As a tourist, I walked by North Station location in Boston, saw the price - $50/hr at any time I’d want to play - and noped out hard. Decided to spend the money on an Uber to Boston Table Tennis Club instead, and played for three hours with good coaching (shoutout to Coach Vincent for the warm welcome) and fun pickup games. Cost half the price in total, and I didn’t have to hunt for a decent partner either.
Economically, Pingpod will just never be a viable option compared to old school clubs, even if they slash their prices to a tenth of what they are now. Forever a novelty/tourist gimmick.
Some very high level players there (lots of Asian students from MIT, Harvard, etc. who, having grown up playing, absolutely rip :))
Westchester club is a much better facility if you're in the NYC area.
I'm in San Diego now, I pay $50/year at my club, lol, $50/hour, ridiculous.
There were tons of ping pong tables available at any university in Taipei that were effectively open to the public to play whenever I wanted.
EDIT: Just out of curiosity I looked up the rental costs for full blown tennis courts in my area. They range from $15-30 per hour.
They already have the tech for reserverations, operating insights and the cool replay feature.
Then you get to the "we raised $X and have $Y valuation" and the tech company framing. Why?
>Today the majority of Americans prioritize experiences over goods and products.
The linked article is a survey of Gen Z; how is that the majority of America?
Your minor error is thinking that surveillance tech is expensive in 2020 onward.
One person monitoring in the Philippines: $2/hour
Break a bat, table or net? - just move to another bay.
Video replay not working even after remote intervention? Give the customer a credit.
Customer flips out after hitting their third backhand into a net, holds their bat to another player's neck while frothing at the mouth? Call the security firm.
Ping pong-opticon is watching
- remote video monitoring from the Philippines. Great way to economically monitor customer behavior.
- built in tech for capturing replays and sharing to social. Awesome and really scratches the sharing itch.
In golf some extra challenges are:
- safety - a golf ball at 160mph is far more dangerous than a ping ping ball, literally life threatening.
- cleanliness - you don't want people hitting balls into your shiny impact screen using their filthy mud covered clubs. Need some way to monitor people's clubs at check in time. Could again be the Philippines crew. Or make them use the in-house clubs - more capital outlay and ongoing expense
- need a gaming computer and sim licence installed on it. Expensive to have sitting idle between customers
This is the same way self storage operators run their business. No one would call that automation. It's called self service.
But I guess that wouldn't drive valuation.
> In 6 years I’ve bootstrapped my moving company to $100M in revenue. Avoiding VC funding has been key. [Link is to an article by a different author.]
Also, it's cute that they use the term "outsourcing" instead of "offshoring" for the Philippines-based monitoring.
Well done, PingPod!
