Show HN: Squadsure a free tool for volunteer sports committees
squadsure.com
I work on a volunteer football committee and one of the areas where amateur clubs struggle in many cases is assessing the viability of teams.
Each season yes there will absolutely be teams that will get the numbers, but when clubs want to expand their reach (perhaps into new age groups, into new divisions) it can be difficult to easily gauge whether it is worth opening registrations and taking that risk.
Many of the registration tools clubs use do not offer the ability to have an expression of interest product, and instead only offer proper registrations including credit card payments up front so players have to pay to indicate interest. One could argue that means players are definitely interested, but its also a huge barrier to entry especially when its possible that team will not be viable.
This leads to situations where clubs may have to provide refunds and tell players they can't run the team that year. This leads to bad PR and of course nightmare accounting for the volunteer treasurers.
Squadsure closes this gap by offering the ability to post teams you are thinking of running, including the minimum number. It is low friction in that potential players only have to offer a name and email, to be kept up to date as to whether the team can go ahead.
It gives clubs custom pages listing the teams for expression of interest that they can easily share on social sites, emails, whatsapp etc.
Players can also see how close the team is to the goal and admins in the backend can export the data out to easily contact those players once the team becomes viable.
I built this because we had this very problem at our own club and I've seen it reflected in other clubs and sports as well.
It's designed to be easy to use, low friction and save time. Something that volunteer committees crave, because this is not their day job.
Give it a look and let me know what you think. I built this not to become a billionarie or even a millionaire, but to solve what to me seems to be a pretty obvious gap in sports registration software.