YourPadelMate

The smartest way to play padel. For clubs & players

Sports

Tech

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Hey Product Hunt YourPadelMate is the thing I've been building on nights and weekends for the past year, and I'm genuinely nervous and excited to finally put it in front of you. What inspired this A club owner told me he spends his Sunday nights building tournament brackets in Excel. That sentence stuck with me. Here's someone who opened a padel club because he loves the sport, spending his one day off manually seeding players, recalculating when someone drops out, and copy-pasting results into a WhatsApp group nobody reads. Padel is now a €6 billion industry with 24,000+ clubs worldwide. The sport grew faster than the tools to run it. Most clubs are still operating on WhatsApp groups, paper notebooks, and spreadsheets and the average owner is a coach who accidentally became the receptionist, accountant, and IT admin. I wanted to give that owner his Sunday back. The problem I was actually trying to solve I started out thinking the problem was booking. It isn't. Booking software already exists, and plenty of it. The real problem is retention. A club signs up 50 members in month one and quietly loses half by the end of the season. Nobody's tracking why. And because padel is seasonal and event-driven, that churn is brutal and mostly invisible until it's too late. So YourPadelMate is built around the idea that padel isn't really a racket sport — it's a social network with a ball. Nobody falls in love with padel. They fall in love with their padel group. If the software helps a club turn strangers into a group, the bookings take care of themselves. That's why the core is: Tournament management (Americano, ladders, team formats) with auto-seeding and live standings players follow on their phones. A real ELO ranking engine and actual match-based ratings that make pairing fair and give players a number worth chasing. How my approach evolved Three things changed while building this: 1. I stopped building features and started removing Sunday-night Excel. Early on I had a roadmap full of good ideas. Most of them were good ideas that nobody asked for. The hardest skill in solo building isn't coding — it's saying no, because every feature you add is a feature you maintain forever. 2. I realized I was designing two products at once. The owner buys it. The players and coaches use it. If either group hates it, you're out. That reframe changed a lot of my UI decisions — the admin side optimizes for speed and control, the player side optimizes for "my friend sent me a link and I get it in five seconds." 3. I learned that a fast market doesn't mean fast adoption. Padel is exploding, but club owners are busy people who adopt tools slowly and carefully. The wave is real, but it doesn't carry you — it just means you drown faster if you build the wrong thing. That taught me to talk to owners a lot more and code a lot less, which was uncomfortable but necessary. What I'd love from you If you run a club, coach, or play: I'd genuinely love to hear what outsiders always get wrong about running a padel club. I've talked to a lot of owners, but I know I'm still missing things that only show up when you're there every day. And if you're a fellow solo builder — happy to answer anything about the stack, how I handled going native on both platforms alone. I'll be here all day. Thank you for taking a look 🎾