100 Days In

It is now exactly 100 days since the Pitchbooking team started on the Ignite Propel Accelerator, based in the Ormeau Baths in Belfast. Things have been moving pretty fast. Apparently, If you don't stop and look around once in awhile, you could miss it. For that reason, we have attempted to commit our experiences so far to a few short paragraphs.

Let’s start with the good news. We have facilitated over 5000 individual sessions of sport during these 100 days. That is pretty good going in our books. We have covered a wide range of activities -including football matches, rugby training, judo tournaments, athletics meets and even quidditch practice. In the struggle to tackle inactivity in our communities, we are proud to have already played some part.

The Pitchbooking.com platform has seen a lot of changes. Our development team have been listening to our customers and delivering new features and improvements on a daily basis. Improved searching and filtering controls, refreshed search results UI, flexible booking durations and platform analytics are amongst some of the larger platform improvements, but this is far from an exhaustive list.

The accelerator programme has been able to put us in touch with a range of individuals that are no doubt experts in their fields. Having the ability to discuss marketing, sales and product development with founders and early employees from companies such as Monzo, Skyscanner and Opentable to name but a few is the type of support that we didn’t even consider possible just a few months ago.

Other notable achievements from our time on the Propel programme include winning the inaugural Propel escape room challenge (never in doubt) and coming dead last in the annual pub quiz. Also never in doubt.

We have made a mark with our existing customers too. A 43% increase in monthly revenues for our customers, testament to our ability to deliver an improved customer experience for the users of our pitchbooking.com portal. On top of this an estimated 62.5 days of unnecessary admin has been removed due to the automation of everyday tasks on the manager platform. It’s fair to say our early customers are delighted with the benefits, and we are receiving real recognition for our work. Being shortlisted for ‘Startup of the Year’ at the DigitalDNA Awards was fantastic recognition, and we are shortly competing at the semi final stage of the Invent 2018 Awards as well.

But perhaps our biggest achievement so far is that our friends and family are starting to view us as less crazy than they did just 100 days ago. Let’s see what another 100 does.