Pluvinel — finding the job in a market no one had digitised
It started with a personal frustration. After a 15-year break from riding, I wanted to get back in the saddle — and found the same problem I had had as a child: finding a riding instructor was surprisingly hard, even with Google and Facebook at my fingertips. Riding schools and instructors simply weren’t online in any meaningful way.
That friction sparked a question: was this just my experience, or a market gap?
Between 2010 and 2015, I monitored and mapped the equestrian market systematically — tracking trends, talking to people in the industry, and building a picture of the opportunity from the ground up. What I found was striking. The equestrian industry was six times the size of the music industry, with an estimated 120 million riders worldwide. And 40% of them paid regularly for riding lessons — compared to just 15% of gym-goers willing to pay for a personal trainer. Yet there were no equine tech companies solving this frustrating process.
I mapped the experience of each side of the marketplace — each with distinct frustrations.
Finding a qualified instructor and riding school that matched their level, discipline and location was unexpectedly hard — even in the age of Google. Word of mouth dominated, and if you were outside the network, you were stuck.
Most instructors hadn’t solved discoverability online, and managing bookings and communication was eating into the time they wanted to spend teaching.
As the platform grew, a third set of problems came into view. Riding schools were drowning in admin — sending out invoices manually, keeping track of horses, riders and instructors, and managing a level of operational complexity that left little room for actually running a good school.
Behind every young rider was a parent navigating their own friction — waiting for invoices to arrive, struggling to get clear communication about lesson schedules, and having no reliable way to manage waiting lists or confirm their child’s spot in a class.
What started as a two-sided marketplace problem turned out to be a four-sided one — and it took years of iteration to uncover all the actors involved. In hindsight, this is precisely where the JTBD framework would have changed everything. Had I mapped the full job system from the start — all the people involved, all the jobs to be done — that picture could have been visible within weeks.
The realisation also triggered a fundamental strategic shift. Pluvinel had launched as a two-sided marketplace, but as the complexity of the riding school’s operational problems became clear, a new direction emerged: less marketplace, more SaaS. The real opportunity wasn’t just connecting riders and instructors — it was giving riding schools the tools to run their business properly.
In 2015, Pluvinel launched as a directory platform — a LinkedIn-style profile for riding instructors. The content strategy was deliberately restrained: give riders exactly enough information to assess fit, without overselling. The design was mobile-first, built for an audience that was passionate about horses but not particularly patient with technology.
Within weeks of launch, over 250 instructors had registered — from all over the world.
With a growing user base, I ran surveys and in-depth interviews to understand what was still broken. The findings were clear: booking and payment were the real friction points. Instructors were spending significant time chasing confirmations and invoices. Riders had no reliable way to commit upfront.
The answer was to merge the booking and payment process into a single, two-click flow — removing friction for both sides at once. Upfront payment meant instructors could trust their schedule.
When I tested the platform with riding schools in the Oslo area, the impact was immediate: schools received all their payments before the riding season started — with less hassle, and full control over who had signed up. No reminders. No chasing.
By 2018, Pluvinel had grown into a full ecosystem connecting riders, instructors, riding schools, and events in one place. Pluvinel received a TEDx talk, coverage in Finansavisen, and grew almost entirely through word of mouth.
“If I had had the JTBD framework from day one, it would have saved me years. The time I spent on design thinking cycles that circled the real question — what job is the customer actually trying to get done? — is time a structured JTBD approach would have collapsed into weeks.”
Pluvinel was built before I had a name for the way I was thinking. Working within a design-thinking approach, I was instinctively drawn to job stories over user stories — because they gave me the context I needed, not just a list of features to build. It was only later, when I began to explore JTBD as a framework, that I recognised what I had been reaching for all along.
Pluvinel is now part of the foundation on which I help other founders and product teams move faster, with more confidence, and far less guesswork.
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