The Interlude Aisle: One Board, Evolved
Guest: Simão Manuel | Date: June 10th, 2026
Some founder conversations stay with you because of the market. Others stay with you because of the simplicity of the product insight.
My conversation with Simão Manuel, founder of Atach, was really about both. On the surface, Atach is a modular surfboard brand. But the more interesting story underneath is about a founder who lived a problem firsthand, spent years building toward a better answer, and came out with a product that feels both highly practical and unusually ambitious.
Welcome to FlickTalks, where I speak with founders building businesses that feel sharper in person than they do on paper.
A founder solving his own problem
Simão is a surfer from Portugal, and Atach started with a frustration that was easy to understand: traveling with surfboards is expensive, inconvenient, and risky. Boards get damaged. Existing solutions were either too expensive, too mechanical, or simply not designed in a way that made life easier.
As he put it: “My boards were always damaged. So I had to find a solution for that.”
That directness is part of what made the story compelling. Atach did not start as a market map or a trend thesis. It started with a founder repeatedly running into the same problem and deciding the existing solutions were not good enough.
More than a travel fix
Atach’s core product is a modular surfboard system. The concept is simple but powerful: instead of owning several separate boards for different conditions, surfers can use one model and swap parts depending on the waves and how they want to ride.
Simão described the broader consumer benefit clearly: “With Atach, you don’t need to have those numbers of boards.”
That framing matters. The pitch is not just portability. It is flexibility, storage efficiency, and a potentially more economical way to participate in the sport.
Simão said the system can create “a combination of more than 20 boards with just a few parts.”
If that promise holds up at scale, Atach is not just improving the surfboard. It is rethinking ownership altogether.
Early, but not directionless
Atach is still early. The company is preparing for a Kickstarter campaign in roughly two months, targeting around $100k, and has not fully launched online yet. But there are already meaningful early signs: around 6,000 emails collected, about $3k in sales to date through pre-orders, and one distributor in Japan that has already ordered 50+ boards for the first slot.
Those numbers are still small, but they feel like signal. For a physical consumer product, especially one introducing a new system rather than a simple design tweak, early proof of interest matters more than polished scale metrics.
A solo founder with ambition beyond the first product
Another thing that stood out was Simão’s honesty about where the business is today. He is building Atach as a solo founder now, after an earlier co-founder relationship did not work out, and he was clear that this round is partly about hiring to fill the gaps around him.
He is also already thinking beyond the launch. After Kickstarter, he wants to expand into a softboard variant and then eventually push the same modular logic into adjacent sports like skiing and snowboarding.
That is what gives Atach a little more weight than a one-off surf innovation. The first product is the proof point. The bigger idea is a modular equipment platform that can travel across categories.
Further links
If you want to learn more about Atach or follow Simão’s work more directly, here are the most useful places to start:
🌐 Explore the Company Website – The home base for everything Atach. Start here for an overview of the product, the mission, and where the company stands today.
👤 Follow Simão on LinkedIn – Simão’s professional profile, where he shares updates on Atach’s progress and his thinking on sustainable materials and entrepreneurship. About Simão – Video – A short video introduction to the founder himself. Good context for who’s behind the product and why he’s building it.
▶️ Watch How It Works – Video – A visual walkthrough of the Atach product. The clearest way to understand the mechanics before diving into anything else. Kickstarter Campaign – The original campaign that brought Atach to life. Useful for understanding how the product was first positioned and what early traction looked like.
Why this one stayed with me
What made this conversation memorable is that Atach feels grounded in real founder proximity to the problem. Simão is not manufacturing a need. He is working on something he seems to understand at a very practical level, and the product reflects that.
The company is still early. There is a Kickstarter ahead, operational risk to navigate, and a lot left to prove. But the core ingredients are there: a firsthand problem, a product with a clear wedge, early traction, and a vision that extends beyond the first use case.
Atach may enter through surf. But it is clearly aiming at something bigger.
Until next time,
FlickTalks