This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey there, thanks for tuning in today. My name is Chris Guillebeau, your host of Side Hustle School and also your host of this segment, Failure Friday. One of my favorite segments to work on every week, a collection of short stories about mistakes, missteps, disasters, and of course, failure. All of the things that go wrong. And just like our Throwback Thursday segment, you get to hear directly from a side hustler who has struggled to get something off the ground.
And they tell you this quick story about something that went wrong, what they learned from it, what it felt like. Not just what they learned from it on the other end, but how did it feel when they were going through it? I think that's a very important thing that is often overlooked. So as I said, it's been fun to work on these stories. And this one features Jeet Mehta from Toronto.
His family is from India actually, and his dad was a professional cricket player. So first of all, fun fact, also relevant to the story as you're gonna hear. And together with a couple of friends, Jeet co-founded Sportsbooker, Sportsbooker. The business provides online booking, scheduling, payment solutions for sports facilities such as baseball stadiums. Really interesting topic or interesting niche, I guess.
It's a pretty cool idea because as Jeet explains, they really felt like they were providing a solution to a problem, but there's always an issue. He and his co-founders also spent six months of building it, just grinding it out, locked in a room, to use his words, only to discover, well, you're gonna hear the story. It's both an origin story and a point of learning. So let's hand it over to Jeet. [Music]
Hey guys, my name is Jeet Mehta, and I, along with my best friends Shahid Maoji and Arbala Shah, were the co-founders of Sportbooker.
So Sportbooker is the first modern tech software solution for sports facilities. We help facility owners get scheduling, online payments, and online booking set up in minutes without any training. But that's now. Let me rewind a couple of years back to 2019. I know the pre-pandemic world feels like it was a lifetime ago, but it hasn't been as long.
At the time, I was actually working as a data scientist at Shopify, that was my full-time nine to five gig here in Toronto. And my friends Shahid and Arbala were working as engineering managers and software engineers at local startups in Toronto as well. So at the time, I was actually training quite rigorously for a cricket tournament coming up in the fall of 2019. So for context, my dad played cricket professionally in India, that was literally his job to play nine to five. He represented his state team and got paid for it.
And so when we moved as a kid to Canada, that was a big part of our culture growing up. So my brother and I both played competitively growing up throughout university as well, and throughout our school years, of course. And after university, I started putting some real hours into it and luckily in 2019, I was picked for a chance to play for the Canadian cricket team in St. Kitts at a tournament in the Caribbean. Again, some of the top players from the West Indies region.
So it was a phenomenal life experience, but the cool opportunity with Sportbooker came through my periods training for the tournament. So the facility that he was training at, the owner of that sports facility came up to me and said, "Gee, look, I know you're in tech. I'm literally drowning in emails and WhatsApp messages for handling bookings at my facility. Please help me out." So for a while, I didn't make much of it because I just wasn't sure if he was just complaining or if it was a real problem that he wanted solved. Six months later, so in the summer of 2019, he got back to me and he said, "You know, please, G, I really need you to help me.
I tried to hire a few folks to build this thing for me and it wasn't working. I need you to sort of figure this out for me." And so that's actually what got me curious. So my friends and I, we did a bit of research. We looked at tangential tools, like in spaces like bowling alleys, which are surprisingly similarly built to indoor cricket facilities, as well as tools for baseball facilities, which are very similar. And we talked to the owner and he basically told us that there were some niche needs that he had at his facility that weren't being met by these existing tools.
So things like the fact that his space is hierarchical, he can open up certain cages and make them bigger for teams or for organizations. That's not something that the software accounted for. So we got really excited. We're all very entrepreneurial minded. I'm sure all of us are at Side Hustle School.
And we started building. So we built a little design prototype first, keeping it lean, which was good. We showed it to him. He was super excited. And he said, yeah, I would definitely pay 200 bucks a month for this, you know, please build it.
Let's make it happen. Now here comes a mistake. We then took that as serious validation and we locked ourselves in a room for six to seven months. And we actually tried to build the entire first version of the product. This took us into the pandemic, at which point, you know, after a hard slog of navigating our full-time careers with other life priorities like relationships, family, friends, et cetera, and then building this product at night.
We finished grinding for six months and we went back to the facility owner super excited and turns out that his business had actually gone under during COVID. It was a tremendous heartbreak for us. I mean, this segment is called Failure Friday. We literally did feel like failures and it did feel like the end of the road. The lesson there was that, you know, don't build in a vacuum.
Like validation is not a one-time exercise. It's a continuous conversation with potential users and customers. And we learned that the hard way. Luckily, it worked out for us in the long run. We took that time to really sit down, call other baseball facilities in the area, speak to real customers and users and actually build a product that's useful.
But the biggest learning, like I said, was this stuff doesn't happen in a vacuum. It happens with the real customer conversations, not just code. So yeah, that was a big learning for us. Hopefully that's valuable to you guys. I'm a big fan of side hustle school.
So it's an honor to be featured here. All right, cheers, take care. [Music]
Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat. That is in fact, the theme of Failure Friday. We've got some words of advice from Jeet to add to it.
Validation is not a one-off exercise. You know, validation is something that is an ongoing process, an ongoing process of listening to your customers, making sure that what you're creating is in alignment with what they're willing to pay for. Not just what they like, not just what they say, oh, that's cool, but what they're actually willing to get their credit card out for and put down that deposit or whatever they need to do to commit. And also don't build in a vacuum. Make sure again, you know, that what you're making is connected to true market demand.
But it seems like Jeet has been able to recover. So that's great. Thanks to him for sharing this transparent and truthful story. I wanna encourage you to check out sportbooker.com. Sportbooker, it actually has no E in it.
So like sport, B-O-O-K-R.com. I'm sure you can find it to be Google it. It'll also be linked up on our show notes page. And then finally, just, you know, pretty awesome that Jeet's dad was a professional cricket player. I got to go to a cricket match when I was on book tour in India once many years ago.
It was a lot of fun, not just the game itself, but kind of everything else that was happening and all the spectators and fans and the snacks being sold. Good times. So I enjoyed thinking of that as I was working on this episode. If you have a question or an update for us about your hustle, sidehustleschool.com/questions. This has been episode 1980, 1,980.
The show notes page, of course, sidehustleschool.com/1980. I hope you will subscribe, follow, come back tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the "Onward Project."
