Score Pickleball Podcast Episode 4: Ben Borton

Okay everybody, welcome to another edition of the SCORE Pickleball Podcast. I'm Ari Wagner, co-founder of SCORE Pickleball, and we are grateful to have another co-founder on the show. We have Ben Borton here of Pod Play Technologies. Appreciate you coming on, brother.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, absolutely. So like we always like to do, because everybody in pickleball has kind of a similar but unique journey, uh, and a lot of the businesses that we're talking to are in the same sort of a space. Um, so let's kick it off with your journey. How did you come to co-found Pod Play Technologies and what's the story behind it? Creation and everything you guys are doing over there?

Yeah, I think we have a pretty unique story, um, given that we started our path to pickleball went via table tennis. Um, so we, we started as venue operators, put the business together in 2019, um, and it was actually founded by my partners Max Kogler, David Silverman, and Ernesto Edwin. Um, I was the first outside investor, okay, in the business, and we looked at kind of the state of table tennis in New York city around 2019, and you basically had a setup where you could either go to a large entertainment venue, um, where there was food and booze and a lot of tables, a lot of corporate buyouts and things like that, or you were going to kind of a basement dojo. There was really nothing in between. Um, so we looked at that setup and said, hey, there is actually, um, demand for table tennis, uh, that's just not being supplied here. And it's not being supplied because it's difficult to do in an economic way. So if you looked at the cost stack to run a table tennis club in New York, you had rent was a really big cost and you had labor as a very big cost. And if you were going to kind of have those big costs, you needed to have food and booze in order to make the margins to kind of make profits work. When we looked at that, we said, hey, if we could take that labor cost, that variable labor cost, and turn it into kind of a fixed technology cost, then two things would happen. We could stay open 24 hours a day, increase capacity, and we would reduce that labor cost and kind of lower the bar to kind of achieve profitability for a club. So that was the idea, and a lot of people like the idea. The only problem with the idea is the technology to do it didn't exist at the time. So we raised a bit of money to put together kind of a proof of concept. We got our first location open in February of 2020, um, very auspicious time.

I was gonna say, if anybody doesn't know what happened in March of 2020, they haven't been paying attention.

We, uh, we probably closed our doors in March of 2020, um, which was, was unfortunate, but we were able to reopen it in May of 2020, and that was because we were doing contactless entry, uh, it was unstaffed, so no employees on site. The activity itself was naturally socially distant, and we could track everybody who came through the door. So kind of against the odds, the concept really took off during the pandemic. And on the back of that, we were able to raise some more money to take that to kind of multiple locations. You roll forward to today, we've raised $19 million across 4 rounds of financing. Our lead investor is Sequoia Heritage, which is part of the Sequoia Capital group of funds. And on the operating side of the business, we now have 25 locations. 20 of those are ping pong locations under the Ping Pong brand, and we acquired a second concept that's called Sharks that was basically a Ping Pong knockoff. We had kind of some of our early customers who came and played at Ping Pong, loved the concept. They said we have to do this for pool. They approached us about licensing our technology. At that point, we had developers, and we said, you know, we're not ready to do that, maybe in the future, but we blessed the project. They got off the ground, ultimately ended up putting together 4 locations, bootstrapped. They didn't really raise any outside capital. And at the beginning of 2023, they kind of approached us and said, hey, we either need to quit our day jobs and give this a real go or turn it over to you guys. So we acquired those assets, moved it over to the Podplay platform, and we've been operating those units as well. And that was a great kind of segue to the Podplay business, which we had always had plans to basically kind of do the Amazon model where you build infrastructure for yourself, and then when you get that to a point where it's really, really good and it's scalable, then you license that to others. And that's where we got to in the, the summer of 2023. We put together Pod Play Technologies. We kind of put our entire tech team from Ping Pong into the Pod Play business along with myself on the business side and a few other people. And we created that as a wholly owned subsidiary and we went to work in the pickleball space. Our launch partners were City Pickle, which is based in New York City here with us. They run the kind of iconic pickleball at Central Park at Wollman Rink. They also have a permanent facility in Long Island City. They've done activations in Hudson Yards and Union Square. They've got some more fun stuff coming next to the Brooklyn Bridge. They've just been a real powerhouse to kind of making pickleball available here in New York City where there's a real supply problem. Our other launch partner was Pickleball, which is based out in Arizona. Pickleball, backed by Steve Kuhn, founder of Major League Pickleball. And so we work with those two partners in kind of launch base to do the necessary modifications to the software that we built for the table tennis use case to modify it for pickleball and kind of announced ourselves to the outside world in October of 2023. And it's really been off to the races since then. We're up to 71 venues signed up on the platform. We signed up 9 new venues in August and it's really, really, really starting to ramp.

Yeah, it's a real wonderful story. And I really, you know, a lot of people that watch our podcast are business owners themselves or recreational pickleball players and things of that nature too. And so understanding that you guys started in an opportunity where things just went completely black for you, you found a way to, to pivot, find a way to, to take that, you know, kind of business doomsday into making yourself profitable, making yourself into an opportunity, getting your name out there because you were one of the first to open back up your doors. And then as you said, you know, you're building this use case so that you can scale it. And once you scale that, you set the date 2023. So that's 3 years from when that opportunity happened for you guys. And now here you are from Pod Play, essentially, like you just, you know, you mentioned it evolved from, from ping-pong and, and, and things of that nature, uh, with billiards and stuff like that. So that's— I really appreciate that unique path and you sharing that. I really, I really like that. What exactly inspired you guys to, uh, you know, dive into pickleball specifically?

Um, a lot of it was just demand. Uh, so we were— we had a bunch of inbound inquiries from, from pickleball clubs that were interested who had kind of experienced our software. They thought it was a great UX. They were interested in some of the kind of the pieces that we were doing with the hardware side. So we had inbound inquiries. Obviously, pickleball was just kind of growing.

Yep.

Like crazy too. So it was a huge, huge growth market. And if you're going to start a vertical SaaS business, it's great to align yourself with a greenfield opportunity. So it's always easier to get started with people when they're from the beginning. Particularly if you're talking about a piece of software that's effectively kind of the control point, it's the interaction point with your customers, it's how you take payments. That's a pretty key piece of technology. There's sort of a high bar for people to change from other systems to us. So it's always easier to align yourself with what I would say a greenfield opportunity, and there's a ton of greenfield opportunity in the pickleball space. So made a ton of sense. A lot of similarities to table tennis. The way we run our club is not horribly different from how most pickleball clubs run. We do open plays, we do tournaments, we do leagues, we do court bookings, we do memberships, we do coaching. So a lot of the concepts are very, very similar.

Yeah. And that's funny too, because even like the growth trajectory of your company is very similar to pickleball because they say the greatest thing that ever happened to pickleball was the pandemic, right? Everybody needed something to do. They wanted to go outside. Nobody really knew what the hell pickleball was before. You know, a lot of people picked it up during the pandemic and it grew from there. And here you are growing too. And, you know, I think becoming into that space, it sounds like you're, you're continuously evolving your thought process. And so I want to dive into this relationship that you have a little bit further down the road. But, you know, your friend of SCORE Pickleball, her name's Caitlin Kerr. She's obviously a friend of yours as well. She's known as the Pickleball Chick. She's an ambassador of yours as well. She texted me a great question. I think it's a good time to bring this up because You know, we're talking about your journey. We're talking about kind of how you evolved from one place to another. Now you're picking up different things. You got great partnerships obviously in place as well. So like where did, I guess yours, but from the collective, from your partners and everybody else, where did that, is that thirst for continuous learning? Is that part of your core values? Is that something that's incumbent to you? Where does that come from for you? That's kind of what Caitlin asked. Yeah.

I mean, absolutely. It's definitely a core, core value. I think if you're going to be really good entrepreneurs, you have to be kind of focused on continuous learning. And particularly if you're going to do a business like ours where we say, okay, we started as an operating business, now we're running a vertical SaaS business, we're moving into new experience verticals. You have to be willing to kind of dig in, learn about the business, ask people questions, have a ton of empathy for the customers and what problems they're trying to solve in order to be a really good operator. I mean, you could say on one level, say, okay, you know, what right do you guys have to serve the pickleball business, right? Um, you come from the table tennis world. I mean, I think there are some natural things that kind of, um, translate.

I believe Ben Johns came from the table tennis world as well, did he not?

Yeah, I mean, there's, there's, there are some crossovers.

There we go.

You could say, okay, they're both, they're both racket sports and things like that. But, you know, there are business concepts that, that translate between the two. But I think on top of that, you have to be willing to kind of learn, get your hands dirty, go out on the courts, talk to club owners all the time, and just kind of listen. And I think that's one of our core values is taking in that information and turning it into good software. So we want software that is, you know, I think one of our design principles is the best technology kind of gets out of the way. And it's really in the service of the game. You know, I think the important thing is people being in a physical space together, doing something that's social, that's active, that's fun. You talk about kind of partnership with Caitlin. One of the reasons why we partnered with her is because she really embodies those kind of values, right? She is full of energy. She's, you know, one of the more social people out there and kind of embodies all the spirit of pickleball.. And we see our job is to have great technology that kind of gets people into those spaces. We have a saying internally, we say, use your phone to put down your phone. So it's this mobile tool that gives people superpowers, but its job is really to kind of get out of the way.

Yeah, we agree with that too. There's something that one of our core philosophies is very similar where we want to give people the opportunity to explore pickleball and enjoy pickleball without actually using their technology, but the technology is this little small piece of it that allows them to organize games. It allows them to organize leagues and statistics. And same thing with what you guys are doing too. And I know you sent me a couple of quotes that I want to bring in right now because I think it's, it's directly correlated to what you're talking about with your technology stack and everything that you're doing over there. And you said you're— and, and I might have paraphrased this a little bit, I might not have— but you said your, your design philosophy is, is less is more. And using tech in service of the game. And I, I really appreciated those two quotes because it's exactly what we're trying to do too, and I think it's exactly what the, the sport needs. So I would like if you expanded on those, like, those principles a little bit and just let us know, you know, how that has influenced the development of the product and, and where that kind of has come from.

Yeah, so less is more. Um, I think one of the core things is you can always add more functionality to software. So if you're in software development, it's always a question of, okay, this feature, this function, is it going to— you can always add more, and it's very easy to kind of over-spec a product. And particularly on the customer side of the user experience, we try and be very ruthless about kind of looking at the trade-offs between, okay, if we add this functionality What do we lose from a user experience standpoint? What are we— are we adding friction? Is it worth adding that friction in order to kind of create this new functionality? And we're very ruthless about that. And I think it comes from— it stems from originally building to the unstaffed use case. So if you think about, you know, operating unstaffed, the UX has to be really easy. It has to be very intuitive. If there's Nobody's going to be there to, to, to help you, then you can't have like extra things that might confuse people, correct? Um, so that's at the core of the design principles, um, and I think it goes back to our tech team. Our tech team is led by a guy named Ilya Rifkin, who's our CTO. Um, Ilya spent a bulk of his career at a digital agency called RGA, and the big projects he worked on there was the Equinox mobile booking app and the Nike+ Running app. So these are, you know, very large-scale consumer-facing apps that have to be kind of easy and intuitive and mobile-friendly. And so Ilya really brings that ethos to the tech team, and 90% of our team basically has ties to those two projects. We've been fortunate enough that we rarely have had to kind of interview anybody on the engineering side, the product side, and the design side. We've been able to kind of just go and recruit in all the best people that Ilya worked with in the past. They're known quantities. We've been able to kind of like reassemble this dream team, and they all share those kind of design principles. There are, you know, there's certain outside companies that we take inspiration from. You know, in particular, Apple is a big inspiration for our company. In our hardware stack, we use a lot of Apple products. We use Mac Minis for our kind of servers. We use iPads. For our kiosks and our kind of hardware setup. We have Apple TV devices that kind of stitch these things together. And I think some of the great principles of Apple is really that kind of the meeting of hardware and software. And simplicity is beautiful, but not simple for the case of simple. There's a lot of hard work that goes into making something very, very, very, very simple.

Yeah, and I think what What I've known about your brand, and I have not been to, and I would love to go to one, but I've never been to one of your facilities. I think it sounds awesome. When we play pickleball, when a lot of the people that we know that play pickleball, you show up at a public park, you show up maybe at a facility, you find a court somewhere, right? And you play with your buddies. And that's really what you guys are doing. You guys are providing an opportunity for people to show up to a pickleball court and play with their buddies. But what you're really doing that I think sets Pot Play apart is you're adding unique features to that experience. So that pickleball player can now leverage technology to enhance what they're trying to do. Right. So share a little bit more about some of those innovations that you have. You know, a couple that come to mind is the Coach Connect and the court assignment algorithm and some other things you guys are doing. I think, like I said, it just adds value to the pickleball experience in any sort of way, even just having that touchless entry and being able to get to courts at any time you want to get to. That adds value, but actually playing the game and what you guys are providing.

Yeah, I mean, I love the two features that you called out. Maybe we'll take those in turn. The first one, Coach Connect. So we're huge believers in coaching and in running our own venues. We have close to 100 coaches approved on the Ping Pong platform. So we're doing everything that we can from a software standpoint to facilitate facilitate coaching. And there's a business reason for that. I mean, we've looked at our data and we found that the lifetime value of customers to get coaching is 17x the lifetime value of an average customer. So there's a good reason, business reason for that. But it also goes back to sort of enjoying the game with both pickleball and table tennis. You get a little bit of coaching, you get better, you see yourself improve. You're basically on that path of continuous improvement. And what you find is that people are on that path continuous improvement, they do more of everything. You know, they make more bookings, they do more coaching, they come to more clinics, they come to open plays. Now they're joining tournaments. Um, they just catch the bug. Correct. Um, so we want to make it as easy as possible for people to, um, find coaching, to coordinate that, and to pay for coaching. So, you know, I think in a lot of, of some of the kind of legacy systems, you're ending up emailing a coach, maybe you're texting a coach, maybe you're doing Venmo on the side. For our Coach Connect feature, that's all done within the system. So you can both view court availability at a club, but you can also see coach availability at the same time. So you see the intersection of those two pieces. You can think about it from the coach standpoint, it's almost like having an embedded Calendly function for them so they can input all of their availability, they can input how much notice time they need to kind of accept a lesson. If they have a list of students that they work with, that is kind of, they just want to work with 20 students, they can kind of input that list and only those students will see their availability. And then those coaches can connect their bank account directly to the system to receive payouts. So, you know, it's a little bit like a sort of, you know, Uber or Lyft sort of gig model where the coaches, the club is basically an office where the coaches can kind of apply their trade. And the system is basically a, a way that they can kind of connect with customers, that they can receive payments from customers, and kind of acquire new, new customers over, over time. So I mean, you think about it as discovery, it's coordination, and it's payment. If we can take all of that friction out and get it down to kind of a couple taps of a button, that's great for the customer, that's great for the coach, and it's just going to facilitate more and more coaching.

Let me, let me ask you this question while we're on the, on the topic, because I, I think a lot of our listeners are potentially, uh, wanting to be coached or coaches. How do you become an approved coach, uh, on, on your platform?

Um, so we don't manage those certifications. I mean, we're enabling this. So if for our clubs, they, um, will do their own certifications, so they will manage their own approvals at Ping Pong. We have kind of a certification program. We have a director of coaching, Matilda Ekholm. She's a former top 20 table tennis player.

Awesome.

In the world, former Swedish Olympian. So there are certain trainings that all of our coaches go through with Mati, both from kind of a safety standpoint. She's built out courses on Udemy that they have to kind of go through before they can become certified as a Ping Pong coach. And I think there are kind of, you know, versions of this that exist in the pickleball world, including like our partners over at Johns Design and Consulting. Colin Johns has a certification program for his coaching program. So I think you'll see over time in the pickleball world that the things will— you may have kind of one or more certifying bodies that become sort of the standard for coaching certification. But at this point, it's, you know, it's up to the clubs. To decide how they manage their own approvals and certifications.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And then to kind of segue there too. So like tonight I'm playing an 8-player round robin with my buddies. We have created kind of an algorithm for that rotation to get everybody to play with everybody once, make it a competitive atmosphere where the top-rated player has a little bit harder of a gameplay moving on forward just so that the set rotation is easy to follow. It's fun. It gives everybody more gameplay. Talk to us a little bit about what you guys are doing with your court assignment algorithm and kind of how that impacts what people can expect.

Yeah, so algorithmic court assignment for us is, you know, a lot of pickleball clubs, if you're going to go make a booking or make a reservation, they allow your— the customers to pick their own courts, which is, you know, it's— that's nice if you're a, a customer, but it's not necessarily kind of the most efficient way to allocate those, those courts. So the example I like to use is restaurants. If you go to a restaurant, you don't get to pick your own table. And let's use like a simplified example, right? If I'm a club that has two courts and court one, let's look at a kind of a block from 10:00 AM to kind of 1:00 PM. And court one is booked from 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM, and then it's booked again from 12:00 to 1:00. And now court two is booked from 10:00 till 12:00. Now, if you're letting people pick their own courts, the only way I could come in and do a booking from 11 to 1, um, with that setup is I would have to go book court 1 from 11 to 12, and I'd have to go book court 2 from 12 to 1, right? So I'd have to make 2 reservations on the front end, more friction there. And then when I show up at the club, I've got to switch in the middle of my reservation, so I've got to switch courts. So there are a lot of people who will just say, nah, I don't wanna do it. I don't need to make two reservations. It doesn't look like they have a two-hour block. I won't do it. But if you're doing it algorithmically, we're basically assigning those courts. We can basically move the blocks around and then offer you that 11 to 1 slot as a single reservation where you don't have to switch. So that's kind of the core of algorithmic court assignments. It's a much more efficient way to assign courts particularly for really busy clubs that are operating at, you know, very high utilization, this can lead to, you know, 5, 10, 15% pickups in utilization, which is very, very meaningful for clubs.

Yeah, on both sides of that spectrum too, it's extremely meaningful because for instance, like I was just talking about before, here's a real-life scenario where that would've been handy, but I luckily enough knew the owner of the facility. The owner of facility went on the backend, helped me out with it and did the exact same thing. He was the algorithm of what you're doing, but he did it manually, right, for me. Like I was telling you, you do an 8-player round robin on the Score Pickleball app. We play it all the time. And, uh, 2 weeks ago there was like a tornado that was coming out of nowhere. Uh, it was beautiful, clear skies all day long. We're 5 minutes away from the, uh, from the outdoor courts, and the sirens start ringing and it's— it starts pouring rain, right? So I pop on the phone, I called my guy at the facility that's local to us, ask him if he's got 2 courts available because we're when we play the 8-player round robin, we have 2 courts, right? 4 and 4. And that's just the way that it goes. And he goes, yeah, I got 2 courts, but, you know, court 1's available, everything else is open play, and I got court 6 available too. Let me move a couple things around. I'll put you on court 1 and 2, and I'll move this over here, blah blah blah blah. Did the exact same thing that your algorithm does. But not everybody has access to the owner of the facility. Every owner of the facility doesn't want Ari Wagner calling them, asking him to do, like, him a favor every single time. And so you can monetize your courts super easily because you get people on them all the time. There's more opportunities to reserve. An open play court may not even be full, right? So even in an open play court, if there's somebody coming in who's going to dedicate time to this court, maybe the algorithm's smart enough to pick up on that too. So I love— you mentioned that technology to me in the past. I love that technology. I think that's going to go a long way for you guys. Um, the Pod Play Uh, you had mentioned with Apple, um, using their, you know, their products for the digital and enhanced scoreboards you guys have. Give me a little more information on how those work and where do you see that technology evolving in the future for what you guys are trying to produce?

Sure. Yeah. So, you know, one of the big differentiating features where Podplay is the only system that fully integrates a reservation management system, so a booking system with, uh, digital scoreboards and video replays. How does that work in practice? So our setup for kind of the pro tier of our offering includes a 65-inch monitor, an iPad or a kiosk as we call it, an Apple TV device that kind of stitches this all together, and then a replay camera on the baseline. So that's the setup per court that's set up in the pro tier. So having that fully integrated into the booking system, when you arrive on that court, if you're coming to one of these pro courts, you'll look up on that 65-inch monitor, you'll see the names of all the players that are on that reservation, you'll see kind of the length of the reservation, you'll see which court it is. And then if you go to the kiosk, you'll be able to kind of look at the kiosk, all the players will be in the dropdown menus, you can assign them to teams. If they have duper ratings, those duper ratings will show there. As well if they've connected their, their duper to it. You can pick side-out scoring, you can pick rally scoring, you can pick 2 out of 3, 3 out of 5, 5 out of 7. And so all of those settings for the game are on there, and then you click play, and then we're going to run the scoreboard. Now, one player on either team is wearing a Bluetooth-enabled wristband. Looks a little bit like kind of a watch, if you will. It's very comfortable to where if you score, your team scores a point, you'll press the button, you know, adds a point. If you need to take a point off the board, you do a double press. And then if you want to get a replay, you do a long press on that button. When you do that long press, what happens is that that video, the replay camera is always running. You do that long press, it's going to trigger us to cut a replay of the last 40 seconds. What happens instantly on the monitor We run a little animation and then we show the last 15 seconds of that play immediately on that 65-inch monitor, which, you know, people love. People love to see those great plays. We also see people using that for line calls and things like that. At the same time, the longer clip, which is a full 40 seconds, gets delivered to your app. So you'll have kind of a full history of all of your reservations that you've been involved in. If those have video replays that are associated with them, you'll see kind of thumbnails there. And then everybody on the reservation will also get an email with those. So there's multiple ways that you kind of access those videos. So the key here is it's user-initiated though, so that the customers, the players are saying, hey, when is this a great play? This is a hugely, hugely popular feature and it goes back to say, okay, the technology getting out of the way. There are a lot of people who kind of want to capture these like great moments, magic moments, but you don't want to have to have somebody standing on the sideline with their iPhone kind of videoing these things. You don't want to set up a tripod. You don't have to do any of that. You don't want to have to kind of walk over some other system and scan a QR code. Now here you're just, you're wearing a wristband, you press a button, you know, you capture that moment, but you stay in the game. So everything is about keeping people in the game, kind of enjoying the game, but still allowing them to kind of capture those moments. I do think there's a bunch of kind of moments that we have in the modern world where it becomes more about capturing the moment than the moment itself. Absolutely. The example I like to use is you go to a concert, you know, you're having this kind of amazing moment, it's a great song. What do you see? You just like see a bunch of people holding up their phones.

Used to be lighters, right? When we were kids, you hold up your lighter.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, now all you see is a a bunch of puns and it's like a bunch of people trying to capture the moment rather than kind of like listening to that amazing song that they're going to see. So we basically want to kind of like get rid of that where you can get the benefits of sharing and capturing those moments without having to leave the moment, you know, so keep people in the game. So that's the video replays. And from a club standpoint, it's a really, really powerful tool because it's, you're basically giving your customers tools to create really great user-generated content. And we're doing, you know, hundreds of thousands of these replays now. And we started, you know, aggregating up some of these things. We do Pod Play Highlight of the Week. A lot of these things are going viral now. We had one in August that got 2.5 million views. That's gold for a club, right?

Yeah, it's unbelievable.

You get 2.5 million eyeballs on somebody, you know, having a great point in your club. It's got your watermark on it. So, you know, we see this as both, you know, a great tool that you can hand your customers, but from a club standpoint, it's also, you know, basically can replace some of your marketing budget, right? So you could go out and spend money on Instagram ads or Facebook ads, or you could, you know, kind of implement this technology and give your customers the tools to kind of create that user-generated version of that it's probably more powerful anyways. So that's the video piece, the scoreboards, some of the aspects there that people love. I don't know, have you been to clubs where it's really loud before? Oh yeah. I'm sure you have. Oh yeah. Right? So it's really loud, it's very hard to keep score, you're yelling all the time. So if you're using the scoreboard, A, you don't need to yell, B, you don't need to argue over it. I mean, we do think that a lot of people spend some proportion of their time arguing about what the score is. There's emotional energy that is spent on that. So we want to give you back all that time to play pickleball. We want to give you back all that emotional energy and make sure you don't have to yell to be heard because it's all up there on the scoreboard. And if you think of it in the context of, say, your world, like tournaments, right? Wouldn't it be great if you knew what was happening on the next court? It might be interesting to you, right? Yeah, absolutely. Take a peek over there, you see what the score is next door, um, it might kind of have an influence on, on your game. So there's, there's, you know, once people get used to this, it is a new, uh, it's a new way of playing, so there is a behavior change. But as soon as people get used to it, they don't really want to go back. Um, it's a just sort of like a better way to play. And then I think I think a lot of people in clubs, once they see other people using it, they kind of join the party. The last thing to mention about it that we are going to be rolling out really soon that's super exciting is a Duper write feature. So if you want to play a Duper challenge match and everybody has already connected their Duper to Podplay, you'll be able to basically just click a button when you're, you know, you pick side-out scoring, you pick rally scoring, but you'll also be able to choose if you're going to submit those results to Duper. And if you choose to submit those results to Tupper at the end of the match, it'll automatically submit all of those results to everybody's Tupper. So nobody has to pull out their phone, nobody has to kind of find the other players, nobody has to input the score, nobody has to confirm, and you avoid the situation where, you know, somebody doesn't like the result so they don't confirm. So we want to get that all down to like single press of a button at the beginning of the game. No, it's again, you're probably getting this theme of like, we want to take the friction away. It's like, take the friction away, have the technology get out of the way, get people to kind of do the things that they want to do on the court.

Yeah, it's great. I mean, it's very synergized to what we're doing. And that's what I really appreciate about the first conversation we had. And in general, the, you know, there's been multiple lowlights. I'll say that first. There's been multiple highlights of my pickleball experience. You know what I mean? And it's so funny. You enjoy those moments with your buddies, you tap paddles, you talk some, talk some smack and you have a good time about it, but they go away. It's gone. It's in the ether of the world, right? Which, which is totally fine. We all grew up, you know, depending on how old you are, before the internet, and that's totally a fine thing. I guess we had digital recorders. We had those little VHS cassettes in there that you had to pop out and put into a bigger VHS to put into your VCR player back in the day. But, uh, we live in a world now where we want to share technology. We want to share those videos. We want, we want to celebrate, you know, wins, and we want to celebrate losses. We want to celebrate our friends, and we want to show people what we're doing, and we want to grow Also importantly, grow the sport of pickleball by, you know, posting a cool point on your Instagram or your Facebook. And maybe you're somebody— your buddies don't even know what pickleball is. They play ping pong, they play tennis, they play any other sport. I came from basketball. Oh, cool. Well, I see, you know, Ben Ari playing pickleball. That's, that's pretty cool. They look like they're putting a sweat in and having a good time. Like, oh, that was a sick point. Wow, that's unbelievable. Pickleball points from the pro level. They're on SportsCenter top 10 now on a decent, on a decent cadence.

Right?

So you're giving that opportunity, which is one of our core values, is we want to give the regular, the regular recreational player the opportunity to feel like they're playing a professional sport when they're playing with their buddies, right? Because at the end of the day, when you're playing pickleball, everybody who's watching this podcast plays pickleball. If you're a 4.0 and you're playing against another 4.0, a professional player looks at that as, as Rudy Poo. Like, these, these guys don't even know what they're doing. But we feel like we're playing the most competitive game of pickleball of our lives. Right? It's unbelievable. It's fantastic. And if I have some awesome ATP or if I have a, you know, a tweener between my legs from the baseline and I put it over and all I have to do is hold tap on my, on my, you know, my wearable for, for Pop Play and that shoots me a replay and it also pops it right on the scoreboard as soon as I'm done with it. It's unbelievable. It's fantastic technology. Those scoreboards too, you know, this is something that I feel like some of our listeners might be interested in if they're, if they're considering, you know, Pop Play as what they're trying to do. Can you advertise on that? You go to a pickleball court or a pickleball facility, you got banners and flags everywhere of, you know, everything from Selkirk and JOOLA and the big brands of pickleball to, you know, some local law office or some local dentist office or something of that nature. So what's the capability when it comes to advertising on those?

Yeah, it's a roadmap item. So we're currently working on basically a content management system, a CMS, for the monitors. So you'll be able to do several things in the future. One is, is placing sponsor ads both on the scoreboards and kind of on the replays in terms of kind of watermarks, and then what you're showing when, um, when the scoreboards are not in use, right? So you'll be able to kind of have a video slideshow and run ads on those. Um, and so yeah, you're going to have a lot of kind of ability to, to do that, and we think it's really, really valuable digital real state. So if you think about, you know, a billboard or something that you're walking by on the street wherever you live, it's sort of in the background, it's not very active. Whereas if I'm looking at a scoreboard and I'm, you know, let's say I'm looking at that scoreboard to see an instant replay of myself having an ATP, I'm getting a little dopamine hit, I'm really excited, I'm feeling good, you know, wouldn't it be great if I'm kind of seeing a sponsor ad there and now I'm kind of associated with it. So I think it's going to be very, very valuable digital real estate because it's so active, right? It is something that literally people are staring at all the time. It's not something that's just sitting in the background. So we're very, very excited about it. We're just scratching the surface. Awesome. And there's definitely some work to do on the tech side, but we look at, you know, we look at that as a huge source of revenue for people who kind of are on our pro tier. So there are different ways that you can monetize this. You can monetize the replays, you can monetize custom replays, which are longer replays. And we see sponsorships as another way that that digital real estate is really going to connect. You're going to get a very high return on having that technology in your club.

Yeah, our clients are, and any really client of any technology is really focused on monetization of what they're doing. And pickleball is a unique sport too, because it really has found its birthplace on the free recreational public courts, right? So people who are really trying to build a career and build businesses when it comes to pickleball facilities and stuff like that, finding opportunities to have ancillary lines of revenue coming in, like digital real estate like you're talking about, is unbelievably impactful. Because right now, you go to any pickle— like I said, you go to any pickleball facility in the world, there's banners everywhere of every different company in the world. A lot of people have, you know, beverages on stuff, and you can even, you know, advertise probably, you know, food and beverage, you know, special of the week, or this, that, the other, whatever it is you're trying to do. So that's cool. So from, from a Poplite Technology standpoint, um, talk to me more about like your marketing channels, what you guys are doing, where people can find you. I know you form those key partnerships like we talked about before, uh, you know, including Caitlin Kerr. And, um, just tell us what other standout relationships you have, because I know you have a couple of them that have helped accelerate what you're doing in terms of market penetration.

Yeah, I mean, I think the partnership angle is great. We have a partnership with Caitlin that we talked about. We have a partnership with Johns Design and Consulting, which is a joint venture between Iola and Ben and Colin Johns. So we're the exclusive technology provider for Johns Design and Consulting. The services they're providing is to, say, independent clubs. It's sort of an alternative to sort of the franchise model. So they're doing things like, you know, certifying courts and certifying lighting and giving people recommendations in terms of best practices from a business model standpoint. So all the things like what does it make to, what does it take to be kind of a top quality club and getting that sort of advice from folks like Ben and Collin and Collin's doing kind of the coaching certifications. So there's a whole bunch of pieces to it. We happen to be kind of the tech piece where, you know, somebody's opening a club who wants to establish their own brand.. But they want some of that guidance in terms of what is the recipe, what are the best practices. They can go to John's design and consulting and get kind of a certification as well as sort of a blueprint for what is a, what is it, what does a JDC club look like? So that's another partnership that's been really great for us. We do a lot of content marketing. So for anybody who's interested in kind of following our story, we're very active on, on LinkedIn. In particular, we are big believers in a writing culture. So we put a lot of content out on our blog. I'm relatively prolific on that, from that standpoint. I'm kind of, you know, in addition to being kind of a co-founder, I'm sort of the chief writer for our company. And, you know, there's multiple reasons for that. We do believe that clear writing is clear thinking. And so it's making ourselves clear to ourselves, but there's also a— we want to lift up the industry. So let's take an example. We put out a piece called the Pod Play Guide to Starting a Pickleball Business. We put it out in April, and one of the reasons why we put it out is we had a bunch of collected learnings that we'd learned in both running our own facilities as well as kind of serving pickleball clubs. And we covered all these major categories and just gave gave people frameworks for how do you think about court utilization? How do you think about yield? How do you think about membership models? How do you think about different forms of programming? How do you think about coaching? And just gave people ways to think about this and kind of layering in some best practices and, you know, some models from kind of a numbers standpoint, like how do you think about calculating these things? And there's been an amazing response to that piece. I mean, if you go You know, if you go on Google and you type it in the box, you say pickleball business plan, it's now the first thing that comes up. And we put that out in April. I mean, that's partly a reflection of just how nascent this industry is. It's partly a reflection of these are needed pieces of content. So we're very focused on putting content out in the world that kind of is useful to club owners, that gives them real frameworks to kind of think about how best to run their Yeah, that's awesome.

I think there's a real shift in that space too. It's literally why we started this podcast is so that there was more content around pickleball that was not just heavily focused on, oh, what's Ben and Anna Leigh doing this week, or what's the professional circuit doing? We're all fans of the professional circuit and we think that professional pickleball is fantastic, but not everybody wants to know about that. People want to know about, hey, how could my recreational game get a boost? What type of paddle should I be buying? If I want to find more technologies from scorekeeping, stuff like that. Like, how can we introduce people into more, uh, into more of pickleball and more of boosting this? Because it is such a new— I think your writing is probably fantastic. I think a lot of the algorithms probably picked up on that, and that's why you're leading that population on Google. But you're right, it really does have a lot to do with the fact that this is still such a new industry, and being a thought thought leader in that, I think is very smart on your guys' end, uh, by putting that content out there. Uh, I feel like that's probably gonna be a lot of what, what you have in the future, but tell us more. So like with the horizon of the future of Pod Play Technologies, you know, I'm sure it's very bright. I'm sure it's very vast. What, what are some things that, you know, people can expect in the near future? And then also what are some pie in the sky ideas that you guys have, um, that you can share with us?

Um, in the near future, I think you're gonna experience it at a lot more clubs. I mean, we've signed up kind of 71 and that's ramping really, really quickly. So I think a lot more people will have the experience and I think they'll love the experience. And the more people love the experience, I think, you know, the more people will kind of want this to be the default operating system for at least a significant portion of the pickleball market. So we want to be the default provider at the premium end of the market and potentially kind of the whole market. So that's kind of the near term for us in terms of like fun stuff that's coming from kind of a roadmap standpoint. We mentioned kind of the CMS. We are rolling out right now a chat feature, so in-app chat, which is really, really powerful for kind of like organizing your— your club is a social network. Sure. And so I think this is a very exciting feature. So you can have channel-based communication. So it's a great way for people to, you know, say something like open matching. If you want to find other people at a particular skill level, you can kind of find them. We also always recommend that people have a best replays channel. So, you know, when people get those replays, they can share it with kind of the entire community. From a club standpoint, you're, you know, your customers are basically curating your best content for you. You know, at PingPong, that's a wildly popular channel for us. So you can think of this as sort of, you know, it's like a Slack or something like that. You know, some of this happens in, say, TeamReach today, and, you know, I think a lot of clubs will be happy to have that internal to the system. So that's kind of an exciting thing that's rolling out. Another exciting feature that we're rolling out, you know, we've got a blog coming out actually this week about it, is we have, we've built an AI agent that we— our head of customer success, Kyle Nielsen, is Ryan Weinbach is so prolific. He's written, I think, 350 articles in our knowledge base. So we have this huge body of kind of tools and sort of content for how to use our system. One problem with that is like, you know, reading 350 articles is like, who has time to do that? So we basically built an AI agent that's trained on our knowledge base. So now, you know, if you're using the system and you're an admin, you can you can just kind of call up a box that looks a little bit like a ChatGPT box, and you can type in a question, and it's going to read the knowledge base and kind of give you— summarize the answer, and then it's going to point you to kind of the articles in that knowledge base. Great. So those are, you know, those are some fun near-term things that are really just like keeping us at the, um, at the forefront of kind of pushing the boundaries of what, what technology, um, uh, can do. If I look to the, to the future, You know, we pioneered this autonomous operating model in Ping Pong. So we have 20 Ping Pong locations that are operating without staff. We have 5 Sharks locations that are operating without staff. We're now servicing, you know, there's a pickleball club in Dallas that's open that's operating fully autonomously. There's another one coming in New York that will open up in kind of the fourth quarter. There's one coming in Michigan. We really see this as a model that can take off in the pickleball space. It's sort of a complement to these larger facilities. If you're talking about a 10, 15-court facility, that's one thing. And if you think about the real estate footprint in a couple of different places, it's very hard to find a place to put a 15-court facility in New York City. For example.

Right.

A lot easier to find a place that you could put like 2 quarts, 3 quarts, 4 quarts, and if you can operate that unstaffed, then now you have the ability to kind of make that a profitable model. So we see it as this nice complement to kind of the bigger facilities, is you could have these autonomous facilities that can stay open more hours, that are unstaffed, that are kind of like no-frills. And the other place that I think it'll really work is in smaller towns, right? So, you know, if I'm in a town of 50,000 people or something like that, maybe that can't really support a 20-quart facility, but can it support a 4-quart facility that's unstaffed? Sure, absolutely. Um, so we see it as like in the dense urban areas where it's very hard to kind of find the space within the existing infrastructure for a large facility, and then in these kind of like tertiary markets where that might be underserved right now, that those kind of bookends are really interesting for this autonomous model. So we, you know, we think we're the obvious partner for anybody who wants to pursue that model. And, you know, for anybody listening who finds that interesting, you know, reach out, kind of go check out podplay.app. There's lots of information there, book a demo. We're happy to talk to you. But we want to see that model proliferate. It's worked really well for us in the table tennis space. It's really worked really well in the pool space. We're now kind of, you know, supporting some people in the golf simulator clubs that are operating autonomously as well. But we really think it's got a big future in the pickleball space.

Yeah, I think so too. I think you're dead on with that. Anybody who can get me onto a pickleball court last minute notice, let me reserve the court, let me find an indoor facility when it's raining outside, let me push a button on my watch, let me see my awesome replay, let me see other people's awesome replays. Let me organize my community a little bit. I mean, there's an absolute need for that into this industry. And so, you know, we're really excited about what you guys are doing. We think it's going to be really cool. I can't wait. You said Michigan. I'm from Michigan. I can't wait just to step into a facility one day and, and see your guys' brand, see your stuff, grab one of those little wristbands, put it on my wrist and have a good time with it. So we appreciate you having me. Coming soon. Yeah. Yeah, I know. We're excited about it. We appreciate having you on. We appreciate all the insights. Um, we'll link to some stuff in the show notes so that people can follow you. People can see what you're talking about with a lot of what you brought up here. And, uh, it's exciting stuff. So we, we, we appreciate what you're doing and we're looking forward to it. So thank you so much.

Thanks for having me on. I appreciate what you're doing as well. Like, I think the philosophy, the culture behind this, this, this podcast and what you're trying to do in terms of lifting the game up. I think it's really valuable. And, you know, just providing information for people to navigate this world from both a business standpoint and from a kind of having fun playing pickleball standpoint. It's a great mission.

Awesome. Well, I appreciate it. If I'm in New York sometime soon, I'm going to look you up. And when you hook up that court in Michigan, I got to come out there and be one of the first users.

Yeah, we'll let you know.

All right, brother. Well, appreciate you.

Thank you. All right. Thank you.