https://nettie.online/blog Essays by Nic Vovk on grassroots women's sport, community health, and building things that last. en-gb Tue, 14 Jul 2026 01:43:45 GMT https://nettie.online/blog/forty-minutes-searching https://nettie.online/blog/forty-minutes-searching Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT I wanted to find out, properly, what it is actually like to search for women's sport happening near you this weekend. Not as a founder who already knows the answer she wants to find. As someone who simply typed a post… https://nettie.online/blog/consistency-is-greatness https://nettie.online/blog/consistency-is-greatness Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT Somewhere in the last decade, we lost the ability to value the middle. A thing is either extraordinary or it is a failure. A post either goes viral or it may as well not have been written. A brand is either disrupting… https://nettie.online/blog/grant-writing-inequality https://nettie.online/blog/grant-writing-inequality Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT Somewhere in every grassroots women's sport club is a volunteer who has become, by accident rather than design, the grant person. They did not train for it. Nobody appointed them officially. At some point they simply… https://nettie.online/blog/raffle-is-not-a-strategy https://nettie.online/blog/raffle-is-not-a-strategy Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT Every grassroots sports club knows the pattern. You need a new kit, so you organise a raffle. Pitch fees are due, so you run a quiz night. The equipment needs replacing, so someone suggests a car wash. And round and r… https://nettie.online/blog/adult-role-models https://nettie.online/blog/adult-role-models Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT Every conversation about role models in women's sport is, by default, a conversation about girls. Get more girls watching the Lionesses. Get more girls trying football after the World Cup. Get more girls seeing women… https://nettie.online/blog/watching-community-less-lonely https://nettie.online/blog/watching-community-less-lonely Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT Over 3.9 million people in Great Britain — 7% of the population — report feeling lonely often or always, and the figure continues to rise (ONS, 2025). The NHS has built an entire workforce to respond to this. Social p… https://nettie.online/blog/role-model-you-can-walk-to https://nettie.online/blog/role-model-you-can-walk-to Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://nettie.online/blog/one-person-whole-household https://nettie.online/blog/one-person-whole-household Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://nettie.online/blog/hidden-cost-of-getting-better https://nettie.online/blog/hidden-cost-of-getting-better Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT I have spent twelve years working in NHS roles across clinical, innovation, health tech uptake and commissioning. In that time I have watched the NHS invest significantly and sincerely in social prescribing — the idea… https://nettie.online/blog/build-with-what-works https://nettie.online/blog/build-with-what-works Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT I have spent twelve years working in NHS roles across clinical, innovation, health tech uptake and commissioning. In those twelve years, I have watched many promising health technology products fail not because they d… https://nettie.online/blog/connection-first https://nettie.online/blog/connection-first Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT I have spent twelve years working in NHS roles across clinical, innovation, health tech uptake and commissioning. I also play rugby at Championship 2 level. And for twelve years I watched two completely different worl… https://nettie.online/blog/deliberately-simple https://nettie.online/blog/deliberately-simple Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT 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.