becoacht

» see becoacht.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Around 2012 every pitch deck in Europe had the same sentence in it somewhere. Airbnb for X. becoacht was Airbnb for sports coaching, and the German sports press gave it credit for being first to put the model on that particular X: a marketplace that knew which qualified coach had an opening in your city on the day you wanted, and took the payment on the site rather than in cash at the side of a pitch.

Frederik Roever founded it in Munich. He had been an investment banker and then CFO of Rocket Internet's Munich operation. In 2012 that was about as Berlin-adjacent as a German marketplace founder's CV could get. The company was registered as becoacht UG on 24 October 2012 with five thousand euros of capital. Telefónica put seed money in through Wayra, its accelerator. In February 2013 the UG became a GmbH at twenty-five thousand, and that August the capital line reads 26,579 euros.

It got noticed. ISPO Munich, the international sporting-goods trade fair, gave becoacht its BrandNew award in 2013 for building a booking system that actually knew when an instructor was free. Coverage followed in the German sports titles and in SHAPE. In 2014 the company put its own brand on the product and ran the site in three languages, English, German and Italian. Sign-in went through Google or Facebook.

None of which is a thing I was ever going to buy. The catalog is priced in euros per hour for people within driving distance of a Bavarian lake, and I have never paid anybody by the hour to supervise my exercise.

~ the chronicle ~

~ five euros an hour ~

The last working homepage on the .com is from 15 July 2014 and it is worth reading for the catalog alone. Munich heads the city row, with Leipzig and Berlin beside it. Sunset Stand-Up Paddling, forty euros an hour, advertised as paddling into the sunset with the German women's champion. Bavarian Bootcamp at five euros an hour, promising functional training and a proper ache the next day. Individually adapted sprint training for track athletes, ten euros. An Ollie-Pop Skateboard Camp.

That spread is the problem in miniature. Five euros and forty euros are not the same business, and a bootcamp and a skate camp do not have the same customer. A marketplace needs enough of both sides in one city for the search box to return anything. Three cities is thin. Three German cities, under an interface that had been translated into Italian, is thinner.

~ we went running ~

Sometime after 25 July 2014 becoacht.com and becoacht.de stopped serving the marketplace. By 27 September the address answers with a page of 229 bytes, and the whole of it is the brand name followed by three words: becoacht - we went running. No date on it, and nothing about what happened to the bookings. Three words, and they are a joke the company's own customers would get.

The paperwork took longer. Munich's commercial register, HRB 201443, records a liquidator against becoacht GmbH on 4 December 2014, months after the site stopped answering. The final entry is dated 28 June 2016, and that is where the encyclopedia gets the 2016 it prints as the death year. becoacht.com today sells betting guides. The .de is parked with a price on it.

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