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.
And it was easy to set up. No need for accounts and email addresses. The fact that your phone number served as id and login meant that even my tech-illiterate mother was able to use it.
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
Honestly I don't see discovery as the issue, at least for us. The waiting list for tennis clubs in London is... another tennis club. (Seriously, we have 500 members and ~500 people waiting. It's the same people on all the other clubs lists.)
There are problems with a club comms app that, to my knowledge, haven't been solved:
Many sports club members don't have smartphones, and don't like smartphones if they have them. You ask these people for contact details and they point you to the Yellow Pages. Most of these people are just social players, but some are in teams. You cannot win a technology argument with them, but your communication system needs to reliably reach them.
Even people who are comfortable with tech will have a 'yet another app' problem. I would. You need to give me a reason to install an app. I don't want your app because its another place I need to look to see messages, and it's yet more notifications that I might miss. Other people have different reasons. To get over my problem, and everyone elses, your offering needs to be rock solid.
All that said, I still think there's space if well executed and integrated with the rest of the club. For example, it should automatically create a channel for people in a box league. It should be integrated with the booking system, and lights (seriously, turning lights on from the phone would be killer). You should have an account balance, which is used for bookings, lights, and the bar.
If you can do all that, then you have something that doesn't yet exist. You've also achieved everything I could do in a few days with a discord bot and some python scripts.
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.
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.
Agreed, the focus should definitely be on exploration rather than promotion. Although I feel like allowing some level of promotion while still shaping the thing being built would attract more ambitious projects which might help give the platform a better reputation for collaboration-seeking.
Maybe allow a mix of both? Like, people can open a thread starting from a pure problem and throw in some ideas for solutions. Or start with an idea and, as part of it, describe the problem. Let people filter if they only wanna see one type. And of course people can always link threads.
