PodPlay Revenue: How This Pickleball Software Hit $3M/Year

We are kind of approaching $3 million in contracted ARR. We have a little over 200 locations signed up on the platform. I think we're over 2,000 courts now.

How do your customers actually make the math work without charging $100 an hour?

The videos and replays functionality, they can be monetized with sponsors. Pickleball is growing like crazy in the US, you know, fastest growing kind of sport by a pretty wide margin. $8 million Series A round led by Frontier Growth, which is kind of an OG investor in the vertical SaaS space.

If you're already charging $60 an hour, 70% utilization, so you're doing $100,000 a year in revenue. Or what was it? I'm curious how it started.

We look at kind of what is the average revenue per hour used, about like $30 per hour across everything.

Before the show, you said, Nathan, one of the ways we've really grown, we really lean into building in public. What does that mean?

Enhancing the kind of in-club playing experience. We do things like digital scoreboards and video replays. There's a viral component to kind of the video replays that, that go social.

Hey folks, my guest today is Ben Borden. He's the co-founder of Podplay Technologies, building at the intersection of sports technology and in-real-life Life Experiences. He leads the go-to-market strategy and is focused on transforming clubs and courts into dynamic tech-driven communities. Before that, he worked in fintech, hedge funds, and early-stage investing. Ben, you ready to take us to the top?

Yeah, absolutely.

You're way cooler now doing this than the hedge fund days, right? That's why you made the transition.

Absolutely. I mean, my co-founder Max Kogler and I both, we managed a hedge fund together back in the day. So this is kind of our second tour of duty together. I was the seed investor in his hedge fund, and we like to say those were our days of turning math into money. But it left both of us feeling a little bit empty from kind of purpose standpoint. You know, we were doing kind of complex options trading strategies. It was fun. It was like playing chess and doing games. But in terms of really changing the world and really having kind of an impact on people's lives, it left us feeling a little bit wanting. And Podplay has been, you know, an amazing kind of purpose-driven business. We like to say our mission is to increase the amount of fun being had in the world, which is kind of a mission that pretty much everybody can understand. You know, I think If your kids can understand it, then you really have kind of a mission that resonates with a lot of people.

Well, but before we dive into mission and fun, I have to stay on the money for a second. Did the hedge fund make money? Are you rich? How'd that thing work?

Yeah, I mean, we took it up to several hundred million dollars in assets, so it was definitely a success story.

Very cool. Okay, so what email do you send your LPs? You say we're shutting down to go build ping pong and ping pong in 2019, or what'd that story look like?

There are a number of stops in between for both Max and I. So that was back in the kind of mid-2000s. We both had multiple stops before getting to sort of PingPod. I, prior to joining PingPod, I was running digital fund services at Figure Technologies, which is a big sort of blockchain holding company. Actually recently went public in Q3, it was September of 2025 they went public. It's been a really nice IPO. I was working there with Mike Cagney, I met Max was being a seed investor in his hedge fund, the one that we just talked about. And that—

this was MM Capital, right?

MM Capital. Yeah. Yeah. I was running a pool of venture capital seeding startup hedge funds. The first hedge fund I seeded was run by Mike Cagney, who, you know, has went on to be the founder and CEO of SoFi, chairman of Figure Technologies. So Mike's one of the kind of only people out there that's done, you know, multiple unicorns. He's a brilliant Brilliant, brilliant person. But that kind of early stage of my career when I was seeding startup hedge funds has had a real impact on kind of my future path.

Okay. I have to ask about this. Don't kill me for this, okay? But my research team basically said, you've talked about this publicly, that there was a black swan event at the hedge fund. Was that the point where you said, ah, there could be more to life than managing money all day long? Can you maybe dive into that a bit? We definitely got—

it took a large drawdown, and this was kind of a real learning experience for Max., and myself. Um, I think you learn a lot about people when you go through kind of adversity together, right? The way we came through that, I think we treated our investors incredibly well. We got on planes, we went and kind of like talked to everybody about kind of what happened, and everybody was very understanding. And a lot of those investors kind of made future bets on us as well, or kind of gave us, uh, another chance. Um, because we, we behaved very well through kind of a period of, of, of adversity. So that was kind of the biggest, biggest learning from that experience is like, how do people comport themselves in, you know, it's easy to kind of be a good person and kind of comport yourself well when everything's going well. But you really learn things about people when you go through adversity together. And I think Max and I were sort of, you know, we'd forged our bond kind of for life during that period of adversity. And it's great to kind of be in the same boat together again.

How did this— where did you guys come up with the idea for the business? How did it get going?

Yeah, I think the, the key is, is you have kept start with PingPod. So the predecessor business was PingPod, which is an operating business. So PingPod is a network of autonomous table tennis clubs. Uh, it was founded in 2019 by Max, David Silverman, and Ernesto Edwin. I was the first outside investor in that business. Um, and the problem they were trying to solve, you had basically at that point in New York City, you had kind of one large entertainment destination, had to play ping pong, and then you had kind of basement dojo style clubs and there was really nothing in between. And you know, the reason for to that was you have relatively high rent in New York City, you have relatively high labor costs. So the possibility of running a profitable ping pong club without food and booze was very little at that point. So we looked at that cost stack and said, hey, if we could do something about the labor piece, insert technology, then there might be a third way to, to do this. So that was the idea. Could you, could you take out that front desk type labor, run without kind of on-site labor all the time? If you could do that, you could extend your, your hours to 24/7, so you're increasing capacity. At the same that you're reducing kind of your, your labor overhead. So you're working on kind of both sides of the math equation. And if you could do that, then you could do smaller format clubs. So that was the vision. Could you build a network of autonomous table tennis clubs spread out around New York? Wherever you are in New York, you should never be too far away from a Ping Pong. Lots of people grew up playing the game. Nobody can afford to have a ping pong table in their apartment. But wouldn't it be great if it was across the street and it was available on demand? And we put some cool technology in there to elevate the experience and we built some community around it. So that was, that was the vision. Got started in in February of 2020, first location. A great time to start a consumer business. Promptly closed our doors along with everything else in March of 2020 in New York City. But after that initial gut punch, it was— turned out to be something that was really great for the business because we were one of the first businesses in New York, non-essential businesses, to reopen. We reopened in May of 2020 and, you know, became— the business really kind of grew like crazy during that period. And we were able to do that because we were doing contactless entry, no employees on site. Naturally socially distanced activity, and we could track everybody who came through the door.

So Ben, when you say really took off in 2020, that first year, can you share in 2020 what was total revenue?

Yeah, I mean, just from a utilization— we had a single location, but it was— utilization was, uh, I think running between 60 and 70% on a 24-hour basis. Um, so if you have a low fixed cost business, that unit was very, very, very profitable.

Well, what does that mean though? I mean, if you're— are you charging $60 an hour, 70% utilization, so you're doing $100,000 a year in revenue, or what was it? I know you maybe feel small now, but I'm curious how it Yeah, no, pricing is anywhere from $20 to $50 per hour.

You have kind of private pods, which are sort of a private space where you have your own space that has kind of one hourly rate. Then you can get a table in an open pod, which is a shared space where there are kind of other people in that space. But I think the best way we look at kind of what is the average revenue per hour used, which is probably kind of the way you're thinking about this. And that in those days was about kind of like $30 $30 per hour across everything. So, you know, there are different ways that you're taking revenue in. It's not just a pay-to-play model. You've got memberships, you have other sorts of things. But we always looked at it from a kind of the, the price-volume relationship is how many hours do you have available, how many of those hours get used, and how much do you get paid per hour during that.

A $30 in 2020, then with that one location, uh, $30 per hour, 18-hour days would be about 70% utilization, is about $540 per day, and if we take that 360 days a year, so 5 days off, that would be like $150,000 to $200,000 of revenue from that one location that year. Is that about right? Something like that?

It was in the hundreds of thousands.

Guys, remember, I am not just a YouTuber. I'm investing in my third fund. We've deployed $250 million into 550 software companies so far. Again, at founderpath.com, if you're interested in capital, I would love to cut you a check because I know you're investing in your education. You watch my show. So sign up at founderpath.com, and when you get the onboarding email, I reply and I see all those. Just reply and say, Nathan, I found you through YouTube and I'll make sure to prioritize you. I would love to cut you a check. Check out founderpath.com.

Okay, so it was fairly good.

So you guys are on to something. And you're saying the big win here is because rents in New York are so expensive, you had to figure out a way to not have like labor, for example. So this Ping Pong I'm looking at here in the Lower East Side, is there any full-time employee running this location or it's all contactless entry?

No full-time employee.

No. Interesting. Okay, well, let's, let's talk about growth. Before the show, you said, Nathan, one of the ways we've really grown, we've really leaned into building in public. What does that mean?

So, I mean, let's talk about the transition from kind of Ping Pong to Podplay, right? So Ping Pong was the predecessor business. That business now has 20+ locations. So it's been successful. It's franchising. Our ambition was always to build a technology platform that would not just serve Ping Pong, that would serve other like-minded kind of venue operators. And we saw a gap in the market for sort of modern club management solutions. You want to modernize better, mobile-first, really good user experience, and then combining kind of hardware and software. So enhancing the kind of in-club playing experience, we do things like, like digital scoreboards and video replays. There's a viral component to kind of the video replays that, that go social.

Oh, this is cool, Ben. This is like super cool. You feel like a superstar playing in one of these things.

Yeah, I mean, the idea is to have your own kind of like personal SportsCenter moment and make that as easy as possible. So part of the secret here is like, can you get rid of the friction? And in order to get rid that friction, you need to do the club management or reservation management and the video capture. So hardware and software. So most of the rest of the market, you have kind of club management tools and then you have, you know, video capture tools that are, that are point solutions. And that just creates more friction for getting to those, those videos. Whether you're scanning a QR code, you have to have separate login, things like that. So really kind of the magic in this is, is combining hardware software in a single kind of full stack solution. So we got to that point in the summer of 2023. So you can think of this a little bit like the Amazon model where you build really good infrastructure for yourself and then you license it to others.

So, so Ben, sorry, just to be clear, when did you write your first line of code for Podplay that we're looking at on the screen? And then what year was your first paying customer for Podplay?

Yeah, so first line of code was this technology was originally written for PingPod, right? So the software, the hardware, the whole package that we were putting together was the technology that powered PingPod, right? So first line of code is in 2019, first outside customers we took in, in the summer of 2023. That was when we formed Podplay as a wholly owned subsidiary. You know, we put the whole tech team in there, myself on the, on the business side. The tech team is led by a guy named Ilya Rivkin, who's one of, one of our co-founders. He's an amazing guy, comes from kind of a background in the fit tech world. He spent the bulk of his career at a digital agency called RGA. His big projects there were the Equinox mobile booking app and the Nike+ running. So he's built really large-scale, kind of global consumer-facing apps. And about 90% of our tech team has ties to those two projects. So our hiring strategy has been to kind of go pick off all the best engineers, product managers, and designers that Ilya worked with in the past and kind of reassemble them as a dream team. So yeah, 2023, we launch LaunchPod Play as a wholly owned subsidiary to license the whole tech stack that we built to power PingPod to other like-minded operators. And the real catalyst for that was pickleball. Pickleball was growing like crazy in, in, in the US, you know, fastest growing kind of sport by a pretty wide margin. And people had seen what we'd done in table tennis. They loved the kind of the experience, the UX, the software, how we were combining software and hardware. And they basically said, could you please do this in, in pickleball? And so we obliged. We had some great launch partners in that space, including City Pickle. They run the iconic pickleball at Central Park. In New York City.

So Ben, sorry, what does a launch partner mean? What does that mean? Like, are they one of your first customers and are you charging them by number of courts or number of people, or how do you bill a lighthouse client?

We are charging on kind of a per court basis. That's the kind of primary, primary model. We have different tiers of the offering. They have kind of a software-only offering. You have software plus hardware, and then a subset of our clients are doing autonomous mode, which also includes you know, is doing the full ping-pong model, which includes door access, includes security cameras, includes monitoring by a team in the Philippines. So that's a kind of a, a different tier of, of the offering. But all of these are priced on a, a kind of per-quart basis, roughly. Uh, you end up with a SaaS fee, so it's not a transaction-based model. You're— we're getting monthly SaaS fees. I know you're always interested in numbers. Um, just to kind of put some numbers around the business, we are kind of approaching $3 million in contracted ARR. We have a little over 200 locations signed up on the platform. So, you know, these are sitting around between 10 and 15, um, per client. Um, again, there's a range. The software-only clients are kind of, you know, generally in the sort of call it 2 to 6 range. And then some of the kind of hardware-enabled clients, which is, let's say, 60% plus are in the hardware-enabled tiers for us, are— those ACVs tend to be, um, a bit higher.

So just to repeat all that back to you, so when you say 200 locations on your platform, how many quarts does that equate to? Is that average of 5 quarts per location? So 1,000 quarts?

No, I mean, average is, is trending up closer to 10 per, per location. And so I think we're over 2,000 quarts now.

Interesting. Okay. This is really interesting growth. So you're at about $3 million of ARR this year, which means you're finishing here in December at somewhere between or somewhere around $240,000 a month of revenue, right? Is that what you mean when you say contracted ARR?

Now, if you're a software client, on average it takes kind of 1 to 2 months from, from kind of signing to going live. For the hardware-enabled clubs, we have a longer lead time, both 'cause it's kind of a more involved process and because we have a backlog on that side. So I'd say the average on that side is somewhere between 4 and 6 months. So there's a little bit of a lag between those two.

Okay, that's right. And $3 million of contracted AR today, what does that represent in terms of growth rate from a year prior?

Triple digits. So yeah, we put it, peg it between 100 and 200. Yes, more than 100%, less than 200%.

That's awesome. Okay, I have to go back to how you funded the business because I think you guys did a $10 million Series A in 2022, which would've been, right before you launched the software. So are both of these companies under the same thing and you, you sort of raised money with the legacy business but are sort of using it to invest in the software business?

We raised money. That $10 million Series A was for PingPod. That was sort of before Podplay existed. And yes, some of the money from that was kind of the initial seeding of the, the, the Podplay business. We spun out Podplay as a standalone entity. In August of this year, which was a prelude to raising a Series A for standalone Podplay, which we did in October. So $8 million Series A round led by Frontier Growth, which is kind of an OG investor in the vertical SaaS space. We're super excited to kind of, you know, lock arms with them. They've been investing in vertical SaaS since 1999 before, you know, I could say before vertical SaaS was a thing. They've invested in, you know, some big names that you would, you would know., from the vertical SaaS space. Uh, they, you know, focus entirely on vertical SaaS. So it's industry-specific software, and have just deep experience and network in the space, which is exactly what we were looking for, to sort of lock arms with somebody who'd be kind of down in the trenches with us.

And most folks, Ben, in 2025 doing a Series A were selling between, call it maybe like 13 and 18% of their business. Were you sort of in that same range with the $8 million Series A?

Yeah, we're not wildly away from that. Okay. Say exactly what the valuation is, but it's not a— it's not an unusual valuation in terms of kind of like dilution.

Yeah, fair enough. How do you as an ex-hedge fund guy— I mean, whenever I think about this, I always think about bits and atoms, right? You're building bits and your business is both of these things, but you have the unique intel to see which courts are making the most revenue per hour or per day or whatever, per court time. If you had a bunch of money, unlimited money, I mean, wouldn't you go roll up the best performing physical courts around the world?

So, I mean, it's an interesting question. It's like, what business do you want to be in, right? So if you're in kind of the physical business, there is, um, I think there is more kind of variability that's associated with that. And so we are excited to be kind of supporting physical businesses. I think it's, uh, I wrote a blog called, you know, Building Digital Tools for Physical Spaces. Um, you know, we do think that there are particularities and kind of domain expertise that's required in order to kind of build, build a tech stack for physical spaces that's different than, you know, building a purely digital product. So a purely digital product, you know, is attractive to a lot of people because it can sort of, you know, scale to infinity and you sort of, you know, are free of kind of the constraints of time and space. It's also way more competitive, right? So if you're going to, you know, try building another social network, it's very difficult at this point because it is one of the most attractive models out there. Whereas if you're building for kind of, you know, things that have these physical characteristics, it's not as flexible. But if you can build a really valuable product for that market, it's incredibly sticky and it's incredibly valuable to the people who are running those businesses. I'm just asking you, like, would you do the roll-up or would you do kind of a software business?

I think you're going to see a lot of software companies today realize that they can't compete with AI unless they sit on some kind of memory about their customers. That the general AI foundational models don't have access to, right? You have access to court and revenue and sales data that ChatGPT, Gemini, the other labs don't have access to. The question becomes, if your software isn't a moat anymore because anyone can build software, and actually the memory you have on your customers is the asset, what do you do to help drive that asset? Obviously selling them software is good, but what about lending them money based off predicting their 2026 court revenue? And if you, maybe if you lend them money, maybe they want to sell one day because a family wants to get out of the court business, then you could buy it, and then you're doing like sort of atoms and bits. So I don't know where it's going to go. I just think the the future is a lot of vertical SaaS companies sitting on unique data. We're going to see very interesting allocation of capital.

Now, do you, do you think people can vibe code a really good vertical solution?

No, I think, I think no. I think the answer is no.

Yeah. So we would agree with you that it's, it's, it's, you can put together a prototype like, and you can vibe code your way to kind of a, you know, a simple scheduling app, but you can't vibe code your way to, to something that has kind of deep value to a domain 100% distribution, etc.

So, hey, quick things I want to wrap up with you. Rapid fire if we can. Just 3 questions here. Number 1, you're building ghost gyms. I mean, they're sports facilities with zero staff, right? Is this the future of fitness in your opinion, or are we just sort of willing to kill the social aspect of sports in terms of the admin staff for the sake of higher margins?

Yeah, I would say you're not getting rid of kind of the social aspect of it. You are, you know, and I would not call it kind of a ghost gym, right? So, you know, when we started out, people said, hey, are you going to lose the human touch? Well, the human touch can isn't necessarily a positive. Uh, if the piece that you're, you know, if you have kind of front desk, and we, we serve plenty of staff facilities, and it's difficult to kind of like get really good front desk people because the best people kind of move on to something else. So the goal was like, can you kind of free yourself of that constraint and replace that with kind of like walking into the— when you walk into kind of a Pod Play facility, you should be walking into the future, right? It shouldn't feel like less, it should feel like more. And in addition to that, you're giving people flexibility, you're giving them proximity, all the things that kind of kind of they want in this day and age. So I, and those resources can be redirected towards community building, right? So it's not like there's, there's nobody on site, but it's just, you know, instead of a front desk, it might be a coach. It might be somebody who's kind of like organizing events. And so you redirect that energy and resource towards, you know, more valuable activities.

All right. Two more here. Pickleball is the fastest growing sport in the world. Many people would say this, but a lot of clubs are losing a bunch of money on real estate. How do your customers actually make the math work without charging $100 an hour?

You do have to get the real estate You have to get the real estate right. We're playing a part in that, right? So we, some of the clubs that we're supporting are doing less from kind of a staffing standpoint because they're working with Podplay. I think the other aspect is working on kind of the revenue side. So some of the features that we offer, like kind of the, the videos and replays functionality, those can be monetized. They can be monetized with sponsors. So we always look at, you know, we want to say we want to compete on ROI. ROI, not price. And kind of that ROI, the components of that is like, can we enable new lines of revenue for a club? Can we kind of reduce costs through kind of reducing kind of like labor overhead and introducing efficiencies? And then can we improve the user experience? We do think that kind of the best clubs are going to win based on user experience. I think in the early days of pickleball, it was enough to just have your doors open was a competitive advantage because, you know, the demand was so far exceeding the supply. But as those balance, we do think that the, the best clubs are going to win on kind of user experience, experience and community over time. And if, as you know, the more we can kind of enable that, the more we're going to enable those clubs to be profitable.

All right, last one here. If I wanted to open an autonomous pickleball court tomorrow, what's the hidden cost that'll kill most founders before they even open their doors?

I mean, this was kind of our big learning with, with Ping Pong. Um, if we kind of found a white box that was— we didn't have to do any kind of like structural work from a HVAC standpoint, from a plumbing standpoint. There are two aspects to this. One is how much capital goes into the business, right? So How much are you spending to kind of get that, get your doors open? And then the second aspect is time to revenue, right? Because you, you know, if you have to do a lot of kind of structural work in order to get kind of a place open, it takes longer to get to the revenue. So not only are you kind of committing more money, and you know, there's also an emotional cost if you're dealing with kind of like permitting and contractors, these things tend to lag, but that's the biggest kind of gotcha in starting a physical business that most people miss is if you can control the amount of capital that goes in and you can kind of reduce the time to get your doors open, you're going to have a much better ROI. So, you know, what I would say is you would, you would prefer a slightly lesser location that if you can get kind of that white box that doesn't have a lot of structural work and you can put less money into it and get open faster than getting that kind of prime location if you have to do a bunch of work to it.

Ben, on that note, if folks want to follow your stories, you keep growing the community and the software and the hardware, where's the best place they can find you online?

I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. So I'd find, you know, find me on LinkedIn, regularly post some of my musings on the Podplay blog. So podplay.app/blog. And you know, if you want to go down the rabbit hole, there is definitely a rabbit hole there to go down. Also Podplay YouTube channel, Podplay Instagram channel. We're very active across both of this.

Guys, there you have it. Ben Borton launched physical ping pong communities back in 2020. Then COVID hit, shut it down, reopened in May in New York City, did a couple hundred thousand bucks in revenue that first year by renting out courts by the hour, about $30 per hour, 70% utilization on those physical courts they had open. Really good first year as it continued to scale. Now by 2023, they said, man, how do we get more into the software world? They wrote code that is now called PodPlay, and they spun it out officially in 2025, this year, with an $8 million Series A, you know, sold, sold the typical amount you sell in a Series A. Now they're scaling. They've got about $3 million of contracted revenue on this platform, serving 200 locations, about 10 courts per location. Folks paying for their software to run these, these locations are paying between $2K and $6K per year. Hardware clients going up closer to $10K. But if you check out the site podplay.com, you'll see how they're building community. They're helping create viral moments, additional revenue streams, and really helping folks create community, which we need more of in this age of AI where everyone gets stuck behind their computer.

Ben, thank you for taking us to this Sure.

Thanks for having me. You won't believe this CEO's revenue. Click here to watch the next episode right now.