Our ping pong startup hit a $50M valuation in 5 years by tapping into automation | Hacker News Reader

Our ping pong startup hit a $50M valuation in 5 years by tapping into automation

fortune.com

51 pointstomwiddles42 comments

While I think these venues are cool, they’re inherently VERY limited in maximum possible scale. They’re more of a competitor to bars like SPIN, rather than traditional table tennis venues - kinda like how Top Golf isn’t really trying to steal business from the local driving range.

As a tourist, I walked by North Station location in Boston, saw the price - $50/hr at any time I’d want to play - and noped out hard. Decided to spend the money on an Uber to Boston Table Tennis Club instead, and played for three hours with good coaching (shoutout to Coach Vincent for the warm welcome) and fun pickup games. Cost half the price in total, and I didn’t have to hunt for a decent partner either.

Economically, Pingpod will just never be a viable option compared to old school clubs, even if they slash their prices to a tenth of what they are now. Forever a novelty/tourist gimmick.

jesus, $50 for a single hour? It's not like we're talking about a batting cage with pitching machines, custom equipment, etc.

There were tons of ping pong tables available at any university in Taipei that were effectively open to the public to play whenever I wanted.

EDIT: Just out of curiosity I looked up the rental costs for full blown tennis courts in my area. They range from $15-30 per hour.

You inspired me to check, and I’m paying $50 per month for my home club. We have monthly member appreciation nights to burn off excess budget where they order a bunch of expensive pizza for everyone.

Boston TTC is a great club despite its small size and low-ish ceilings.

Some very high level players there (lots of Asian students from MIT, Harvard, etc. who, having grown up playing, absolutely rip :))

Westchester club is a much better facility if you're in the NYC area.

I'm in San Diego now, I pay $50/year at my club, lol, $50/hour, ridiculous.

Claims of automation really fall apart for me when they rely on outsourcing. Even setting aside ethical considerations, this business relies on there being a stable source of cheap labor. Moving that labor to remote monitoring and presumably some kind of local intervention skeleton crew for when they report something may be more in line with the experience customers want than a gym that is perceptibly staffed, but automation is a strong word for that

I wonder how well some type of skeleton crew will work on long term. If you are paying premium price you want issues fixed now, not for the next visit. And if someone over worked have to run from site to site all around the city it can't be too fast to get stuff worked. And even if you cancel pre-emptively reservations people will only take that so many times...

What can go wrong with a table tennis business that would require urgent onsite intervention?

Break a bat, table or net? - just move to another bay.

Video replay not working even after remote intervention? Give the customer a credit.

Customer flips out after hitting their third backhand into a net, holds their bat to another player's neck while frothing at the mouth? Call the security firm.

Breaking table or net. How many bays there are? What is the utilization of those at popular times? Someone remote confirms this. Orders repair. Is repair person available or fixing things somewhere else?

We're in the cloud golf simulation space (sounds like these guys dabble in golf too) and this has a few really interesting angles.

- remote video monitoring from the Philippines. Great way to economically monitor customer behavior.

- built in tech for capturing replays and sharing to social. Awesome and really scratches the sharing itch.

In golf some extra challenges are:

- safety - a golf ball at 160mph is far more dangerous than a ping ping ball, literally life threatening.

- cleanliness - you don't want people hitting balls into your shiny impact screen using their filthy mud covered clubs. Need some way to monitor people's clubs at check in time. Could again be the Philippines crew. Or make them use the in-house clubs - more capital outlay and ongoing expense

- need a gaming computer and sim licence installed on it. Expensive to have sitting idle between customers

https://archive.is/8O3Us

Feels like a mini WeWork in the making. They should keep it small if the actually want to be a viable business.

Yeah, so much of this is really cool!

Then you get to the "we raised $X and have $Y valuation" and the tech company framing. Why?

>Today the majority of Americans prioritize experiences over goods and products.

The linked article is a survey of Gen Z; how is that the majority of America?

Gen Z is the current generation that spends money on leisure activities.

The golf, crafting, gardening, hunting, etc industries would question that framing.

Gen Z should be renamed to Gen YOLO

YOLO is a millenial thing.

No chance they spend the most on leisure activities. Definitely it's baby boomers.

Probably more X's in their 40s and 50s, as they have the kids leaving home and now have time on their hands, but are still in their prime earning years.

I don't see the connection at all. If anything, they can easily branch out into games that share some characteristics, such as: Few players on the field, no referee, small field, physical exertion etc. I think of badminton or squash.

They already have the tech for reserverations, operating insights and the cool replay feature.

I wouldn't really consider this automation. Just because a company uses software doesnt mean it's automation.

This is the same way self storage operators run their business. No one would call that automation. It's called self service.

But I guess that wouldn't drive valuation.

File under: Things that can exist in a big enough city.

Yeah, many such ideas only work once you're past a certain number of people, given e.g. the fraction of people who play ping pong, you need a lot of people to reach the point where it's viable as a business. Cutting costs on the other side as described in this article is a great way to bring that threshold down though.

Eh rent is cheaper in smaller cities, and more space is available for hosting multiple activities in one location.

This is always a strange comment because most people live in big cities…

I don't understand. Either you have one person on site or one person monitoring video with your expensive "no one on site" tech. I'm skeptical that this would save anyone money. I suppose the labor for the monitoring is dirt cheap and maybe one person can monitor multiple sites? And I suppose no real employees means no HR, etc..

So, you do understand, since you explained it yourself.

Your minor error is thinking that surveillance tech is expensive in 2020 onward.

One person monitoring in the US: $30/hour

One person monitoring in the Philippines: $2/hour

$2 per hour and monitoring 20 screens simultaneously.

> In March 2022, we received $10 million in VC funding [for facilitiy rental business]

> In 6 years I’ve bootstrapped my moving company to $100M in revenue. Avoiding VC funding has been key. [Link is to an article by a different author.]

Also, it's cute that they use the term "outsourcing" instead of "offshoring" for the Philippines-based monitoring.

TTAAS (table tennis as a service)

This reads like a pre-COVID startup story and I find that refreshing despite the slight Silicon Valley (the show) vibes.

So much cynicism here but if they have solid YoY growth and $3.6 million in real revenue then $50 million valuation (I assume post money and probably with some guarantees) isn’t totally crazy

There's barely any cynicism in the comments, what are you seeing?

Will be in NYC soon, and will definitely check out the table tennis, just not clear how to find a partner since I'm at the 2,000 point level.

I suspect you could still find someone via the Pingpod slack, but another option would be to book a coach and play with them - they have multiple former olympians

There's a pingpod place near where I live. It's a cool little spot, and I applaud the founder for taking a unique approach.

Well done, PingPod!

This is one way to make use of the excess of unused office space.

Cool gonna rent one right now and use it as a meth lab!

> Third, the PodPlay system includes a dedicated video-monitoring team based in the Philippines. The team in Manila constantly keeps eyes on all PodPlay autonomous locations and alerts local team members when necessary.

Ping pong-opticon is watching

They automated away all the manual labor though.

They didn't automate it away, they did the same old practice of hiding it in sweatshops.

Should have put a /s on my comment

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