Why Nettie is Deliberately Simple—and Why That is the Most Important Business Decision We Have Made

There is a temptation, when building a technology platform, to add features. To create an account. To capture a profile. To ask the user for something in return for the value you are giving them.

We decided not to do that.

Not because we could not. Not because we did not think of it. But because we understand something about human behaviour that the technology sector consistently gets wrong: complexity is the enemy of adoption, and adoption is the enemy of everything.

This is the story of why Nettie is built the way it is — and why simplicity is not a compromise. It is a considered, deliberate, and academically grounded strategic choice.

The Problem With Most Tech Platforms

When a new technology asks you to do something, it faces what behavioural scientists call the ability problem. The behaviour can only happen if the person has the motivation, the ability, and a prompt — all three converging at the same moment (Fogg, 2020). Remove any one of them and the behaviour does not happen.

Most technology platforms damage ability without realising it. They ask users to download an app. Create an account. Remember a password. Verify an email address. Grant permissions. Accept terms and conditions. By the time the user reaches the actual behaviour — the thing the platform was built to enable — they have been asked to do six other things first.

Each of those steps is what researchers call friction. And friction, as Singh et al. (2024) demonstrated in a systematic review of health behaviour habit formation, directly increases the resistance associated with a behaviour and decreases the likelihood of it becoming automatic.

The result is predictable: most people never get started. And the ones who do often do not come back, because the habit never formed.

What Nettie Does Differently

Nettie asks one thing of a fan at the gate of a grassroots women's sport club.

Scan a QR code.

No app. No account. No email address. No personal data. No permission requests. No password. No onboarding flow.

Ten seconds. That is all.

The QR code is a fixture-level prompt — the same code for every fan at every game. It is displayed on a Nettie banner at the gate. The fan sees it, scans it, and the club earns 50p. The attendance is verified. The fan walks in.

From a behavioural design perspective, this is not an accident. It is an application of Fogg's Behaviour Model (Fogg, 2020) with deliberate precision. The prompt is visible and contextual — right there at the gate. The ability is maximised — no friction whatsoever, just a camera and a QR code. And the motivation is provided by the environment — the fan is already there, already wants to watch the game, already made the trip.

The behaviour — scanning in — asks nothing of the fan that they were not already prepared to give.

Why Anonymity Matters More Than You Think

Nettie's Year 1 check-in is fully anonymous. We collect a timestamp, a fixture identifier, and a club identifier. Nothing else.

This is not just good data governance. It is good behavioural design.

Research into technology adoption consistently shows that privacy concerns create a significant barrier to first-time engagement — a phenomenon known as the privacy paradox, where users' stated concerns about data privacy are not matched by their behaviour, but where actual data requests do create measurable friction and distrust at the point of adoption (Wang et al., 2024). When a platform asks for personal data before it has established any value or trust, it faces an impossible ask: give us something valuable before we have shown you anything in return.

Nettie inverts this entirely.

In Year 1, Nettie asks for nothing personal. The fan scans anonymously. The club earns. The fan sees the banner, understands the exchange — their presence matters, the club benefits — and the trust is built through that experience, not through a data collection form.

By the time Nettie introduces an optional login in Year 2 — allowing fans who want to create a profile, track their attendance history, and deepen their connection to their club — the behaviour of scanning in is already established. The habit already exists. The trust has already been earned.

That sequencing is everything.

The Science of Starting Small

BJ Fogg, founder of the Behaviour Design Lab at Stanford University, has spent more than twenty years studying how behaviours become automatic. His central finding is deceptively simple: tiny is fast, tiny is safe, tiny can be scaled, and tiny reduces dependency on willpower and motivation (Fogg, 2020).

Instagram understood this instinctively. When they launched, they removed every feature from their original app that was not core to the single behaviour they wanted to establish: sharing a photo. Three taps. That was it. Their competitors had more features. Instagram had more adoption (Fogg, 2020).

Nettie is making the same calculation.

The single behaviour we want to establish is the scan. One gesture. Ten seconds. Repeated at every home game across a season. Fogg's research shows that consistent repetition of a behaviour in a stable context — the same gate, the same banner, the same moment before every match — is precisely the mechanism through which automaticity develops (Fogg, 2020). By the end of a season, scanning in does not require a decision. It is just what you do when you arrive at the ground.

A 2025 study found that individuals who began with minimal viable habits and gradually scaled up were 2.7 times more likely to maintain long-term habits than those who started with more demanding targets (Pinto, 2025). Nettie's ten-second anonymous scan is the minimal viable habit. Everything that follows — the login, the profile, the personalised discovery, the deeper community connection — grows from that foundation.

The Discovery Layer — 30 Seconds to Find Sport Near You

The second element of Nettie's simplicity strategy is the discovery website.

Before a fan ever arrives at a gate, they need to find the club. And finding grassroots women's sport near you is, right now, genuinely difficult. The information is scattered across social media pages, club websites, county FA directories, and local notice boards. There is no single place to look.

Nettie's website changes that. A postcode. A sport. Within 30 seconds, a fan can find active women's clubs near them — verified by the fact that they are on Nettie, with real attendance data showing that people actually go.

This matters behaviourally for a specific reason. Fogg's Behaviour Model identifies the prompt — the moment that cues the behaviour — as a non-negotiable prerequisite. As Fogg states, "no behaviour happens without a prompt" (Fogg, 2020). For someone who has never been to a grassroots women's match, the barrier is not the match itself. It is the moment of discovery — finding out that the match exists, that it is near them, and that it is worth going to.

Nettie's 30-second discovery removes that barrier entirely. The prompt is built into the experience: here is a club near you, here is when they play, here is how many people came last week.

The social proof embedded in that last piece of information — verified crowd attendance — does something powerful. It normalises attendance. It tells the potential fan: other people like you are already doing this. That social proof is one of the most reliable motivational triggers in behavioural science (Cialdini, 2009).

Fitting Into Lives, Not Demanding to Change Them

There is a broader principle at work in all of this that goes beyond the technical design choices.

The best behaviour change is the kind the person never notices they are doing.

The fan does not scan in because they have decided to change their relationship with grassroots sport. They scan in because there is a QR code at the gate, and it takes ten seconds, and the club earns 50p. The discovery happens not because someone committed to finding new sport but because it was quicker than anything else available.

The change — the growing habit of attending, the deepening connection to a local club, the physical activity, the social belonging — all of that emerges as a consequence of frictionless repeated behaviour. Not as the stated goal of an intervention.

This aligns directly with what Zhu et al. (2024) describe in their systematic review of digital behaviour change interventions: that the most effective habit-forming designs are those that embed new behaviours into existing contexts and routines, rather than requiring users to adopt entirely new ones. Going to the match is already the context. Scanning a QR code at the gate is a micro-behaviour that attaches to that existing routine almost invisibly.

Small changes, consistently applied in a stable context, compound into large ones (World Journal of Advanced Research and Reviews, 2025). That is the Nettie model.

Why This Is a Strategic Choice, Not a Limitation

Some people, when they hear that Nettie starts with anonymous, account-free check-ins, assume that is a temporary compromise — something that will be replaced by a fuller product as soon as possible.

It is the opposite.

The simplicity of Year 1 is the foundation on which the value of Year 2 is built. You cannot ask for a login before you have earned the trust that makes someone willing to give it. You cannot build a longitudinal fan dataset before you have established the habit of checking in. You cannot prove community health impact to NHS commissioners before you have a season of verified, trusted attendance data.

Each year of Nettie's product roadmap is deliberately sequenced:

Year 1 --- Establish the behaviour. Anonymous. Frictionless. Ten seconds. The club earns. The fan comes back.

Year 2 --- Deepen the relationship. Optional login for fans who want it. Attendance history. Personalised sport discovery. A richer dataset for clubs, sponsors, and NHS commissioners.

Year 3+ --- The data becomes the product. Longitudinal fan engagement data. Community health evidence. A verified grassroots attendance dataset that is unlike anything else that exists.

None of that is possible without the foundation. And the foundation requires that Year 1 is as simple as it is.

This is not a startup cutting corners to launch quickly. It is a product built on the understanding that behaviour change is hard, that trust is earned, not demanded, and that the most powerful technology is the kind that fits into people's lives so naturally they barely notice it is there.

The Bigger Picture

Grassroots women's sport is full of fans who already show up every week. They do not need to be convinced to attend. They need to be given a way to make their attendance count.

Nettie gives them that — in ten seconds, anonymously, without asking them to change anything about how they already live.

And from that ten seconds — repeated across a season, across twenty clubs, across a growing national network — comes something that has never existed before. A verified record of who was there. A dataset that proves these communities are real. A foundation for everything that comes next.

Simplicity is not the easy choice. It is the hardest one. And it is the right one.