Building in Public Journal #1: Week 28, 2026
Lots of new users. Almost no paid conversions. That was the problem I brought to Hackapei this week.
Hackapei is a coworking event for people building products. The concept is simple: you clock in in the morning, introduce your product, and state your goal for the day. At 5 PM, you gotta demo what you worked on, what you achieved, and why.
It’s build in public, in real life. With the little pressure of following up on your commitment. Folks at the events found it’s a great way to be motivated—and I agree!
Goal: improve free-to-paid conversion
I’m working on nextmatch.lol, an application to sync League of Legends esports matches to your calendar. Thanks to marketing during international events, I acquired a lot of new users—but almost none converted to paid.
My goal for the day was to attack that problem from two complementary angles:
- Offer — the free plan is too generous
- Perception — the app showcases paid value poorly
One is about what free users get; the other is about how clearly they see why paying is worth it. In this post, I’ll detail the reasoning behind each and explain what I built.
Assumption 1: the free plan is too generous
The nextmatch.lol free plan allowed users to follow two teams for free. That meant receiving all the future matches for those teams in your calendar, regardless of the event they were participating in.
Most users would reach the 2-team limit of the free tier—meaning there was value. But, after researching similar apps in traditional sports, I realized my free plan was overly generous compared to what these other apps were doing. I thus decided to experiment with reducing the free follow limit to 1.
Existing users benefit from their early sign-up bonus—they can keep their second extra following for free if they already used it.
Assumption 2: paid value is poorly showcased
Because my app is a utility that syncs matches to the user’s calendar app, most of the value happens outside the app. The value is when the user sees the matches in their Google Calendar, not so much when they're in the app.
Showcasing the product's value is key to upselling users, so I needed to improve how the perceived value in-app. Hypothesis: improving the perceived value (of the free plan) + previewing the premium plans' benefits better → improve the free-to-paid conversion.
In the paywall “upgrade” modal, I’m previewing the list of matches the user can add to their calendar. But this is only viewed if the user attempts to follow an extra team.
I think this should be visible at other moments in the user journey. So I’m rebuilding the entire onboarding/following journey around three goals:
- Reveal value — showcase the synced matches at all times
- Prompt upgrade — add subtle nudges before the hard paywall modal
- Celebrate progress — mark milestones (first follow, first calendar sync, etc.)
Here’s the WIP onboarding flow (going live later this week!)
It needs a bit of polishing, but the core is showcasing the value at all times.
Summary & what’s next
This week at Hackapei I tackled free-to-paid conversion on both sides of the problem: tightened the free offer (1 team follow instead of 2), and started rebuilding onboarding so users see calendar value—and upgrade prompts—earlier in the journey.
Still to ship: the reworked onboarding. After that, I’ll keep pushing more users to the top of the funnel and watch how they convert. When the Summer Split starts (in 1 week), I’ll assess opportunities to re-engage existing users.
If you want to attend focused co-working events with other product builders, join us at the next Hackapei.