How Podplay Reached $3M Contracted ARR and 200 Locations with a Vertical SaaS Platform for Sports Clubs (Interview with Co-Founder Ben Borden)

Opening Numbers: $3M ARR and 200 Locations

Ben Borden

00:00We are kind of approaching 3,000,000 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.

Nathan Latka

00:09>> How do your customers actually make the math work without charging a $100 an hour?

Ben Borden

00:13The videos and replace functionality, they can be monetized with sponsors. Nicoball is growing like crazy in The US, you know, fastest growing kind of sport by a pretty wide margin. $8,000,000 series a round led by Frontier Growth. It's just kind of an OG investor in the vertical SaaS space.

Nathan Latka

00:27>> If you're are you charging $60 an hour, 70% utilization, so you're doing a $100,000 a year in revenue? Or what was it? I'm curious how it started.

Ben Borden

00:33We look at kind of what is the average revenue per hour used, about kinda like $30 per hour across everything.

Nathan Latka

00:40>> Before the show, you said, Nathan, one of the ways we've really grown and really lean into building in public. What does that mean?

Ben Borden

00:44Enhancing the kind of in club playing experience. We do things like digital scoreboards and video replays. There's a viral component to kind of video replays that that goes social.

Guest Introduction: Ben Borden, Co-Founder of Podplay

Nathan Latka

00:55>> 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 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?

Ben Borden

01:14Yeah. Absolutely.

Nathan Latka

01:15>> You're way cooler now doing this than the hedge fund days, right? That's that's why you made the transition.

Background: Hedge Fund Days and Co-Founder Max Koeghler

Ben Borden

01:20Absolutely. I mean, my my co founder Max Koeghler 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, it's just we were doing kind

01:38of 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 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

01:58that pretty much everybody can understand. Know, I think if your kids can understand it, then you really have kind of a mission that resonates with a lot of people.

Nathan Latka

02:05>> 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 did that thing work?

Ben Borden

02:10Yeah, I mean, we took it up to several $100,000,000 in assets, so it was definitely a success story.

Nathan Latka

02:17>> Very cool. Okay, so what email do you send your LPs? You say we're shutting down to go build ping pong or ping pod in 2019 or what that story looked like?

Ben Borden

02:26There 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 PingPod. Prior to joining PingPod, I was running digital fund services at Figure Technologies. It's a big sort of blockchain holding company. I actually recently went public in

02:49September 2025. They went public. It's been a really nice IPO. I was working there with Mike Cagney. How I met Max was being a seed investor and in his hedge fund, the one that we just just talked about and that

Nathan Latka

03:04>> This was Capital, right?

Ben Borden

03:05Capital, 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. Mike's one of the kind of only people out there that's done, you know, multiple unicorns. I mean he's a brilliant brilliant brilliant person. But that that kind of early stage of my career when I

03:27was seeding startup hedge funds has had a real impact on kind of my my future path.

Nathan Latka

03:31>> Okay, I have to ask about this, don't kill me for this, okay? But my research team basically said, you've talked

03:36about this publicly that there was

03:37>> 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?

Ben Borden

03:43We definitely got, it got took a a large drawdown and this was kind of a a real learning experience for for Max and myself. 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

04:09a lot of those investors kind of made future bets on us as well or kind of gave us another chance because we behaved very well through kind of a period of adversity. So that was kind of the 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

Origin Story: PingPod and the Autonomous Club Concept

Ben Borden

04:31when you go through adversity together. And I think Max and I were sort of, you know, we've forged our bond kind of for life during that period of of adversity and it's great to be kind of be in the same boat together again.

Nathan Latka

04:42>> How did this where'd you guys come up with the idea for the business? How did it get going?

Ben Borden

04:45Yeah. 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. It was founded in 2019 by Max, David Silverman and Ernesto Eguin. I was the first outside investor in that business. And the problem they were trying to solve, you had basically at that point in

05:08>> New York City, you had kind

05:09of one large entertainment destination, had to play ping pong, and then you had kind of basement dojo style clubs and there's really nothing in between. And you know, the reason for that was you have relatively high rents in New York City, 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, we could

05:30do something about the labor piece, insert technology, then there might be a third way 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 hours to 20 fourseven, so you're increasing capacity at the same time that you're reducing kind of your your labor overhead. So you're working on both sides of

05:52the 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 pod. Lots of people grew up playing the game. Nobody can afford to have a ping pong table in their apartment. But would it be great if it

06:11was across the street and it was available on demand and we put some cool technology in there to elevate the experience. So we built some community around it. So that was a was a vision. Got started in February 2020, first location, a great time to start a consumer business. Promptly closed our doors along with everything else in March 2020 in New York City. But after that initial gut punch, it was turned out turned out to be

First Location Launch in February 2020 and COVID Impact

Ben Borden

06:36something 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 2020 and, you know, became the business really kind of grew like crazy during that during that period. And we were able to do that because we're doing contactless entry, no employees on-site, naturally socially distance activity, and we could track everybody who came through the door.

Nathan Latka

06:56>> So Ben, when you say really took off in 2020 that first year, can you share in 2020 what was total revenue?

Ben Borden

07:01Yeah. Mean, just from a utilization, we had a single location, but it was utilization was, I think, running between 6070% on a twenty four hour basis. So if you have a a low fixed cost business, that unit was very very very very profitable.

Nathan Latka

07:16>> Well, what does that mean though? I mean, you're are you charging $60 an hour, 70% utilization, so you're doing a $100,000 a year in revenue or what was it? I know you maybe feel small now, but I'm curious how it started.

Ben Borden

07:25Yeah. No. No. 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 can get a table in a open pod, which is, a shared space where there are kind of other other people in that space. But, you know, I think the best way we look at

07:47kind of what is the average revenue per hour used, which is probably kind of the way you're you're thinking about this. And that in those days was about like $30 per hour across everything. So, you know, there there are different ways that you're taking revenue and 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 price volume relationship is

08:11how many hours do you have available, how many of those hours get used and how much do you get paid per hour during that?

Nathan Latka

08:16>> In 2020 then with that one location, 30 per hour, eighteen hour days would be about 70% utilization is about $5.40 per day. And if we take that three sixty days a year, so five days off, that'd be like a 150 to $200,000 of revenue from that one location that year. Is that about right? Something like that?

Ben Borden

08:32It was in the hundreds of thousands.

Nathan Latka

08:34>> Guys, remember, I am not just a YouTuber. I'm investing into my third fund. We've deployed two fifty million dollars into five fifty 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. Sign So up at founderpath.com and when you get the onboarding email, I reply and I see all those. Just reply and say, Nathan, I

08:56>> 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 onto 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

Unit Economics: $30 Per Hour and 60 to 70% Utilization

Nathan Latka

09:15>> full time employee running this location or it's all contactless entry?

Ben Borden

09:18No full time employee. No.

Nathan Latka

09:19>> 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 we've really leaned into building in public. What does that mean?

Transition from PingPod to Podplay Software Platform

Ben Borden

09:27So I mean, let's talk about transition from kind of PingPod to to Podplay, right? So PingPod was the predecessor business, that business now has 20 plus locations, so it's been successful, it's franchising. Our ambition was always to build a technology platform that would not just serve PingPod, 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 a modern, mobile first,

09:55really 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 video replays that that goes social.

Nathan Latka

10:12>> Oh, this is cool, Ben. This is like super cool. You feel like a superstar playing in one of these things.

Ben Borden

10:16Yeah. I mean, the idea is to have your own kind of like personal sports center 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 of 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

10:36tools 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 logins, things like that. So really kind of the magic in this is combining hardware software in a single kind of full stack solution. So we got to that point in the summer of of twenty twenty three. So you could

10:58think 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

Nathan Latka

11:05>> So, Ben, sorry. Just to be clear, when did you write your first line of code for Pod Play that we're looking on the screen and then what year was your first paying customer for Pod Play?

First Outside Customers in Summer 2023 and City Pickle

Ben Borden

11:12Yes. 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 twenty twenty three. That's when we formed Podplay as a wholly owned subsidiary. You know, we put the whole tech team in there and myself on the

11:37on the business side, tech team is led by a guy named Elliot Rifkin, who's one of our co founders, he's an amazing guy, comes from kind of a background in the fit tech world, 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 plus running app. So he's built really large scaled kind of global consumer facing apps and about 90% of our

12:03tech 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 reassembled them as a dream team. So yeah, 2023 we launched 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

12:28was pickleball. Pickleball was growing like crazy in The US, you know, growing kind of sport by a pretty wide margin. And people had seen what we've 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

12:56iconic pickleball at Central Park in New York City.

Nathan Latka

12:59>> 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 course or number of people or how do you bill?

Pricing Model: Per-Court Monthly SaaS Fees and Tiers

Ben Borden

13:07A lighthouse client, we are charging on kind of a per court basis, that's the kind of 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 pod model, which includes door access, includes security cameras, includes monitoring by a team in The Philippines. So that's a

13:31kind of a different tier of the offering. But all of these are priced on a kind of per court basis, roughly. You end up with a SaaS fee, so it's not a transaction based model. You're getting monthly SaaS fees. Know I you're always interested in numbers just to kind of put some numbers around the business. We are kind of approaching 3,000,000 in contracted ARR. We have a little over 200 locations signed up on the platform. So

13:58you know, these are sitting around between 10 15 per client. Again, there's a range, the software only clients are kind of, you know, generally in the sort of call it two to six 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, those ACBs tend to be a bit higher.

Nathan Latka

14:19>> So just to repeat all that back to you, so when you say 200 locations on your platform, how many courts does that equate to? Is that average of five courts per location, so a thousand courts?

Ben Borden

14:28No. I mean, average is is trending up closer to 10 per per location, and so I think we're over 2,000 courts now.

Nathan Latka

14:35>> Interesting. Okay. This is really interesting growth. So you you're at about $3,000,000 of ARR this year, which means you're finishing here in December somewhere between somewhere around $240,000 a month of revenue, right? That what you mean when you say contracted ARR?

Ben Borden

14:47Now, if you're a software client, on average it takes kind of one to two months from kind of signing to going live. For the hardware enabled clubs, we have a longer lead time, both because 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 four and six months. So there's a little bit of a lag between those two.

Growth Rate: Triple Digits Year over Year

Nathan Latka

15:08>> Okay, that's great. And 3,000,000 of contracted AR today, does that represent in terms of growth rate from a year prior?

Ben Borden

15:13Triple digits.

Nathan Latka

15:16Peg it between one hundred and two hundred. Yes, more than 100%, less than 200.

15:20>> That's awesome. Okay, I have to go back to how you funded the business because I think you guys did a 10,000,000 Series A in 2022, which would have been right before you launched the software. Are both of these companies under the same thing and you sort of raised money with the legacy business, but are sort of using it to invest in the software business?

Ben Borden

15:36We raised money, that $10,000,000 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 a standalone Podplay, which we did in October. So $8,000,000 series a round led by Frontier Growth, which is kind

Funding: $8M Series A Led by Frontier Growth

Ben Borden

16:05of 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 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. They focus entirely on vertical SaaS. So it's industry specific software and have this deep experience and network in the space,

16:31which 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.

Nathan Latka

16:38>> And most folks spend in 2025 doing a series a we're selling between call it maybe like 1318% of their business. Were you sort of in that same range with the 8,000,000 series a?

Ben Borden

16:46Yeah. 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.

Nathan Latka

16:55>> Yeah. Fair enough. How do you as a ex hedge fund guy mean, whenever I think about this, I always think about bits and atoms. Right? You're building bits and at 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, mean, wouldn't you go roll up the best

17:14>> performing physical courts around the world?

17:18So, mean, I 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,

17:26think 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, I wrote a blog called, you know, Building Digital Tools for Physical Spaces. You know, we do think that there are particularities and kind of domain expertise that's required in order to kind of build a tech stack for physical spaces that's different than, you know, building a purely digital product. So a purely

17:53digital product, you know, 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 gonna, 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,

18:18things that have these physical characteristics, it's not as 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 what would you do the roll up or would you do would you do kind of a software business?

18:38>> I think you're gonna 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 emote anymore because anyone can build software and actually the memory you have

Autonomous Facilities and the Future of Staffless Sports Clubs

Nathan Latka

19:00>> 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 you lend them money, maybe they wanna sell one day because a family wants to get out of the court business, then you could buy it, then you're doing, like, sort of atoms and bits. So I don't know where it's gonna

19:16>> I just think the future is a lot of vertical SaaS companies sitting on unique data. We're gonna see very interesting allocation of capital.

19:23Do you you think people are can can vibe code a really good vertical solution?

19:29>> No. I think I I think no. I think the answer to that is no.

Ben Borden

19:32Yeah. 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 simple scheduling app, but you can't vibe code your way to something that has kind of deep value to a domain.

Nathan Latka

19:47>> A 100% distribution, etcetera. So, hey, quick things I wanna wrap up with you. Rapid fire if we can. Just three questions here. Number one, 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?

Ben Borden

20:05Yeah. I would say you're not getting rid of kind of the the social aspect of it. You are

20:11yeah. And I would not call it kind of a ghost gym. Right? So, you know, when we started out, people said, hey, are you gonna lose the human touch? Well, the human touch can isn't necessarily a positive. If the piece that you're, you know, if you have kind of front desk and we we serve plenty of staff facilities and that it's difficult to kind of like get really good front desk people because the best people kind

20:30of 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 of the things that kind of they want

20:50in 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.

Nathan Latka

21:08>> Alright. 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 a $100 an hour?

How Clubs Make the Math Work Without Charging $100 Per Hour

Ben Borden

21:19You 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 Pod Play. 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 videos and replace functionality, those can be monetized,

21:42they can be monetized with sponsors. So we always look at, you know, we want to say, we want to compete on 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

22:04clubs are gonna 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 gonna win on kind of user experience and and community over time. And if as, the more we can kind of enable that, the more we're gonna

22:24enable those clubs to be profitable.

Nathan Latka

22:25>> Alright. 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?

Ben Borden

22:33I mean, this was kind of our big learning with with PingPod. 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

Hidden Costs of Opening an Autonomous Pickleball Court

Ben Borden

22:57revenue, right? Because you know, 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 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, you know, gotcha in starting a physical business that

23:21most 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 gonna 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

23:42open faster than getting that kind of prime location if you have to do a bunch of work to it.

Nathan Latka

23:46>> Then on that note, if folks wanna follow your stories, you keep growing the community and the software and the hardware, where's the best place they can find you online?

Ben Borden

23:53I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. Find me on LinkedIn, regularly post some of my musings on the pod play blog. So podplay.app backslash blog. You know, if you wanna go down the rabbit hole, there is definitely a rabbit hole there to go down. Also pod play YouTube channel, pod play Instagram channel, we're very active across both of those.

Nathan Latka

24:12>> Guys, there we 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 $100,000 in revenue that first year by renting out courts by the outer hour, about $30 per hour, 7070% utilization on those physical courts they had open, really good first year as they continue to scale. Now by 2023, they said, man, how do we get more into the

24:33>> software world? They wrote code that is now called Podplay, and they spun it out officially in 2025 this year with an 8,000,000 series a, you know, sold sold the typical amount you sell in a series A. Now they're scaling. They've got about $3,000,000 of contracted revenue on this platform serving 200 locations, about 10 quarts per location. Folks paying for their software to run these these locations are paying between 2 and 6 k per year. Hardware clients

24:57>> going up closer to 10 k. 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 buying their computer.

25:11Ben, thank you for taking us to the top.

Ben Borden

25:13Sure. Thanks for having me.

Nathan Latka

25:14>> You won't believe this CEO's revenue. Click here to watch the next episode right now.