Show HN: Clubman – a booking platform for ski clubs

by davidbanham • 7 years ago

6 2 7 years ago

I volunteer on the board of my ski club. We have three lodges across two resorts and have used a couple of different booking systems over the years. They've all been pretty bad, usually falling over under load and then making financial errors.

Clubman is well tested (TDDish) software written in Go and hosted on Kubernetes (GKE) with payments through Stripe. It's done 6 bookings per second in real world usage and been synthetically load tested to 10x that.

Ski clubs are a small niche but they have very specific needs. There are _lots_ of booking systems for hotels but they're all geared towards filling as many beds as possible with people willing to pay (of course!) Ski clubs usually have rules to ensure all members get equitable use of the facilities while also trying to maximise utilisation. These rules can get very complicated with multiple classes of membership, multiple rounds of booking with different entitlements and limits on beds and guests, different rules for high and low season, etc.

Clubman implements a system of Rules based on Triggers and Actions. It allows clubs to reflect arbitrary sets of rules without needing to commission custom modules from the developer as with other systems.

Notbad Software is a one person operation. I've built Clubman over the last 12 months alongside consulting work and my other products. I'm very proud to launch it to all clubs today.

motohagiography• 7 years ago

There is another important aspect to this where it could be valuable to have an identity provider for people who have ski, golf/clublink, family sports, tennis, and business club memberships. Most private clubs have fewer than 2k members, but there is a great deal of affinity between them for services, and a digital channel to the ~1m people in the world who pay for private club memberships could be a play.

Quintessentially, Velocity Black, and Vertu, among others, have tried to crack this market, but I don't know how much traction they managed. When Uber first launched they reached out with a promotion through one of the old business clubs I was a member of. What's different about skiing is it's mainly whole families. I think this is a sleeper exciting play.

Show HN: Clubman – a booking platform for ski clubs

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