Last week a screenshot went viral on X. Someone had shared the daily match schedule for WTA Madrid. Someone replied immediately: "Where do you find this?"
The answer: "BeinMax1 or Max2 loops it on screen throughout the day."
Then someone else wrote what might be the clearest product critique I've read in months:
"This is information you can never access unless you're already a Bein subscriber. Like — I might see this and think 'wow, these matches are on?' and subscribe. But I can't figure it out at all."
Neither can I. But from a product perspective, I understand it completely.
The paywall is in the wrong place.
The classic model: sell the product, then deliver the content. But this model has a problem — the user is expected to make a purchase decision before learning what they're purchasing. The information that "Iga Swiatek is playing, Sabalenka is on at 9 PM" only exists for people who already paid.
But that information is precisely what would drive a subscription.
It's a loop. Closed. Unbroken.
Think about how Netflix works. You can watch trailers without an account. Spotify lets you listen on the free tier — ads included, but you hear the music. YouTube streams without login. These platforms deliberately leave parts of the experience discoverable. Because without discovery, there's no purchase decision.
BeinSports does the opposite.
The match schedule loops on their TV channels. The content exists and is being broadcast — but only to people who already paid. A potential subscriber never sees that screen. So they never reach the moment of "I should subscribe to watch this."
The viral tweet proves demand exists. People want to watch these matches. But there's no bridge to convert that demand into revenue.
From a product management perspective, this is a funnel design failure.
Every product has two layers:
- Open layer: Where users understand the product, see the value, and decide "yes, this is for me."
- Payment layer: Full access, complete experience.
The transition between these layers is the product's sales pitch. And if that pitch isn't working, it doesn't matter how good your content is — conversion won't come.
What does BeinSports' open layer contain? Logos. A slogan. A subscribe button. The product's value is invisible. Only the purchase offer is visible.
The same mistake happens constantly in SaaS.
"Start your trial" button. But before starting the trial, you can't see the feature list, the interface, the real workflow. The user can't reach "this will make my job easier" before entering their credit card.
Conversion rates are low. The topic comes up in the PM meeting: "Let's fix onboarding." But the problem isn't onboarding — it's that no value was shown before onboarding even started.
Show value first. Then ask to pay. The order matters more than the pitch.
The "won't making this free reduce value?" argument always surfaces.
No. Because you're not showing it to non-subscribers anyway. That potential subscriber is currently learning about matches from Twitter, from people sharing screenshots — or not learning at all.
Opening the match schedule to general access isn't a value loss. It's opening a discovery channel.
The design question should be simple: how much does a user need to see to say "I want this"?
Answering that question is the cheapest way to improve conversion.