Why I built koshiFlo — and what I kept watching at training
I am a software developer by trade. Most of my working life is spent solving problems for other people's businesses — building systems, untangling processes, finding the more efficient way to do things.
Twice a week, I go to a martial arts club.
For a long time those two things were completely separate. Work was work. Training was training. I showed up, put in the time, went home.
But at some point I started noticing things.
The paper register being passed around at the start of every session. Students signing their name, instructors marking attendance, the sheet going back to the front. It worked. It had always worked. The club was well run by people who cared about what they did.
Then grading season arrived.
If you have never been inside a martial arts club in the weeks before a grading event, it is hard to describe the amount of administrative work it generates. Who has attended enough sessions to be eligible? Which sessions count toward which grade? Who has paid their grading fee and who hasn't? Are there students who technically qualify but probably aren't ready?
The instructors handled it — cross-referencing paper registers, checking dates, making calls based on memory and experience. They were good at it. But it was time-consuming, and it was entirely manual, and it happened several times a year.
And I kept thinking: this is a solved problem in almost every other context.
Attendance data exists. Grading history exists. Membership records exist. The information needed to answer every one of those questions is already there — it just lives in different places, in different formats, and takes a significant amount of human effort to pull together.
I am a software developer. This is exactly the kind of problem I spend my days solving.
So I started building.
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What became clear quite quickly is that the problem is not really about attendance tracking. Plenty of software tracks attendance. The problem is that attendance alone does not tell you anything useful.
An instructor does not need to know that a student came to 47 sessions. They need to know whether that student is progressing, whether they are ready to grade, and whether there are any signals that they might be starting to drift away.
That distinction — between recording data and understanding what it means — became the foundation of what I was building.
Most martial arts club software is built around administrative needs. Membership records, fee management, attendance registers. These things matter, but they are not what a good instructor cares about most. What a good instructor cares about is their students. Whether they are progressing. Whether they are being seen. Whether the quieter ones at the back are getting the same attention as the ones who are easy to notice.
koshiFlo is built around that.
It connects attendance, grading readiness, membership records, and student history into a single progression picture for every student in the club. It tells an instructor who is ready to grade before grading day arrives. It surfaces students whose training consistency has dropped before they disappear. It takes the information that already exists and turns it into something the instructor can actually act on.
The final decision always stays with the instructor. koshiFlo advises and highlights. The instructor leads.
I did not build koshiFlo because I wanted to build software. I built it because I trained twice a week at a club run by people who were doing a difficult job well — and I could see a specific way to make it easier.
Not easier in a way that changes how martial arts works. The tradition, the structure, the grading system — those are things worth preserving. Easier in the sense that instructors should be able to finish a session knowing exactly where every student stands, without spending an hour with a spreadsheet to find out.
koshiFlo launches in September 2026.
If you run a martial arts club — a single dojo, a small organisation, anything in between — I would genuinely value your perspective on what would make it useful, or what would make it fall short.
You can join the early access waitlist at koshiflo.app.
Andrew Tinkler is the founder of koshiFlo, the student progression platform for martial arts clubs.
