The Founder Journey

This was one of those weeks where a lot of small green lights turned on at once.

DUPR is now production-live. Not test credentials, not a sandbox handshake, the real thing. I reconnected my own DUPR account through the app this week and watched the token exchange actually work. That sounds small until you remember every rating, every match result, every bit of player history we want to carry across has to pass through that handshake cleanly. It did.

Push notifications shipped end to end. Booking confirmations now hit a real phone, not just an inbox. We built the infrastructure, scheduled the cron, added the admin test rig, and proved it on a device. For the first time the app feels like it talks back to you.

The Organise suite went live too. Fixtures, Round Robins, Leagues and Box Leagues, Ladders. Four ways for coaches and venues to run their own programming without us standing in the middle charging a toll. It is free to organise. That was the point from day one: make the court the product, not the paperwork around it.

We also fixed a stupid mobile sign-in gap. The menu had a big JOIN FREE button but no obvious way back in for existing players. Now there is a SIGN IN link right next to it. Small fix, big difference. You should not need to memorise a URL just to get back to your account.

iOS Build 5 is up on TestFlight and our first outside testers are on it. Still pre-launch, still rough in places, but real people on real phones is a different kind of feedback to anything you get in a browser.

All of this feeds into September. The Pickleball England Activator Certification is still the anchor I am training towards. Every booking that flows, every match that confirms, every notification that lands is practice for the moment I am standing in front of beginners trying to get them hooked on the sport. The app has to work by then. This week it got a lot closer.

Turns out the pre-order model already had a home.

I sent Tisdell Pickleball a message a few weeks back. They're a US paddle brand, born out of the American pickleball scene where the sport is already everywhere. No pitch deck, no big ask, just an honest note about what we're building over here and why a partnership made sense for both sides.

Keenan got back to me. We talked it through and he agreed to be our first brand partner. He's shipping the EverSpin Roses paddle across the Atlantic so I can put it through a proper on-court review ahead of the Pickleball England Activator Certification in September.

We announced it yesterday. Within the hour Keenan had added the post to his own story and put a pre-order link in his bio pointing his audience straight at us. A US brand sending its UK players our way. That's not something I asked for twice, he just did it.

Same pattern as the DUPR message. Small, honest, direct, and it moves faster than anything I could plan for. The review goes up properly once the paddle's had real court time.

Turns out the right partner just says yes.

Turns out portable ratings matter to more than just us.

I sent a message to DUPR last week half expecting nothing back. Cold outreach to a company that size usually goes nowhere. Their founder Tito replied within the hour.

Here's why it matters. DUPR is the rating system most pickleball players already use to track their level, win or lose, match by match. Right now that rating lives in DUPR's world, separate from wherever you actually book and play. If PLINKY PLONK connects to it properly, your rating follows you. You don't rebuild your history from scratch just because you booked through us instead of somewhere else. That's the whole idea behind us being a layer on top of the booking systems that already exist, not another walled garden.

We're right at the start of this one. A spec went over this week covering what it'd take on both sides, players seeing their DUPR rating in their PLINKY PLONK profile, coaches seeing it too when they're planning sessions, results syncing back so nobody's logging the same match twice. Nothing's built yet. Tito's coming back to us on the technical side.

But this is basically how everything here happens. Not big launches, just one direct message that lands, one conversation that goes somewhere. Worth remembering when the ask feels small.

Every session is one rep closer to the Pickleball Activator Certification.

I'm training ahead of my Activator Certification with Pickleball England this September, so I can run beginner sessions myself, right here in Thanet.

Still chasing every ball, even on the days it'd be easier not to.

Whatever your week looks like, show up anyway. That's most of it.