“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 2024 State of Pickleball: Participation & Infrastructure Report, Pickleheads and SFIA estimated that the U.S. will need to spend $855 million over the next 5-7 years to reach one dedicated court per 500 participants. “Now in our second year of this report, we can see the pickleball industry has responded to the court shortage challenge by adding infrastructure, with dedicated pickleball facilities growing 55% year-over-year,” states Brandon Mackie, Co-founder and COO, Pickleheads. “Still, there remains a long road of investment ahead with $855 million needed to construct courts over the next 5-7 years.”

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. 

You Never Get a Second Chance to Make A First Impression

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?

Creating a Great First Impression

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. 

PodPlay has grown rapidly without a sales team. We have been able to do so by focusing on two things: content that helps club owners make smart business decisions and a product experience that drives word-of-mouth for the clubs we serve and PodPlay. 

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. 

All Apps Are Not Created Equal

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

How do end users feel about the experience? PodPlay apps recently crossed 5200 ratings on the App Store with an average rating of 4.91:

What Makes PodPlay Different

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 quality code at a velocity not seen elsewhere in the club management software space. 
• Taste. Taste is the ability to make product decisions that transcend pure utility—choices driven by aesthetic sensibility, cultural intuition, and a sharp point of view. As Ilya is fond of saying “the right way is faster than the fast way.” Short cuts, quick hacks and hasty integrations come at a high cost if you are trying to build with taste. Having a strong point of view means balancing customer feedback with the requirements of building an intuitive and integrated system. 
• History. PodPlay was incubated inside 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 150,000 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 is now a stand alone entity, our former parent and sister company remains a large customer. Using our software, PingPod has managed hundreds of thousands of reservations - and our PodPlay clients reap the benefits of that experience. If you are building digital tools to manage physical spaces there is no better way to learn what to build than to manage physical spaces with technology. It is not an accident that the founders of many of the most successful Vertical SaaS companies that serve four wall businesses have a deep history or connection to the domain they serve. We build better software because our team uses it everyday to work and to play. All our team members regularly use our apps 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. 

The PodPlay Advantage

PodPlay gives venue operators all the tools they need to digitally manage a physical space - integrating video replays, digital scoreboards, and autonomous functionality with a reservation engine, event management, coach connect, membership module, and payments. 

Originally built to power PingPod, the network of futuristic autonomous ping pong clubs, PodPlay is now being used to manage venues across pickleball, padel, ping pong, golf simulators, tennis, cricket, soccer and pool, with more experience verticals to come in the future.

If you’re interested in learning more, request a demo.