A month ago, I posted in three Dublin padel WhatsApp groups asking whether anyone would commit to a proper competitive league. Sixty-something yeses inside forty-eight hours. That was the green light. The league launched a couple of weeks later. We're now at a few hundred active players across eight venues, with more signups than slots most weeks.
Most of what I expected to be hard turned out to be easy. Most of what I expected to be easy is what's eating my evenings.
What I got right
Validating before building. The WhatsApp post was the entire MVP for week one. No platform, no logo, no signup form — just a question and a way to count yeses. By the time I started writing code, the question of whether the demand existed was already settled. I see a lot of founder energy go into building before validating; this is the version that doesn't.
Anchoring on real existing channels. The league lives partly inside the channels people already check — WhatsApp groups they were already in, court bookings they were already making, results they were already discussing. The platform supplements, it doesn't replace. The friction of “another login” would have killed half the engagement.
Picking eight venues, not three. The instinct is to start small and prove it out at one or two clubs. I went the other way — eight venues from day one. The reason: padel in Dublin is geographically fragmented. Players in Tallaght don't drive to Howth, and vice versa. A multi-venue league is the only version that works.
What I got wrong
I underestimated the comms overhead. When you're running a league across eight venues, you become the central nervous system for every weather cancellation, every late substitution, every “is my match tonight or tomorrow?” question. The first two weeks I was personally on every WhatsApp thread. That's not sustainable past month two.
I built the rankings layer first. Should have built the fixture-finder first. Players don't open the app to check their ranking — they open it to find out when and where they're playing next. The ranking is a vanity surface; the fixture-finder is the daily-driver. I shipped them in the wrong order.
I priced too low. The league is intentionally accessible, but I'm now subsidising some operating costs out of pocket. There's a balance between “cheap enough that nobody hesitates” and “sustainable”. I was on the wrong side of it for the first season.
Three things I'd do differently if I started this week
- Build the comms automation from day one. Auto-responders to common questions, a structured way to log cancellations, a digest that goes out Sundays so I don't field individual queries. Even a janky version. Anything beats “Ben replies to 80 messages a day.”
- Charge ~25% more. Same player base would have signed up. The extra runway funds a paid hand-off for the parts of operations I shouldn't be doing personally.
- Ship the fixture-finder before the leaderboard. Lead with the daily-use feature. The aspirational feature can wait.
The shape of month two
The headline isn't the player count. It's that the league has graduated from a project I'm running into a system that mostly runs itself, with a sustainable economics-and-operations spine underneath. Most of my month-two energy goes into the unsexy stuff: the comms automation, a clearer rules document, partner agreements with venues so the relationship survives me forgetting to email them. Boring. Necessary.
The platform side will keep evolving in public. If you're playing in the league and something annoys you, tell me — the things I change fastest are the ones a real player flagged on a Tuesday.