Your App is Your Front Door

“All pickleball booking software is the same.”

If you believe the above statement, this blog is not for you, and I would be happy to direct you to the cheapest provider in the market. And, I think you would be making a mistake.

To date, the demand for quality pickleball courts in the United States has so far outstripped supply that “being open” has been enough to attract a thriving community of players. Without competition, many clubs have gotten away with providing a subpar customer experience.

That is changing.

In their 2023 State of Pickleball: Participation & Infrastructure Report, Pickleheads and SFIA estimated that the U.S. will need to spend $900 million over the next 5-7 years to build 25,800 dedicated courts to reach one dedicated court per 500 participants. Not surprisingly, many businesses have emerged to meet that demand. In his article The Business Strategies Behind the Exploding Indoor Pickleball Club Market, Forbes writer Todd Boss did a deep dive on many of the major players in the indoor pickleball club boom and posed the question: are there too many indoor facilities being built?

Whether or not you believe the market is nearing a point of saturation, it is clear that market forces are working to bring supply and demand into balance. When that happens, “being open” will no longer be a competitive advantage. Clubs will compete on the experience they create for customers.

The front door to that experience is your booking app. Delight your customers and they arrive at your club predisposed to love it. Frustrate them and they may not even complete a booking.

So when do your customers form a first impression of your pickleball club?

For the vast majority of customers, it is when they book their first court reservation, open play, or clinic on their phone. That first interaction plays an outsized role in establishing your club’s brand. Jeff Bezos says that, “Your brand is what people say about you when you are not in the room.”

Do you want your customers to think of you as cheap, non-branded, difficult, and non-intuitive? Or modern, branded, intuitive, and customer friendly?

At PodPlay Technologies, we obsess over creating the kind of customer experience for end users that is so good they want to tell others about it.

We recently launched our first racing simulator club on PodPlay. How did the owners find us? They played at their local pickleball venue (a PodPlay client) and liked the booking experience so much they wanted it for their own club. That is a great first impression.

How do we do it?

We believe the keys to creating a great first impression are:

• Branding. Customers of your club should onboard on your app (whether mobile web or native) with your logo and colors, not a third party aggregator app where your club is one of many.

• Minimal friction. Customers should be able to browse court availability, programming, and more before creating a customer account. Don’t make customers fill out a long form and give you their payment info before they know what you offer. Create too much friction at onboarding and customers may give up before they even get started.

• Mobile first design. 95% of customers will be booking on their phone, so your app should use mobile design principles and be easy to navigate on the small screen. Booking software made for the desktop makes your club look dated and does not translate well to mobile. We avoid elements like grid-based calendars that are hard to read at all costs and minimize the need for horizontal scrolling. We favor intuitive, mobile design concepts like vertical scrolling and quick filters.

• Simplicity beats complexity. An app can always offer customers more functionality, but at what cost in terms of added complexity? We would rather have an intuitive, easy UX with 95% of the functionality than create unnecessary friction to get that final 5%. If a feature makes the customer work too hard, then the cost in terms of customer experience is too high.

These principles are better experienced than described. The following demo will give readers a taste of PodPlay design principles in the wild.

How do end users feel about the experience? PodPlay apps recently crossed 1000 ratings on the App Store with the following results:

So why are we open sourcing our app design thinking in this blog? We believe we are uniquely positioned to deliver on these principles because of our team, our history, and our corporate structure.

• Team. Our engineering team is led by PodPlay Co-Founder and CTO Ilya Rivkin. His previous startup, Clarity Money, was acquired by Goldman Sachs, which allowed us to lure him back to his roots building in SportsTech. Prior to Clarity, Ilya spent many years at R/GA, a digital agency, where his major projects were building the Equinox mobile app and the Nike+ running mobile app. These projects required creating best-in-class mobile experiences AT SCALE. 90% of our engineering, product, and design teams worked on those two projects with Ilya. Our hiring hit rate on the tech team has been close to 100% because everyone we have hired is a known quantity and high trust. It is a dream team that is shipping code at a velocity not seen elsewhere in the club management software space.

• History. PodPlay is a wholly owned subsidiary of PingPod, and our tech stack was originally developed to power the PingPod network of autonomous table tennis clubs that operate 24/7 without staff. The economic benefits of operating autonomously - simultaneously lowering labor costs and increasing capacity - are obvious. What is less obvious is whether those benefits can be achieved without sacrificing the customer experience. Building for the unstaffed use case requires creating a simple, intuitive app. When there is no staff to bridge the gap, it better be easy to use for everyone, or the concept will fall flat in spite of its economic advantages. 20 locations and 100,000 customers in, we feel like we have ample proof that our team was able to pull it off. Building to the unstaffed use case has pushed our team to prioritize simple, intuitive design in a way that our competitors have not had to.

• Dogfooding. While PodPlay has grown rapidly, and serves a wide range of sports clubs today, PingPod is still the largest single client of PodPlay with 20 locations. Using our software, PingPod has managed hundreds of thousands of reservations - and our PodPlay clients reap the benefits of that experience. We can stress-test new features on our own operating business before rolling them out to our PodPlay clients, and our Pods serve as “showrooms” where we can conduct “physical demos” for potential clients (we can demo on zoom with the best of them, but when it comes to the intersection of digital and physical space, there is no substitute for the IRL experience itself). We build better software because our team uses it everyday to work and to play. All our team members regularly use our app and PodPlay client locations to play the sports they love. We strongly believe that the best software is built with empathy - and the best way for us to build with empathy is to be customers ourselves.

PodPlay clients may be venues, but we believe we will serve them best by designing an amazing experience for their customers. Our goal, as it has been from Day 1, is to build and refine a system that is highly functional but intuitive and delights customers. True to our roots as a consumer company, the technology we build for PodPlay clients is squarely a B2B2C offering.

*Originally published by Ben Borton, Aug 19th, 2024. The article is on PodPlay's blog.