Venue tech requires vertical integration of hardware and software
Ben Borden · He Turned Pickleball Software into a $3M/yr SaaS · Feb 18, 2026 · at 10:22
Podplay co-founder Ben Borden explains why sports venue operators require an end-to-end integration of reservation software and video capture hardware.
“Part of the secret here is like, can you get rid of the friction? And in order to get rid of that friction, you need to do the club management sort of reservation management and the video capture. So hardware and software. So most of the rest of the market, you have kind of club management tools, and then you have You know, video capture tools that are point solutions. And that just creates more friction for getting to those videos, whether you're scanning a QR code, you have to have separate logins, things like that. So really kind of the magic in this is, is combining hardware software in a single kind of full stack solution.”
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