While I think these venues are cool, they’re inherently VERY limited in maximum possible scale. They’re more of a competitor to bars like SPIN, rather than traditional table tennis venues - kinda like how Top Golf isn’t really trying to steal business from the local driving range.

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.

Claims of automation really fall apart for me when they rely on outsourcing. Even setting aside ethical considerations, this business relies on there being a stable source of cheap labor. Moving that labor to remote monitoring and presumably some kind of local intervention skeleton crew for when they report something may be more in line with the experience customers want than a gym that is perceptibly staffed, but automation is a strong word for that

We're in the cloud golf simulation space (sounds like these guys dabble in golf too) and this has a few really interesting angles.

- 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

https://archive.is/8O3Us

Feels like a mini WeWork in the making. They should keep it small if the actually want to be a viable business.

I wouldn't really consider this automation. Just because a company uses software doesnt mean it's automation.

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.

I don't understand. Either you have one person on site or one person monitoring video with your expensive "no one on site" tech. I'm skeptical that this would save anyone money. I suppose the labor for the monitoring is dirt cheap and maybe one person can monitor multiple sites? And I suppose no real employees means no HR, etc..

TTAAS (table tennis as a service)

File under: Things that can exist in a big enough city.

Will be in NYC soon, and will definitely check out the table tennis, just not clear how to find a partner since I'm at the 2,000 point level.

This reads like a pre-COVID startup story and I find that refreshing despite the slight Silicon Valley (the show) vibes.

There's a pingpod place near where I live. It's a cool little spot, and I applaud the founder for taking a unique approach.

Well done, PingPod!

This is one way to make use of the excess of unused office space.

> In March 2022, we received $10 million in VC funding [for facilitiy rental business]

> 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.

So much cynicism here but if they have solid YoY growth and $3.6 million in real revenue then $50 million valuation (I assume post money and probably with some guarantees) isn’t totally crazy

Cool gonna rent one right now and use it as a meth lab!