Clubable / Sports operations
One club. One system. No more operational patchwork.
I designed and built Clubable end to end: a connected platform for registrations, payments, sessions and communication across a grassroots football club.
Live productVisit Clubable
The starting point
A real club owner had a problem no single product solved.
A close school friend runs his own football club. He could find products for individual jobs, but nothing that brought the whole operation together in the way his club actually worked.
Registration lived in one place, payments and subscriptions in another, and day-to-day communication happened elsewhere. Every new tool added another hand-off for volunteers, coaches and parents to manage.
Discovery
Start with the workflow, then challenge every workaround.
We began with a detailed sit-down. I mapped everything he wanted the club to do and kept asking why the existing apps could not do it. That turned a feature wish list into a clearer picture of the operational problem.
I researched the club-management market, compared the different products already available and identified the gaps between what those products offered and what a working club needed every week.
- 01Player registration without rebuilding the same data elsewhere.
- 02Payments and subscriptions connected to the member journey.
- 03Accurate session bookings, attendance and operational checklists.
- 04Communication inside the product rather than across separate group chats.
The product bet
Connect the people doing the work, not just the admin screens.
Clubable is designed around three connected experiences. Administrators configure the club and manage members, coaches run sessions from the pitch, and parents handle children, bookings and payments from the mobile app.
The value comes from the shared operational record beneath those views: a payment can affect booking eligibility, a team relationship controls who can communicate, and a coach's attendance update becomes useful club reporting.
Building it
I owned the whole journey from conversation to working beta.
I led the discovery, market research, product definition, prototyping, interaction design and development myself. I started with look-and-feel prototypes, tested the structure against the original needs and then built the MVP into a working web and mobile platform.
The result spans a web administration portal and a shared mobile app, backed by one multi-tenant data model. It now covers memberships, sessions, payments, attendance, checklists, match reports, reporting and in-app communication.
The hard decisions
Payments, safeguarding and trust had to be part of the product model.
The technically difficult work was inseparable from the product decisions. Club data must remain isolated between tenants. Payment state must be dependable enough to govern access. Communication must respect real coach-parent relationships rather than creating an unsafe open directory.
That led to role-scoped experiences, database-level access policies, Stripe Connect payment flows and adult-only messaging rules linked to active team relationships. The system is designed around the realities of youth sport, not generic collaboration software.
What happens next
A four-team beta will test the operational truth.
The first trial will run with four teams from the club that shaped the original problem. That keeps the learning close to the people whose work the product is meant to improve before expanding to larger clients.
Success is deliberately practical: payments complete reliably, sessions are tracked correctly and every booking contains accurate information. Those signals matter more than a long feature list because they determine whether a club can trust the system every day.
What it taught me
The best brief was already hiding inside the workaround.
Clubable reinforced that a useful product begins by understanding the whole operating rhythm. Building every layer myself let me keep the original problem visible—from the first interview through to the data model and beta plan.