HN user
One of the reasons, at least here in the UK, is that for a long time you only got so many SMS messages in your phone contract. MMS was also awful for a long time. WhatsApp solved both those problems, and most importantly was on every device possible.
In general the discovery is mostly for the people looking for a club, rather than the club themselves. I believe there's also huge space for creating new clubs. (e.g. 10 people in a town search for a Netball team but it doesn't exist. Perfect chance to self organise). From the research I've done, tennis tends to be an outlier because the physical clubs tend to be quite large, well known, and have something for everyone. As opposed to football or netball where you just play in a park in an evening and you have no idea of the ability level until you show up.
I completely agree communications is going to be tough. I really don't want to build yet another chat app. There just aren't any drop in solutions though. Especially not with group messaging. The question has to be what your messaging for. If it's just notification messages, that can be solved with e-mail/sms/whatsapp.
Anyway, thanks for your feedback!
I've actually just launched the MVP for a sports club discovery website in the UK. The long term goal is to fix a lot of these issues you have with managing a club as well. You can see more details in my profile, and it would be great to chat about the problems you face. DM if you're interested
I’m a big fan of this concept. I’m always coming up with ideas, or more importantly problems I think tech could solve (or solve better). Some of them I might work on myself but most of them I know I’ll never touch them for a multitude reasons like lacking the technical expertise or not knowing the right people to talk to. I’d happily put these online for someone else to solve. In the end it would still be solving my initial problem.
As far as I can tell, nothing like this really exists. A quick search gives r/startup_ideas and a few other low traffic forums.
I think structuring it around the fundamental problem, rather than the solution would provide a nice space for lots of solutions to flourish.
Users could easily like problems that they also have, giving a nice ranking of the ‘most important’ problems, and which would provide a ready list of people to present an MVP to, get feedback from, and you may even find a cofounder amongst them.
Currently working on an app for organising amateur sports clubs and teams.
Still early in development but hoping to get the basic function in a beta soon.