🦄 First User Fridays Issue #6 - How Saša got Tourneer its first users
The story of how Saša Fišter was inspired to build Tourneer and how he found its first users.
Hey all! 👋
In this issue, I’m excited to bring you the latest news and updates from the market and tech, as well as an in-depth interview with the founder of a new tennis tournament booking software.
First, let's take a look at the market news:
Twitter has suspended the accounts of several journalists recently. It's caused quite a stir.
There’s this new bill called the Warren-Marshall Bill, it's causing a lot of controversy because it's being seen as a "direct attack" on crypto users.
Last, looks like SBF is going to face some U.S. charges, and Ray is apparently preparing to share the autopsy of FTX.
Now, on to the interview. Had the chance to sit down with Saša Fišter, the founder of Tourneer, to learn more about their innovative platform and the exciting things they have planned for the future.
Hope you enjoy this issue and find the news and insights we've shared to be valuable. As always, I welcome your feedback and suggestions for future issues.
Let’s get started! 😁
First off, can you tell us a little about yourself?
I’m programmer with background in business. I had few companies of which some of them are sold, some failed some shut down. I like to build things, figure out how things work, and try to make them meaningful.
What is the product you want to talk about today?
Tourneer, software for organising tennis tournaments, where you can organise, announce or find tournaments near you.
How did you come up with this product idea?
Recently I started working on a tennis tournament software. It all started 4 years ago when I wrote software for booking tennis court for our local club, and we expanded to dozens of clubs in Croatia and Slovenia.
While this project is still ongoing I found that organising tennis tournament can be very cumbersome because of all applications, managing tournament etc. I did research to find out tournament software but none of them was what I was searching for. Every one of them was always missing some puzzle that I thought I need, so I started working on Tourneer, my own solution for organising tennis tournament.
That's a very niche product with a use case that seems to be really needed, I mean there's a market for events management and booking apps, but focusing on tennis is very interesting. Are you a big fan of the sport?
Sure, that’s one of the reason why I decided to step into the game. I think that niche is a way to go, because if you are in tennis you don’t want distractions from other sports features. You expect the software to be clean as possible.
I am big fan of tennis. I’m playing tennis for the last 5 years and, as I have business background, and I was always trying to make things simpler, I think that was natural step for me to challenge myself and try to solve the problem of organising tennis software.
Do you work alone on tourneer or do you have team mates?
Yes, there is three of us, I’m the founder and all-around guy, Oliver is working on Devops things, and Matija is working on marketing.
Can you go a bit more into detail of what Tourneer does?
So Tourneer has four phases:
Phase 1 - Landing page for collecting emails, so we can send our early users or interesents news about the products, where we are, what are the plans, how are we going to make this work ~ this is phase where we are now
Phase 2 - In this phase, users will be able to announce tournaments. Announcing tournament will be priced 10 euros discounted to 5. The reason why we are charging right from the beginning is that we want to have serious customers and not someone how will test this out and announce fake tournaments. Since this is location based - it means that it will show the tournaments near by your location, or near by searched location, it will be very easy to find tournament relevant to you.
Phase 3 - A solution for announcing tournament, accepting applications, so it’s easier to get list of who will play - data that will be very handy when you are creating draws, or you want to contact players.
Phase 4 - Complete solution for organising tournament. So you can announce, accept applications and create draws with seeders. Also this will have payments integrated in every step. Idea is to organise tournament with 4-5 clicks, after that you only need to save match result
This seems like a pretty comprehensive product and solution already Saša have you guys been working on it for long?
I have tested that idea few years ago. Since I’ve build Sliceer, which is tennis booking software with additional features like tennis rank algorithm, I created demo for our own tournament which I showed to other organiser and they said they loved it.
So I decided to build standalone software just for that purpose. It will be available for everyone, and not only Tourneer will be management software, I see it as a platform for tennis tournament because idea is to have information on how to organise tournament, how to market it, how to make it different, etc, also we want to be the place to find and explore tennis tournaments.
Similar like Shopify is doing for online shoping, we want to do same thing for much more smaller niche - tennis tournament.
How were you able to find your first customers?
Mostly via newsletter and direct contacts because there is bunch of tournaments announced online so it’s easy to get in contact with organisers, getting a real client is different story but I believe we have a good product and that users will love it.
I really believe in the idea - I think it will evolve later on, but that’s good thing. We also have some potential customers from our Sliceer product, so I think we have first 10 or so users from it.
Can you share other ways of how you find your customers now?
Yes for sure, as I said we have my old contacts that I collected through Sliceer, and over there tennis clubs start using our booking software so we collected around 100-200 users per club. That’s great because we now have database with over 2800 users, and more than 20 clubs which are all potential customers.
Other than those, we have some radio show appearance, and through our blog posts, that works fine. Also we are using our logos and promo materials in tournaments, so people heard about us.
We track everything with Google Analytics. Also we are reaching directly to the potential users. For example, we used Google Maps to find tennis courts, then we try to find contact and cold email them. This is not working as we would like but it’s a good way for brand markerting, people will have in back of their heads our name.
Can you share an approximate of how many users you currently have?
Around 60 users, we have a plan for 100 subscribers this year, 500 until we officially launch phase 1, so starting May. For users that’s difficult to say since we don’t know if there will be one user announcing 5 tournaments, or will it be 5 users and 5 tournaments.
Answer to that question is still unknown. I can say that I will be very happy if we collect 300 users until end of the 2023.
Can you share your current revenue numbers?
Right now we’re pre-revenue, but we want to reach 10k euros revenue in 2023. That’s our goal, and it’s realistic because we will have only Phase 1 next year in production, so as it’s 5e per tournament we don’t expect to much revenue. That’s 2,000 announced tournament.
Our strategy for acquiring users is very simple. We want to provide good content for tennis tournament organisers. We know thing or two about our business since we are digitalised everything and especially tennis for the last 5 years, so I think we know how tennis and digital products works together.
We want to share information with others as well. Also, there will be some advertising, but we will decide where to target it once we will see what our data will show after we launch first phase, i.e. if there will be 3 tournament announced in Amsterdam, we will make some ads over there, and promote their events.
Lastly, do you have some insights that you can give founders who are just starting to look for their first users?💡
It’s a cliche but essentially it’s all about finding the solution to some problem. If you create really good solution people will come.
First step is always hard, and it varies from project to project, but it’s always good to think in terms of ‘how would you feel in their shoes’. It changes the whole perspective.
There is no key to this challenge, you have to try many solutions, even if some of them work you have to search further because there is always a better way to do something. Try, observe, try again, adapt. Then again, it’s never ending story. Even if you have one user, you have to think like you have 100. It’s really important to provide good customer service, to listen what they have to say and think about how to push customer into better world.
Where can we go to learn more about you and your projects?
You can find out more on tourneer.info and we are just deploying blog.tourneer.info (available next week). Also there is www.sliceer.com for our other project, but it’s only on Croatian. 😊
Thanks for the time and thanks for the insights Saša!
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That’s it thanks for reading everyone! See you next week! 👍