How Podplay grew Podplay to $3M revenue and 200 customers in 2023.

PodPlay Revenue

How This Pickleball Software Hit $3M/Year - YouTube

https

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=SB8bmy8LylI

Transcript

(00:00) We are kind of approaching 3 million in in contracted ARR. We have a little over 200 locations signed up on the platforms. I think we're over 2,000 courts now. >> How do your customers actually make the math work without charging 100 bucks an hour? >> The videos and replays functionality that can be monetized with sponsors. (00:16) Pickle ball 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 plus ass space. Are you charging 60 bucks an hour? 70% utilization. So you're doing 100,000 bucks a year in revenue or what was it? I'm curious how it started. (00:34) >> 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 leaned into building in public. What does that mean? >> Enhancing the kind of in club playing experience. (00:48) We do things like [music] 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 Bordon. He's the co-founder of Podplay Technologies building at the intersection of sports technology and in real life experiences. He leads the go to market strategy and is focused on transforming clubs and courts into dynamic techdriven communities. (01:10) 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 that's why you made the transition. >> Absolutely. Yeah, I mean my my co-founder Max [clears throat] Kogler and I both we managed a hedge fund together back in the day. (01:27) 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, it's just we were doing kind of complex options trading strategies. (01:41) 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 pod play 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. (02:00) 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, before we dive into mission and fund, 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 we took it up to several hundred million dollars in assets. (02:16) So it was definitely a success story. >> Very cool. Okay. So what what email do you send your LPs? You say we're shutting down to go build pingpong and or or pingpong in in 2019 or what that story looked like? >> There were there were a number of stops in between for both both Max and I. So that was that was back in the kind of mid mid 2000s. (02:35) Um we both had multiple stops before um getting to sort of PingPod. I prior to to joining PigPod, I was running digital fund services at Figure Technologies, which is a big sort of blockchain holding company. Actually recently went public in um uh in Q3 was September of 2025. They went public. It's been a a really nice IPO. I was working there with with Mike Kagny. (02:58) How I met Max was being a seed investor and in his hedge fund, the one that we just just talked about. And that >> this was MM Capital, right? >> Mm Capital. Yeah. Yeah. I was running a pool of venture capital seating startup hedge funds. The first hedge fun I seated was run by Mike Kagy who you know has went on to be the founder and CEO of of SoFi, chairman of Figure Technologies. (03:19) So Mike's one of the kind of only people out there that's done, you know, multiple unicorns. He's a a brilliant brilliant brilliant person. But the that kind of early stage of my career when I was seating startup hedge funds has had a real impact on kind of my my future path. >> Okay. I 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. (03:39) 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 got took a a large draw down and this was um kind of a a real learning experience for for Max uh 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. (04:04) 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. (04:20) So that was kind of the biggest 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. (04:33) And I think Max and I were sort of, you know, we forged our bond kind of for life during that period of of adversity. And um 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. (04:49) 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 Ewin. I was the first outside investor in that business. Um and the problem they were trying to solve you had basically at that point 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. (05:17) And you know the reason for that was you have relatively high rents in New York City of relatively high labor cost. 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. (05:36) Um so that was the idea. Could you could you take out that front desk uh type labor run without kind of on-site labor um all the time? If you could do that, you could extend your your hours to 247. So you're increasing capacity at the same time that you're reducing kind of your your labor overhead. So you're working on kind of both sides of the math equation. (05:54) 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 pingpod. Lots of people grew up playing the game. (06:08) Nobody can afford to have a ping- pong table in their apartment. Um, but wouldn't it be great if it was across the street and it was available on demand and um, we put some cool technology in there to elevate the experience and we built some community around it. So, that was a that was the vision. (06:23) Got started in February of 2020, first location, a great time to start a consumer business. Uh, promptly closed our doors along with everything else in in March of 2020 in New York City. But after that initial gut punch, um it was turned out up turned out to be something that was really great for the business cuz we were one of the first businesses in New York, non-essential businesses to reopen. (06:45) We reopened in May of 2020 and you know became the business really kind of uh grew like crazy during that during that period and we were able to do that cuz we're 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 I think running between 60 and 70% on a 24-hour basis. Um, so if (07:12) you have a 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 bucks an hour, 70% utilization, so you're doing 100,000 bucks a year in revenue, or what was it? I know you maybe feel small now, but I'm curious how it started. (07:25) >> Yeah, I know. I know pricing is anywhere from call it $ 20 to $50 per hour. You have kind of private pods which are sort of a private space where you have your own pace your own space that has kind of one hourly rate. Then you...