SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
He Turned Pickleball Software into a $3M/yr SaaS
18 Feb 2026
Chapter 1: How did Ben Borton transition from hedge funds to pickleball software?
We are kind of approaching 3 million in contracted ARR. We have a little over 200 locations signed up on the platform. I think we're over 2,000 quarts now.
How do your customers actually make the math work without charging 100 bucks an hour?
The videos and replays functionality, they can be monetized with sponsors. Pickleball is growing like crazy in the US. You know, fastest growing kind of sport by a pretty wide margin. $8 million Series A round led by Frontier Growth, which is kind of an OG investor in the vertical SaaS space.
Are you charging $60 an hour, 70% utilization, so you're doing $100,000 a year in revenue, or what was it? I'm curious how it started.
We look at what is the average revenue per hour used, about $30 per hour across everything.
Before the show, you said, Nathan, one of the ways we've really grown and really leaned into building in public, what does that mean?
Enhancing the in-club playing experience. We do things like digital scoreboards and video replays. There's a viral component to video replays that go social.
Hey folks, my guest today is Ben Borden. He's the co-founder of Podplay Technologies, building at the intersection of sports, technology, and in-real-life experiences. He leads the go-to-market strategy and is focused on transforming clubs and courts into dynamic tech-driven communities. Before that, he worked in fintech, hedge funds, and early-stage investing.
Ben, you ready to take us to the top? Yeah, absolutely. You're way cooler now doing this than the hedge fund days, right? That's why you made the transition, right?
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Chapter 2: What was the initial problem that led to the creation of PodPlay?
I think if your kids can understand it, then you really have kind of a mission that resonates with a lot of people.
Well, before we dive into mission and fund, I have to stay on the money for a second. Did the hedge fund make money? Are you rich? How'd that thing work?
Yeah, I mean, we took it up to several hundred million dollars in assets. So it was definitely a success story.
Very cool. Okay, so what email do you send your LPs? You say we're shutting down to go build ping pong or ping pong in 2019 or what that story look like?
There are a number of stops in between for both Max and I. So that was back in the kind of mid-2000s. We both had multiple stops before getting to sort of PingPod. Prior to joining PingPod, I was running digital fund services at Figure Technologies, which is a big sort of blockchain holding company. I actually recently went public in Q3 of September of 2025. they went public.
It's been a really nice IPO. I was working there with Mike Cagney. How I met Max was being a seed investor in his hedge fund, the one that we just talked about. This was MM Capital, right? MM Capital, yeah. I was running a pool of venture capital seeding startup hedge funds. The first hedge fund I seeded was run by Mike Cagney, who has went on to be the founder and CEO of
Sofi, chairman of Figure Technologies. Mike's one of the kind of only people out there that's done, you know, multiple unicorns. He's a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant person.
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Chapter 3: How did the COVID-19 pandemic impact the launch of PodPlay?
But that kind of early stage of my career when I was seeding startup hedge funds has had a real impact on kind of my future path.
Okay, I have to ask about this. Don't kill me for this, okay? But my research team basically said, you've talked about this publicly, that there was a black swan event at the hedge fund. Was that the point where you said, ah, there could be more to life than managing money all day long? Can you maybe dive into that a bit?
We definitely took a large drawdown, and this was kind of a real learning experience for Max and myself. I think you learn a lot about people when you go through adversity together. Right. The way we came through that, I think we treated our investors incredibly well. We got on planes. We went and kind of like talked to everybody about kind of what happened and everybody was very understanding.
And a lot of those investors kind of made future bets on us as well or kind of gave us another chance because we we behaved very well through kind of a period of adversity.
So that was kind of the biggest, biggest learning from that experience is like, how do people comport themselves in, you know, it's easy to kind of be a good person and kind of comport yourself well when everything's going well. But you really learn things about people when you go through adversity together.
And I think Max and I were sort of, you know, we forged our bond kind of for life during that period of adversity. And it's great to kind of be in the same boat together again.
How did this, where'd you guys come up with the idea for the business? How did it get going?
Yeah, I think the key is you have kept start with PingPod. So the predecessor business was PingPod, which is an operating business. So PingPod is a network of autonomous table tennis clubs. It was founded in 2019 by Max David Silverman and Ernesto Ebwin. I was the first outside investor in that business.
And the problem they were trying to solve, you had basically at that point in New York City, you had kind of one large entertainment destination, had to play ping pong. And then you had kind of basement dojo style clubs and there was really nothing in between. And, you know, the reason for that was you have relatively high rents in New York City of relatively high labor costs.
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Chapter 4: What unique pricing model does PodPlay use for its software?
So that was the idea. Could you take out that front desk type labor, run without kind of on-site labor all the time? If you could do that, you could extend your hours to 24-7, so you're increasing capacity. At the same time, you're reducing kind of your labor overhead. So you're working on kind of both sides of the math equation. And if you could do that, then you could do smaller format clubs.
So that was the vision. Could you build a network of autonomous table tennis clubs spread out around New York? Wherever you are in New York, you should never be too far away from a ping pong. Lots of people grew up playing the game. Nobody can afford to have a ping pong table in their apartment. But would it be great if it was across the street and it was available on demand?
And we put some cool technology in there to elevate the experience. So we built some community around it. So that was that was the vision. Got started in February of 2020. First location, a great time to start a consumer business business. promptly closed our doors along with everything else in March of 2020 in New York City.
But after that initial gut punch, it was turned out to be something that was really great for the business because we were one of the first businesses in New York, non-essential businesses to reopen. We reopened in May of 2020 and, you know, became the business really kind of grew like crazy during that period.
And we were able to do that because we were doing contactless entry, no employees on site, naturally socially distanced activity, and we could track everybody who came through the door.
So Ben, when you say really took off in 2020, that first year, can you share in 2020, what was total revenue?
Yeah, I mean, just from a utilization, we had a single location, but it was utilization was, I think running between 60 and 70% on a 24 hour basis. So if you have a low fixed cost business, that unit was very, very, very, very profitable.
Well, what does that mean though? I mean, if you're, are you charging 60 bucks an hour, 70% utilization, so you're doing a hundred thousand bucks a year in revenue or what was it? I know you maybe feel small now, but I'm curious how it started.
Yeah, pricing is anywhere from $20 to $50 per hour. You have kind of private pods, which are sort of a private space where you have your own space that has kind of one hourly rate. Then you can get a table in a open pod, which is a shared space where there are kind of other people in that space.
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Chapter 5: How does PodPlay drive customer acquisition without a traditional sales team?
you know, I think the best way we look at kind of what is the average revenue per hour used, which is probably kind of the way you're thinking about this. And that in those days was about like $30 per hour across everything. So, you know, there are different ways that you're taking revenue and it's not just a pay to play model.
You've got memberships, you have other sorts of things, but we always looked at it from a kind of the price volume relationship is how many hours do you have available? How many of those hours get used and how much do you get paid per hour during that?
In 2020, then with that one location, 30 per hour, 18 hour days would be about 70% utilization is about 540 per day. And if we take that 360 days a year, so five days off, that'd be like 150 to $200,000 of revenue from that one location that year. Is that about right? Something like that? It was in the hundreds of thousands. Guys, remember, I am not just a YouTuber.
I'm investing in my third fund. We've deployed $250 million into 550 software companies so far. Again, at founderpath.com. If you're interested in capital, I would love to cut you a check because I know you're investing in your education. You watch my show. So sign up at founderpath.com. And when you get the onboarding email, I reply and I see all those.
Just reply and say, Nathan, I found you through YouTube and I'll make sure to prioritize you. I would love to cut you a check. Check out founderpath.com. Okay, so it was fairly good. So you guys are on to something. And you're saying the big win here is because rents in New York are so expensive, you had to figure out a way to not have like labor, for example.
So this ping pong I'm looking at here in the Lower East Side, is there any full-time employee running this location or it's all contactless entry? No full-time employee, no. Interesting. Okay, well, let's talk about growth. Before the show, you said, Nathan, one of the ways we've really grown, we've really leaned into building in public.
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Chapter 6: What challenges did PodPlay face in raising capital for growth?
What does that mean?
So let's talk about the transition from kind of ping pod to to pod play. Right. So ping pod was the predecessor business. That business now has 20 plus locations. So it's been successful. It's franchising. Our ambition was always to build a technology platform that would not just serve ping pod, that would serve customers. other like-minded kind of venue operators.
And we saw a gap in the market for sort of modern club management solutions. You want a modern, mobile-first, really good user experience. And then combining kind of hardware and software. So enhancing the kind of in-club playing experience. We do things like digital scoreboards and video replays. There's a viral component to kind of the video replays that goes social.
Oh, this is cool, Ben. This is like super cool. You feel like a superstar playing in one of these things.
Yeah, I mean, the idea is to have your own kind of like personal sports center moment and make that as easy as possible. So part of the secret here is like, can you get rid of the friction? And in order to get rid of that friction, you need to do the club management sort of reservation management and the video capture. So hardware and software.
Most of the rest of the market, you have kind of club management tools and then you have video capture tools that are point solutions. And that just creates more friction for getting to those videos, whether you're scanning a QR code, you have to have separate login, things like that. So really kind of the magic in this is combining hardware software in a single kind of full stack solution.
So we got to that point in the summer of 2023. So you can think of this a little bit like the Amazon model where you build really good infrastructure for yourself and then you license it to others.
So Ben, sorry, just to be clear, when did you write your first line of code for Podplay that we're looking at on the screen? And then what year was your first paying customer for Podplay?
Yeah, so first line of code was this technology was originally written for PinkPod, right?
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Chapter 7: How does PodPlay integrate software and hardware to enhance user experience?
So the software, the hardware, the whole package that we were putting together was the technology that powered PinkPod, right? So first line of code is in 2019. First outside customers we took in in the summer of 2023. Um, that was when we formed Podplay as a wholly owned subsidiary.
Um, you know, we put the whole tech team in there and myself on the, on the business side, uh, tech team is led by a guy named Elliot Rifkin, who's one of, one of our co-founders. He's an amazing guy comes from kind of a, a background in the fit tech world. Uh, he spent the bulk of his career at a digital agency called RGA.
Um, his big projects there were the Equinox mobile booking app and the Nike plus running app. So he's built really large scaled kind of global consumer facing apps. And about 90% of our tech team has ties to those two projects.
So our hiring strategy has been to kind of go pick off all the best engineers, product managers and designers that Ilya worked with in the past and kind of reassembled them as a dream team. So, yeah, in 2023, we launched PodPlay as a wholly owned subsidiary to license the whole tech stack that we built to power PinkPod to other like-minded operators. And the real catalyst for that was Pickleball.
Pickleball was growing like crazy in the U.S., you know, fastest growing kind of company. sport by a pretty wide margin. And people had seen what we'd done in table tennis. They loved the kind of the experience, the UX, the software, how we were combining software and hardware. And they basically said, could you please do this in pickleball? And so we obliged.
We had some great launch partners in that space, including City Pickle. They run the iconic pickleball at Central Park.
In New York City. So, Ben, sorry, what does a launch partner mean? What does that mean? Like, are they one of your first customers and are you charging them by number of course or number of people or how do you bill? A lighthouse client.
We are charging on kind of a per court basis. That's the kind of primary primary model. We have different tiers of the offering. They have kind of a software-only offering. You have software plus hardware.
And then a subset of our clients are doing autonomous mode, which also includes, you know, is doing the full PinkPod model, which includes door access, includes security cameras, includes monitoring by Team of the Philippines. So that's kind of a different tier of the offering. But all of these are priced on a kind of per-quart basis, roughly.
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Chapter 8: What advice does Ben Borton have for founders looking to enter the pickleball market?
Again, there's a range. The software only clients are kind of, you know, generally in the sort of call it two to six range. And then some of the kind of hardware enabled clients, which is, let's say it's 60% plus are in the hardware enabled tiers. For us, those ACBs tend to be a bit higher.
So just to repeat all that back to you. So when you say 200 locations on your platform, how many quarts does that equate to? Is that average of five quarts per location? So a thousand quarts?
No, I mean, average is trending up closer to 10 per location. And so I think we're over 2000 quarts now.
Interesting. OK, this is really interesting growth. So you're at about three million bucks of ARR this year, which means you're finishing here in December at somewhere between somewhere around two hundred forty thousand dollars a month of revenue. Right. Is that what you mean when you say contracted ARR?
Now, if you're a software client, on average, it takes kind of one to two months from from kind of signing to going live for the hardware enabled clubs. We have a longer lead time. Both because it's kind of a more involved process and because we have a backlog on that side. So I'd say the average on that side is somewhere between four and six months.
So there's a little bit of a lag between those two.
OK, that's right. And three million have contracted to AR today. What does that represent in terms of growth rate from a year prior? Triple digits.
So, yeah, we put it, peg it between 100 and 200. Yes, more than 100 percent, less than 200 percent.
That's awesome. Okay, I have to go back to how you fund the business because I think you guys did a 10 million Series A in 2022, which would have been right before you launched the software. So are both of these companies under the same thing and you sort of raised money with the legacy business but are sort of using it to invest in the software business?
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