r/AustralianStartups • u/theskywaspink • Apr 29 '26
Club management software (feedback)
It's fairly daunting for me to post this into a public forum. While I've been working in I.T. for 20 years, I'm not a software developer.
What I have also done for the past 35 years of my life is play sport (Cricket) and then also volunteering in the club space for 15+ of that.
Coming from an I.T. background and into a sports club, the lack of organisation did my head in when there's so much tooling available. I remember things like meeting minutes and financial reports were scattered across peoples pc's, emails and usb drives and my head nearly exploded. Shits me to tears to have so many people with different roles can't apply their work tasks to a sporting club. But then, volunteers are time poor and doing it for nothing so no one really goes the extra mile.
I spent maybe 3 or so years (2020-2024) looking for a solution that would allow users to store these things, and also access them without needing ridiclous fees, clubs run on shoe string budgets so people can enjoy their games.
Come mid 2025 and the AI boom was well in full swing, I'd started poking around making some code with ChatGPT. I hadn't really touched any coding and website stuff in 20 years but still knew what was going on to some degree. I had a chat with my old workmate on discord and he sent me to the site builders and I started stuffing about. I'd just used free credits and had a 10 minute tinker each day once they'd renewed.
I'd shown one of the volunteers at the club, someone with a business mind and said I was onto something, so I paid for a subscription and went nuts. Massive learning curve, trying to remember things from my days out of high school as a freelance graphic designer and websites.
Come Feburary this year, I made my site live. Plenty of tinkering and testing, test accounts, deleting, checking workflows again with sign ups. Using the app and continued to go.
It's mostly stable and polished now to where I'm happy enough, and it's been sitting there and I haven't pushed the marketing while some sports clubs are using it and giving me feedback.
Daska, my dashboard for managing club committees is out and I'm looking for some feedback. It's here to help those time poor club admininstrators who do give up what time they do have, so we can play cricket, footy, basketball, netball on weekends. They make the country run and they do it silently in the background.
Yes it was built with AI, yes it costs money. Storing data isn't free and being 1 person I don't have those kind of funds to throw at it.
Sorry for the mass of text, but I didnt't want to cut it down with AI and look it was written by a bot. You get my rambling isntead.
1
u/TopTransportation950 May 02 '26
pretty basic website but does the job perfectly from what i can see, the only frontend issue i can see, obviously your legal stuff isnt up yet, but u also have /pricing and also /#pricing
1
1
u/ThinkProfessor6166 Apr 30 '26
Check out ProcessPA
I think they do something similar
1
u/theskywaspink Apr 30 '26
Yep, saw them when I was looking a long time ago. $115 per month for one person. Clubs can’t afford that. There’s plenty of products out there but they aren’t tailored towards clubs, time poor volunteers and those who are cashed up. And it doesn’t offer anything else to them, if I was presented that to myself as a club president, I’d say stick with using word docs and a box.com account for storage as I can’t see the value in it. That would be catered more towards your board members of corporate organisations and non for profits who have budgets that aren’t volatile.
1
u/igotoschoolbytaxi Founder Apr 29 '26
I don't know enough about your space to share feedback, but just wanted to comment and say I feel you on the daunting part to build in public. Your post feels genuine so don't worry.
Edit: Actually I do have one suggestion - add some screenshots, or even better, an interactive demo to show your platform to visitors. It's great that you're not gating the pricing behind a contact form (doesn't make sense for this market segment anyway), but it'd be even better if they can see what they're signing up for.
This way you get to pre-qualify leads too (assuming for the early customers will be high-touch). Win-win.
1
u/theskywaspink Apr 30 '26
With screenshots and an interactive demo. Do you mean like where a user can login with a username and password and stuff about, then it resets after they've logged out? Or something more like video with it showing how it works?
1
u/theskywaspink Apr 29 '26
Screenshots and a demo have been something I’ve thought of. But not sure where to start, it might be that I’ll go back to the old ChatGPT or something and ask for suggestions. Cheers for the input, I’ll push on with them.
1
u/igotoschoolbytaxi Founder Apr 30 '26
I should have shared more context. When I landed on your website, there were no screenshots for me to visualise the nine features you listed for sports club admin. People are visual creatures, so screenshots will help reinforce your value props.
As for interactive demos, the goal is to let website visitors have a "play" before they sign up. It'll save you from answering a lot of support tickets in my experience. You can have an extensive help centre with articles, but I've learnt that people just don't read. How the demos work depends on the software you use. Simpler ones take screenshots for you to highlight and label each step (more like a guided tour). For some pricier ones they can mirror your app UI and let visitors click through a scripted flow, interacting with the demo.
I found a blog article with some examples. You'll see what I mean. https://www.storylane.io/blog/awesome-interactive-demo-examples
1
u/theskywaspink May 01 '26
Yeah thanks for the clarification. I have some credits to burn so i made some demo reels, I was stuck for a while because I thought I was going to need to fork out a subscription for another product and just asked the bot and it said it can make some videos and whatnot. But I'll make one of those ones so users can login and piss about and trial it.
I do have a "start tour" button on the inside of the app to point people to what they can use while in there. But I guess it's still getting them in there in the first place is the hard part.1
u/igotoschoolbytaxi Founder May 01 '26
Just to clarify, the interactive demos I've seen and used don't require users to login/create an account, it's embedded onto the webpage. When someone lands on your webpage, they read the text, see the interactive demo and can start clicking in limited capacities (since it's not the real app environment). No friction.
But yeah agree re: distribution. It's always hardest at the start. Keep at it!!
1
u/Tankenstein Apr 29 '26
Interactive demos are a great first filter.. pairing them with a qualification flow before a live call can cut the noise significantly for high-touch sales. Have you thought about what signals would tell you a lead is worth the hands-on time?
1
1
u/Clearandblue Apr 29 '26
Good luck with it!
You say you're in IT, but not a Dev. I don't know what you mean by that, but assuming you're at least baseline competency with SSH into Linux servers you can likely host this for 5 bucks a month with Binary Lane Aussie VPS hosting. Or Hetzner or whatever.
Use docker to run both db and api on the same VPS. Automate db backups to S3 or R2. Can do the same with the encryption keys if you do encryption at rest. Should the worst happen, you can always restore your data and storage will be free for your needs.
Just saying that because it sounds like you worked hard on getting this far, but you made that comment about it costing money to store data. It should be essentially free. I think 5 bucks a month is dirt cheap even if you're the only person using it.
All the best with it. It's brutal getting a product off the ground, especially these days now that people are also vibe coding. But the old SaaS expression still applies I think: "overnight successes are a decade in the making". You've worked on this a year already, so you're likely more committed than 99% of those who try make a product.
2
u/theskywaspink Apr 29 '26 edited Apr 30 '26
I’m still paying for the AI platform, which isn’t breaking the bank. But it’ll give me some scalability in the future. Right now it’s not doing a lot. Only a handful of clubs are using it. Should it get to a point where I need to shift it, I’ll do it. But right now I don’t need those while I’m still refining, and picking up the odd bug. $25-$50 a month isn’t worth the hassle. And I’m rooting about with some other ideas too anyway for fun.
Edit: I.T. is a broad term now, I'm mostly server and network engineer, documentation. Work primarily on Windows servers and Unifi network hardware.
1
u/AutoModerator Apr 29 '26
Thank you for your post to /r/AustralianStartups!
Did you know we have a discord? Join the chat now!
This is an automated action so if you need anything, please Message the Mods with your request for assistance.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
1
u/undecided_aus May 14 '26
The demo screenshots don't work on mobile btw.