When you build software for other people for a living, a particular kind of restlessness shows up around year three or four. You've shipped systems for town councils, ski resorts, tourism boards — each project teaches you something, pays the bills, and then ends. The knowledge stays in your head, not in a product you can keep improving. By early 2023, at Maladeta Studio we'd already tried twice to turn that restlessness into something more durable, with NaturPark and MeteoTrail, and run one real experiment in the opposite direction: a two-sided marketplace called SnowTeach. None of those were failures. But none of them were, deep down, the product we actually wanted to build — until this one. This is the story of how we decided Lueira would be different: not another product running alongside the studio's bespoke work, but the studio's actual bet on itself.
1. What every mountain sports school was actually doing
Between the bespoke contracts for public institutions and the months we spent building and pitching SnowTeach at the end of 2022, we had talked to enough ski schools, surf schools, rental shops and dive centers to notice the same pattern everywhere, regardless of the sport or the coastline. Nobody had one system. They had several, stitched together with attention and goodwill. A booking came in by phone or Instagram DM and landed in a shared spreadsheet. Instructors got their schedule through a WhatsApp group, updated by whoever was free to type it out that morning. Stock — wetsuits, skis, tanks, boards — lived in a notebook, or in someone's memory, and was only ever really audited when something went missing.
- A booking sheet that only the owner really understood
- A WhatsApp group standing in for a staff scheduling tool
- Rental and safety-critical stock tracked on paper or not tracked at all
- A business that ran, but only because someone was permanently on call to hold it together
None of this was stupid. It was what you build when a system has to exist by tomorrow morning and nobody has time to shop for software. But it had a real cost: double-booked instructors, gear promised twice, owners who couldn't take a day off because the whole operation lived in their head. We had already built bespoke tools for institutions who could commission custom software. Mountain sports schools couldn't, and mostly didn't know that a system built specifically for how they work was even an option.
2. What NaturPark, MeteoTrail and SnowTeach taught us
We didn't arrive at Lueira from nothing. NaturPark had taught us that a product serving very different institutions has to be modular almost to a fault — the same core with configuration on top, or you end up maintaining a fork per client without admitting it. MeteoTrail taught us something less technical and more important: build for one real, demanding user who has an actual decision to make with your data, not for an imagined average user who doesn't exist yet. And SnowTeach, our two-sided marketplace experiment from December 2022, taught us the hardest lesson of the three — that matching supply and demand between instructors and students is a trust problem and a chicken-and-egg problem at once, and that we didn't yet have the reach or the capital to solve either at the speed a marketplace demands.
What SnowTeach did give us, though, was proximity. Talking to schools about a marketplace that would sit on top of their business made it obvious that the more urgent, more tractable problem wasn't matching them with new customers — it was the mess underneath their own operations. A school that can't see its own bookings, staff and stock in one place isn't ready to plug into anything else. That reframing is what turned SnowTeach from a dead end into the insight that led directly to Lueira.
3. Deciding to make this the product, not a product
This is the part that made Lueira different from day one. NaturPark and MeteoTrail were built and shipped as products, but they lived alongside the studio's bespoke work, one more thing the team did between client projects. We decided, going into Lueira, that this time had to be the opposite: bespoke work would fund it, not compete with it for attention. That meant a dedicated team, a roadmap we'd actually defend against a client's tempting one-off request, and an explicit answer to the question every services company eventually has to ask itself — are we a studio that occasionally builds products, or a studio building toward one product that outlives any single contract? For Lueira, we chose the second answer, on purpose, in writing, before we'd sold a single subscription.
Concretely, that meant starting narrow: one core loop — bookings, staff and stock in one place — built well enough that a school could run its whole day on it, rather than a broad platform that did a bit of everything passably. Every vertical we'd eventually want to serve, from ski schools to dive centers, would have to fit that same core rather than get a special version of it. That constraint is a direct descendant of what NaturPark taught us about modularity.
4. What we knew we didn't know yet
We were honest with ourselves that betting on Lueira didn't resolve the uncertainty, it just changed its shape. We didn't know which vertical to start with in earnest, or whether a ski school in the Pyrenees and a dive center on the coast had enough in common to share a product without either feeling like an afterthought. We didn't know if schools that had run for years on WhatsApp and spreadsheets would trust a new system with their bookings during their busiest, least forgiving season. We didn't know what to charge, or how to support a small studio's worth of engineers building a product while still delivering on existing client commitments. And we didn't know, honestly, if we had the discipline to keep saying no to bespoke shortcuts once the first schools started asking for them.
What we did know was the problem, because we'd seen it up close in three different attempts to solve pieces of it. That was enough to start. This post is a founding document more than a victory lap — Lueira in March 2023 is a booking and management platform for mountain sports schools, nothing more exotic yet, built by a studio betting that this time the product should be the point. Whether the bet pays off is a story we'll keep telling as it happens, not one we can write the ending to today.