How Ben Borton Grew PodPlay to 290 Locations and 1.8 Million End Customers

In this week’s episode of the Niche Pursuits podcast, Ben Borton and I discuss how PodPlay grew from operating sports venues into a software and hardware company serving hundreds of locations. Ben shares how problems inside PingPod led the team to build tools for reservations, access, video, payments, and venue operations. Those internal solutions soon attracted interest from other operators facing similar challenges.

The conversation then moves into the growth methods that followed, including founder-led sales, organic search, customer referrals, and video distribution partnerships. Ben also explains why PodPlay keeps publishing opinionated content even as AI-generated search answers change how prospects discover and evaluate software.

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Turning an Operating Problem Into a Software Company

Ben’s entrepreneurial background stretches back roughly 20 years, when he ran a venture capital pool that seeded startup hedge funds. He later joined one of those firms as a partner and helped grow it to several hundred million dollars in assets.

That work eventually led Ben and his longtime business partner, Max Kogler, toward businesses where they felt a stronger connection to the end product. Max later founded PingPod, a network of autonomous table tennis clubs, and Ben became its first outside investor.

PingPod opened its first New York City location in February 2020. One month later, COVID closures forced it to shut its doors.

The business had several features that unexpectedly made it well-suited to reopen during the pandemic. Contactless access, no employees on site, socially distanced activity, and detailed tracking of who entered each location helped PingPod reopen in May 2020, well before many other recreational businesses.

• PingPod eventually grew to 20 locations.
• Its clubs could operate 24 hours without relying on food or alcohol revenue.
• Technology reduced the labor burden that normally makes smaller sports facilities difficult to operate.
• The team built its own systems because suitable off-the-shelf software existed.

As PingPod grew, the internal technology became more sophisticated. Then operators in pickleball and other sports began asking whether they could use the same system.

Those market requests led the team to create PodPlay as a separate business. Ben joined as a co-founder in 2022, and PodPlay officially launched as a wholly owned subsidiary of PingPod in the summer of 2023.

Expanding the Product Beyond Court Reservations

PodPlay is now a platform for managing modern sports venues. Its software covers many of the functions an operator would expect, including court reservations, memberships, events, payments, and coaching. The company has grown to 290 locations signed up on the platform, serving more than 1.8 million end customers.

The product’s more distinctive side comes from its hardware. More than 60% of PodPlay customers use hardware-enabled tiers that can include court monitors, iPads, replay cameras, and automated access systems.

• Players can capture instant video replays during a game.
• Longer recordings can cover an entire match.
• Newer features add AI analysis to video footage.
• Screens can function as digital scoreboards.
• Some venues use integrated door access and security cameras to operate autonomously.

PodPlay now has more than 60 locations operating with autonomous features. Those facilities span pickleball, billiards, golf simulators, and other activities.

Ben sees automation as more than a way to reduce staffing costs. It lets club owners put more resources into community events, customer relationships, and programming instead of staffing a front desk during every open hour.

It can also make low-traffic periods more economical. A club can remain accessible early in the morning or late at night without adding the full labor expense that traditionally comes with those hours.

Using Founder-Led Sales to Build Early Trust

When PodPlay entered the market, it was competing against companies that had been around seven or eight years longer. That created a credibility gap that a polished website or a sales hire alone could not solve.

Ben’s answer was founder-led sales. A prospect considering software from a young company may have questions about reliability, support, features, and the company’s future. Hearing directly from a founder who has operated 20 sports venues creates a very different conversation from hearing a scripted pitch.

• Ben could talk operator-to-operator with prospective customers.
• Early customers were invited to help shape the product’s direction.
• Direct sales conversations doubled as a source of product feedback.
• PodPlay focused heavily on making its first customers visible and referenceable.

The first 10 customers were especially important because sports venue software carries geographic social proof. Someone opening a pickleball facility is likely to look at what successful clubs nearby are using.

CityPickle became one of PodPlay’s earliest major reference customers. The company operates highly visible pickleball locations in New York City, including courts at Central Park, giving PodPlay a recognizable customer that other operators could see using the platform.

Founder involvement also gave Ben direct exposure to objections and feature requests. That information could flow back into the product much faster than if several organizational layers separated sales and product development.

Measuring Growth Through Sales Efficiency

PodPlay deliberately spent more heavily on research and development while keeping sales and marketing costs comparatively lean. Ben tracks that efficiency by comparing each dollar spent on sales and marketing with the recurring revenue it produces.

At certain points, PodPlay generated as much as $4 in recurring revenue for every $1 spent on sales and marketing. As the company has grown, its target has moved closer to $2 for every $1 spent.

Ben contrasted that with public SaaS companies where the figure can be around $0.50 in recurring revenue for every $1 spent. His point wasn’t that every company should copy PodPlay’s spending model, but rather that low-cost acquisition channels gave the company room to invest more aggressively in the product itself.

Several channels contributed to that efficiency:

• Referrals carried little direct acquisition cost.
• Organic content continued attracting prospects after publication.
• Product usage created material to distribute on social media.
• Early customers generated credibility for later sales conversations.

That approach is especially relevant for smaller companies competing with established brands. When a business cannot spend more than its competitors, it can look for channels where useful work keeps producing value long after the initial effort.

Turning Customer Video Into a Distribution System

Video is where PodPlay’s product and marketing strategy connect. Players already want to save memorable points, funny moments, and great shots that traditionally required placing a phone nearby, asking someone to record, or setting up a tripod.

PodPlay removed much of that effort. The system already knows who reserved the court, and the cameras are already recording, so the player can capture a replay without creating a separate account or interrupting the game.

The company then asked a second question: what happens to all those clips after they’re created? PodPlay began turning individual customer clips into recurring media series. It created a “Best of Pickleball” format, then began supplying footage to larger pickleball media brands with far greater distribution.

• PodPlay partnered with The Dink on its ClipTHAT series.
• It partnered with The Kitchen Pickleball on Top 10 Amateur Pickleball Highlights.
• It worked with DUPR on weekly highlights and bloopers.
• Monthly programming now includes both top plays and bloopers.

Those relationships have produced significant reach. PodPlay says replay-related content has generated more than 24 million views. Six million of those views came during Q2 alone. At the time of recording, PodPlay had already generated another six million views in Q3 even though the quarter was only around halfway complete.

Making Content Submission Part of the Product

As the number of captured videos grew, PodPlay faced a new problem: sorting through the footage. The company has now served more than two million replays. Manually asking clubs to submit their best footage became difficult as that library expanded.

PodPlay responded by adding a “Go Viral” feature directly to the product. Players can submit a clip for social distribution, add their social handle, approve publication, and even suggest a hook. That single change had a major effect:

• Submissions increased by more than 10 times.
• Ben estimates around 90% of the submitted clips are high quality.
• PodPlay now receives more usable footage than it has distribution channels for.
• Amateur players get a chance to appear alongside content from major pickleball media companies.

This creates an interesting distribution advantage for PodPlay. The company can provide large publishers with a continuous supply of amateur pickleball footage that would be hard for those publishers to gather on their own.

Ben’s broader lesson is to find something your company can provide to a partner with greater reach. If that contribution is useful enough, a smaller company can gain access to distribution it could never reproduce economically on its own.

Building Search Content Around Genuine Expertise

Video is only one side of PodPlay’s content strategy. The company has also invested heavily in written resources designed to attract people researching how to build and operate sports facilities.

One of its most successful pieces is a guide to creating a pickleball business. Ben and his team saw that search results were filled with broad advice while operators wanted numbers, frameworks, and specific operating information.

PodPlay had an advantage because its team had already operated 20 locations. The guide could draw from direct operating experience rather than summarizing generic business advice.

• PodPlay first published the guide in 2024.
• The company has updated it in 2025 and 2026.
• It receives roughly 8.6 times the traffic of PodPlay’s next most-viewed piece, by one comparison Ben cited.
• Another comparison put its traffic at about 10.5 times the next article.

PodPlay has never spent money on paid search, according to Ben. The company made an early choice to focus on organic material that could earn search visibility through usefulness and authority.

That bet is also carrying into AI-generated search results. Ben said PodPlay’s guide now appears frequently in Google’s AI Overview for searches related to pickleball business planning.

Using Content to Pre-Sell Prospects

Search traffic matters to PodPlay because its main conversion event is a booked demo. Once a prospect books one, the company converts roughly 40% of those demos into customers.

Ben attributes part of that unusually high conversion rate to what happens before the sales call. Prospects can spend time reading articles, watching videos, learning about the product, and seeing PodPlay customers using it before they ever speak with the company.

Ben calls this the “rabbit hole test.” If someone becomes interested in a company and starts researching it deeply, is there enough high-quality material to keep them learning? PodPlay has intentionally created that depth through:

• Detailed industry guides
• Founder commentary on LinkedIn
• Product videos and replay footage
• Customer examples
• Clear opinions about how sports venues should operate

Ben regularly hears prospects reference PodPlay material during demos. Some even repeat frameworks from the company’s articles back to him, which signals that much of the education process has already happened.

That changes the role of a sales conversation. Instead of introducing the company from scratch, the call can start with a prospect who already has context and a reason to be interested.

Adapting Written Content for AI Discovery

The rise of AI-generated answers has not convinced Ben to abandon written search content. Google search remains PodPlay’s number one source of demo discovery, while AI search has become a growing category.

He believes AI makes average content easier to produce, creating much more competition in the middle. The opportunity shifts toward work with original data, clear opinions, direct experience, and information generic summaries cannot easily reproduce.

That favors companies with genuine subject expertise. PodPlay can write about operating sports venues from the perspective of a team that has run them, sold technology to hundreds of locations, and collected data across a large customer base.

The strategy going forward isn’t centered on producing the highest possible volume of articles. It’s centered on publishing material worth citing, sharing, and researching in depth.

Scaling Beyond Founder-Led Sales

Founder-led sales helped PodPlay reach its early stage, yet Ben eventually hit a clear constraint: his calendar.

Until the company raised a Series A in October 2025, sales remained heavily founder-driven. PodPlay had done no outbound sales and spent little time at conferences, relying primarily on inbound interest, content, referrals, and word of mouth.

After the funding round, Ben began handing more sales responsibility to Ryan Weinbach. Ryan brought deep ties to the pickleball industry, helping PodPlay preserve the peer-to-peer feel that made Ben’s early conversations effective. The company has since added another salesperson with a similar background:

• She had been a PodPlay customer.
• She operates a pickleball facility.
• Her professional background includes SaaS sales.
• She approached PodPlay about joining the team.

That shift has given Ben more time to work on content while keeping sales closely connected to the customer’s industry. He has also used Claude extensively to extend his ability to research, organize ideas, and produce work that previously took far more time.

Final Thoughts

PodPlay’s story shows how a niche business can grow from a problem the founders experienced firsthand. The team operated venues, built technology for its own needs, and only later realized other operators wanted the same tools. That sequence gave PodPlay product insight, credibility, and customer feedback before it became a standalone software company.

Since then, growth has come from founder-led sales, visible customers, useful search content, and video that customers want to share. With 290 signed locations, more than 1.8 million end customers, over two million replays, and 24 million replay-related views, PodPlay shows how product quality, proof, and distribution can compound over time.

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