SaaS in India: Building Rembo

The Story

22nd March, I was at the entrance gate of a public swimming pool and didn't know that my membership had expired but that session went completely normal without anyone noticing this fact.

Just to be fair, I contacted the operator and told them the whole case.

The Problem

Here comes the chaos. For nine different players with different issues, inquiries, registrations and form fill-ups, there was only one operator managing everyone's admin work.

The operators were also answering the inquiry requests and "bookings" made by the players through WhatsApp.

Answering calls and messages in early morning about slots and booking details is a serious mess, and booking for the player itself is not confirmed for large-scale operations.

The Vision

The businesses owning and operating these turfs have to hire separate people to manage only the admin work, for each court.

The precious time and money that they could have spent fixing physical issues, maintenance and scaling their business is wasted right here on the admin/ops work.

Brainstorming

I found that big teams such as Playo and Hudle have already built a solution for this problem but they focussed only on amateur players, who book only one or two slots, and missed out on the offers, schemes, and long-lasting bookings.

Soon, I started planning and brainstorming an idea that would solve this admin work for continuous inquiries, long-lasting bookings, offers, exclusivity of offers, and announcements.

The Plan

The final solution — which I'll be iterating on for the next two months — will be a SaaS management application for the operators and a mobile app for the players.

The SaaS web application for the operators will allow operators to register their courts under one organisation and one operator.

This application will be equipped with the functionalities listed below:

• Initial organisation setup under one operator, with its important details.
• Register courts/turfs under this organisation (or a business) name, with information about the court/turf.
• The dashboard will provide, at a glance, newer unverified bookings, revenue data and expiring bookings.
• Each court/turf registered will have its own separate management screen with information about the court/turf.
• And some interactive features required for basic functionality:
  • New offers (with/without exclusive sessions)
  • Push announcements (with/without selecting dates)
  • Verifying a booking
  • Updating an issue's status
• Data export: one click to export the entire organisation's data into a single Excel sheet.

The players' mobile app will contain their booking information and other essential stuff.

But the most-used feature is going to be the QR Code

A QR code can be generated for each court/turf with some essential information. The sizing is intentionally A4 ruled, for printing and display.

If a player has an active booking on that court, they can easily check in and mark their attendance. If not, they can either inspect that court/turf or create a booking.

This feature kills the on-gate check-in/attendance mess and helps the operator track and authorise players visiting. It also makes the process of registering or booking a slot not just easy but assured too.

Current Stage

We can't open the sign-up gates yet because the platform is still in BETA and currently misses the right infrastructure for scale.

So we're contacting operators manually and onboarding in small batches.

Help Us Out

If you're from a court/turf organisation or business and willing to spend more time growing and less on admin work, you can request an invite right now — and visit the website for more information.

If you're a player, then you definitely know the pain of un-assured court/turf "reservations" and inefficient check-ins. Message us with the details of your favourite court/turf and we'll connect soon.