ZenSports To Expand Into All Sports; Go Beyond Leagues/Tournaments
It’s been a busy 6+ weeks since we originally launched ZenSports as a marketplace for for pool/billiard leagues and tournaments on February 15th. In that time, we’ve grown to over 1,000 players, we’ve processed more than $15,000 in entry fees for leagues/tournaments, and we’ve created lots of delight among players and directors that have used our product. And that’s just here in the Bay area.
We started out specifically with pool/billiards as the main focal point of ZenSports when we launched so that we could get our product in the hands of as many players and league/tournament directors as quickly as possible. Like any technology startup, the key to future success is getting early user feedback, testing, iterating, and improving on the product experience.
During the first 6 weeks, we found that the biggest value that we were creating was on the player side. Players absolutely loved being able to easily discover, register, and pay for tournaments with a couple taps of a button on their phone.
Additionally, we received tons of requests from players to be able to find other individual players and teams to play with (not just leagues/tournaments), to be able to live stream their matches, and to expand into other sports beyond just pool/billiards. This feedback has validated our hypothesis that there’s a big opportunity to bring the world of amateur sports from the offline world into a more online, mobile experience.
In order to meet these feature requests and our goal of getting hundreds of millions of amateur sports players across the world onto our platform, we have 3 major product initiatives over the next 2 months:
1) Expand into all sports. Bowling, tennis, softball, basketball, soccer, etc. They’re all coming.
2) Instead of continuing to build a marketplace for players and directors of leagues and tournaments to come together, we’re going to focus 100% on the player experience, allowing players to find other players, teams, and groups to compete with. Our league and tournament functionality will still exist so that players can create more organized competition. But players will also be able to compete more informally through practice matches, pickup games, casual one-on-one or doubles matches, coaching lessons, etc.
3) Build out all of the social tools that players expect. This includes giving players the ability to video and live stream their competitions, find and follow other players in their area, bring their network of friends in to create teams/groups, instant message other players, receive push notifications, etc.
Starting this week, we’re going to begin releasing these new features on a rolling basis for the next 10 weeks. Because some features are dependent on others, there may be times where you won’t see us release any new features for two, three, or even four weeks. We may also release on a Thursday instead of our typical Tuesday releases if, for example, we find a bug that would hamper the existing product experience. In other words, expect our new feature releases to be a bit erratic from now until mid-June. But we’ll always keep you up-to-date with what we do release on our Product Updates page, so if you’re not currently subscribed to those, please do so.
The ZenSports team is super stoked to be bringing you these awesome new features over the next couple of months. We’re confident that these are the features you’ve been craving for, and will make ZenSports your go-to app for any and all things sports-related that you do. As always, feel free to chat with us or leave comments below if you have any questions on these changes.
