Management software for climbing gyms and health facilities.
I built SportKeeper as a way to offer gym owners a simple, lightweight, and modern approach to managing climbing gyms.
SportKeeper is a climbing gym management platform, but it can be used for things like skate parks and martial arts gyms as well. I built the software because there’s just one single platform that all climbing gyms use. They are a PC based software, and requires gym owners to manually bill their memberships on the 1st of every month!
I sat and watched the process and realized that SportKeeper could definitely be the next big thing.
This is an amazing opportunity for someone to jump on, and the only reason I'm selling it is a lack of bandwidth.
I’m the sole developer behind CG Cookie, and for the last two years we’ve been building Mavenseed. In order to really make SportKeeper take off, it’s going to take more time than I can give it.
SportKeeper has had a number of clients, but that number is currently sitting at 0. The last gym used SportKeeper to run their gym for several months, but ultimately left without giving a reason as to why (just recently, a few weeks ago). This was after spending many months building features that they asked for.
This also included the initial passes with building the migration tools to migrate gyms from the other platform to SportKeeper. All of the pieces are included and ready, it just takes the right person to come along and make it shine.
SportKeeper is an all in one membership platform that runs on Stripe, and even features a POS interface that works directly with Stripe Terminal. We had gyms actively using this for many months before they eventually left.
The application is production ready, and has been running for a couple of years with no big issues.
I’ve got contacts with the CWA (Climbing Wall Association) which holds the CWA summit yearly. I also have contacts at Climbing Business Journal where you can work with them to advertise. I did put out an article there a long time ago, and from that had nearly 30 gyms who were interested! But this was in the early days of SportKeeper, and at this point it’s vastly matured.
If you position this correctly and get into the hands of gym owners, you have a very good chance of taking over the market.
This sale includes everything related to the business including the domain name, documentation, and the entire Rails App, which will be transferred as soon as the sale is finalized.
If you’re interested please reach out nphaskins at gmail dot com. I’m also happy to answer any questions, and will be available for 30 days past the sale for any help or guidance.
It's been months 8 months since my last update here. In the span of time the first subscriber canceled. No indication as to why, even after prodding.
But you just move on.
Unlike most indie-hackers, I am no rush to become rich off of this project, or hope for it to be my single source of full-time income. I am very happy and well taken care of at my current employer and have no desire, nor reason to leave.
That allows SportKeeper to grow organically. It's either going to make it, or it doesn't. But for now, it's back to hussling.
We're back to one subscriber. It's a new gym opening soon, and they seem really set on using SportKeeper as their platform (they've even ordered the card reader from Stripe).
I'm also talking to a couple different gyms. Maybe they come on board. Maybe they don't. One of these leads is pretty well connected, and very interested in seeing SK succeed, and is offering to help in a couple different areas.
So, I'm still here, with some tricks still left up my sleeve.
The last couple of months has just flown by with nothing really to show for, sans a few bug fixes and security updates. Then a few days ago, we had our first subscriber, a new climbing gym opening up in CO.
My goal for now is to just keep them happy, doing whatever it takes to ensure that they are successful.
Five gyms are currently testing SportKeeper. Each week I continue to get 1-2 interested in joining the private beta. Progress has been slow, but that's more than O.K.
This is a B2B SaaS offering, and a side project at that. Incremental progress is what matters here.
Just keep shipping.
Last week I opened up private beta to a couple of gyms. Currently a gym in Chile, the US, and Australia are giving the software a good run through. I've only seen a couple errors come through and I've patched those just as fast as they popped up.
Crazy.We have gyms running in a beta less than four months after conceptualization of the idea.
As for making money, I'm not worried about that right now. All of these gyms know our pricing, and after the kinks are worked out I'm sure they'll convert.
In the last week I've also published our pricing, and our commitment to give back 10% of revenue in order to make the world a better place.
https://sport-keeper.com/giving-back
Making the last few tweaks before sending out beta invitations on Friday. There are clients that are just waiting on me to launch this. I've been an engineer this for almost a decade, and despite that, TBH...it's terrifying to release this.
Here goes nothing!
I worked all day last Friday, Saturday, and half of Sunday to get the system ready to take live transactions in one week.
A large portion of that work was centered around changing plans. Sounds simple, and with previous versions of Stripes API it was simple, but with the way things are setup now, it's infinitely more complex.
Subscriptions have multiple subscription items. We're using this in the form of memberships, with membership addons. So think a family plan, with an add-on plan for children, with a quantity.
It resulted in a pretty slick UI that works really well for changing plans. https://cl.ly/e5ce57d9229b
Other than that, I'm reworking how a gyms events are displayed. My original approach had an "events site", and I figured this could serve as the gyms actual website, adding options for adding pages and such. But in reality, we're loosing focus.
I've shifted and am now going to build embeddable JS widgets (think Calendly).
Until next week!
Slowly but surely more gyms are contacting us about SportKeeper. I gave a demo last week to a gym in Australia. Today I'll be talking to a gym in Chile. I've gotten a ton of great feedback which has resulted in a few new features:
I've got several gyms that are ready to sign up, but I'm going to take two more weeks to finalize some things before opening up our private beta.
Stripe has also emailed me to let me know that they can start pushing some of our clients Terminal readers into production, so it's pretty much down to waiting on me now.
In other news, I had the CEO of a competitor email me and they didn't seem to happy with the marketing copy on our website. They're convinced we're talking about his company (even though it's not mentioned on marketing pages) and wanted me to CHANGE THE COPY on our site! The truth? 95% of the home page of the site was a result of reading 400 reviews of Mindbody on Capterra. Notice the bold text on the home page. Those are all highlighting weak points that users noticed about Mindbody. The home page was meticulously hand-crafted to appeal to those users.
At any rate, it adds some fuel to the fire and inspires me to keep going.
Last but not least, I've decided that we're going to donate 10% of our profits to help make the world a better place. That will be forever. I'm calling it Giving Startups. https://givingstartups.com I truly think that as entrepreneurs we have the power to change the world through our startups.
I'm going to start doing weekly progress reports which will include the latest ship logs. Bare with me, just trying to lock into a good cadence with updates here on IH.
A lot has happened this week. On Monday an article that I wrote went out on a newsletter that caters to gym owners. And no it wasn't free, I paid $250 for this. Marketing dollars left...0. LOL
The response has been amazing. The overall response is positive, and I've gotten a lot of great feedback, including feedback from a live demo that I did yesterday for a potential client on the other side of the world.
As of now I have several gyms ready to signup. Before that happens, I have a number of things to complete:
...and probably more that I'm missing.
I built SportKeeper as a way to offer gym owners a simple, lightweight, and modern approach to managing climbing gyms.