ClubShed
Equipment tracking for grassroots football clubs.
I'm a co-founder of HVV Football Factory, a grassroots football club originally based in The Hague. Three years in, we kept running into the same problem nobody really talks about: equipment disappearing.
Every season we'd lose around €1,000 of gear. Footballs forgotten in coaches' car boots. Bibs taken home "to wash" and not seen again. Cones vanishing from training sessions. Goalkeeper gloves walking off. Jerseys kept by players who left the club mid-season and never returned them.
It wasn't theft. It was just entropy. Volunteers, kids, parents, three different coaches per team, no system, no audit trail. Stuff drifts. By March every year, half the kit cupboard had become archaeology.
We tried fixing it the obvious ways:
- A WhatsApp group for the coaches. Worked for about three weeks.
- A shared Google Sheet. Worked until people stopped updating it.
- Spond's equipment feature. Great app for fixtures and parent communication. Terrible for equipment, because it's an afterthought bolted onto the real product. No QR codes, no condition tracking, nothing built for the actual moment in the kit cupboard.
- Pen and paper. Beat all the digital tools until the paper got wet.
The thing none of these tools got right is the actual environment a kit man works in. It's a parent, alone in a dim storage room, holding a phone in one hand and a mesh bag of 18 footballs in the other, trying to mark what just got handed back. They need to scan, not type. They need photos, not item codes. They need a one-click report at the end of the season for grant applications, not a pivot table they have to build from scratch.
So I built ClubShed (clubshed.pro). An equipment tracker built specifically for that moment.
Honest status update before this turns into a pitch:
- Marketing site live, app live, payments working, kit-specific tracking (jerseys, shorts, socks with numbers and sizes) shipped last week.
- Zero users so far.
- About to start outreach to other grassroots clubs for first users this month.
The hardest part isn't building. Its distribution. The audience here is grassroots football volunteers, not tech Twitter. They're on Facebook groups, Reddit r/grassrootsfootball, and county FA newsletters.
A few things I'm actively trying to figure out:
1. Whether the free tier (1 team, 30 items, 3 coaches) is too tight or too generous. €15.99/month for unlimited. Picked the price after looking at Spond (free), Pitchero (£6.49/month), and a few others. No idea yet if it's right.
2. Whether to stay narrow (just equipment, just football) or eventually expand. The all-in-one tools dominate by doing everything mediocre. I'm betting on doing one thing properly. Reversible if I'm wrong, but the focus discipline is hard to maintain when every potential user asks, "Do you also do X?"
3. How to find the first 10 users when your audience doesn't read IH or use Product Hunt. Cold emailing club secretaries from county FA websites is on the list. Reddit posts are on the list. So is just visiting clubs in person where I live. Nothing about this is scalable; it's just real work.
If you've built a narrow vertical SaaS targeting a non-tech audience, I'd genuinely love to hear how you got your first 10 users. Especially anyone who targets volunteers, parents, or community organisations. The distribution playbook is the part I'm least sure about, and the part where IH has the most useful collective experience.
1 Comment
This is a strong vertical because the pain is boring but very real. €1,000 of missing equipment per season is easier to understand than another generic “club management” pitch.
I’d be careful not to lead with “equipment tracker” too broadly though. The sharper buyer promise is probably closer to:
“Stop losing kit every season without forcing volunteers to maintain another spreadsheet.”
That speaks to the real moment you described: parent volunteer, kit cupboard, phone in one hand, no patience for admin.
For the first 10 users, I would not start with broad SaaS distribution. I’d treat it like a local pilot sale: club secretary, kit manager, youth coordinator, or treasurer. The pitch should be about preventing next season’s kit loss and making end-of-season reporting easier, not “try our app.”
The free tier question also depends on the pilot goal. If 30 items is too small to feel useful for one real team, it may block the first “aha” moment.
Happy to put the tighter version in writing if useful. I’d map the first 10-club acquisition plan, outreach message, free-tier/pricing test, and the cleanest pilot offer for ClubShed.