>be me
>spending free time building a website in 2026
>open web I'm trying to participate in is mostly dead
>audience on Instagram
>search traffic amogged by AI Overviews
>building anyway

It's not like the market isn't there. Brazil had 2,827 official street running races in 2024 — up 29% from the year before, per ABRACEO and CBAt. In 2025 that number jumped to 5,241. Add cycling, triathlon, trail running. Running alone is valued at R$1.1 billion. The market is large. The platforms trying to aggregate it are mostly invisible.

Let's look at other players

People have built for it already. brasilquecorre.com has 52,000 Instagram followers. A race calendar. A blog. A subscription club. And a separate store selling branded apparel, sunglasses, headphones, and energy gels. Seems like a thriving business.

I don't have access to their financial data. But there are signals. One SKU — sportswear glasses — is marked down 70%. From R$230 to R$70. Makes me think: are they really moving inventory? The platform doesn't appear on Reclame Aqui. Good sign? Or lack of traction?

Many business fronts: event calendar, subscription club, e-commerce store. Thriving — or throw everything and see what sticks?

The audience is real. Whether the business is — I'm not sure.

The deeper problem is attention

The issue isn't brasilquecorre.com specifically. Every site in this space hits the same wall. Athletes are on Instagram, WhatsApp, Strava. That's where the groups are, the race photos, the training check-ins. An independent website is asking someone to open one more tab, create one more account, check one more feed.

Mobile changed this permanently. Apps have push notifications. Websites don't. The habit loop — open, scroll, get dopamine — is owned by platforms built for exactly that. A humble website can't compete with that. It doesn't even play in the same arena.

And then there's the other side of it. Build a website and you immediately attract bots — scrapers, data harvesters, exploit scanners. Search engines reward machine-readable content, so everyone optimized for machines. The metric became the target. Sites built for Google rankings, not for people. Content farms. SEO spam. AI-generated pages at scale.

That's how the internet was mortally wounded.

What Seems to Work?

Except tools seem to escape this — at least for now. A nutrition calculator, a pace calculator, a hydration planner. Users arrive with a specific problem. That's what Google Analytics and Search Console tell me — people want to swap stems, plan water stops, figure out gear ratios. Sometimes they search for races in city X or races near me.

This is the micro-SaaS playbook, and there's a thriving community of people doing exactly this. One person, one problem, one tool. No community to manage, no inventory, no team. Costs almost nothing to run.

Tools are pull — people search for them when they have a specific need. Calendars and communities require a habit. Habits are owned by Instagram and Strava. Nobody is taking that back.

Even tools won't last forever. AI Overviews are already answering the simple ones.

So Why Build?

Because I like bikes. And I'd rather post here than on Reddit.

The site costs almost nothing to run. If it never makes money, it still exists. If ten people find a tool useful, that's ten people who got something out of it. That's enough.

The trend is clear: harder to get traffic, harder to monetize. Build anyway. Just make sure your engineering skills keep the hosting bill low.