GotCourts just announced a partnership with Swiss Tennis. What is the partnership about?
GotCourts will become an official digital platform for tennis players in Switzerland, whether they are members of a club or not. For both Swiss Tennis and GotCourts, it means that we can extend our reach and together advance the sport. Out of around half a million tennis players in Switzerland, already 160’000 use our app but many more could benefit. Together with Swiss Tennis, we will be a strong team to bring the entire Swiss tennis community together. For us, this partnership is an important recognition of what we have achieved so far and the value we bring to the sport. And Swiss Tennis positions itself as a digital pioneer among sports associations.

What has GotCourts achieved in the past?
GotCourts has become the leading digital platform for tennis and other racket sports in Switzerland and is already active in 7 additional countries. We offer more than 1700 courts that players can book on our marketplace. In 2019, they will make well over half a million bookings on GotCouts. Building on the foundation of the court booking marketplace we started to invest heavily in product features for players.

What do you mean by that?
Players can find other players and connect through our app, communicate through the in-app chat or post invitations on our activity marketplace, track their game results, see statistics of their activities and much more. GotCourts helps them organize their sports activities in an easy way. It’s all about playing more and having more fun!

This almost sounds like GotCourts has become a tennis-based social network.
Yes. Traditionally, tennis clubs were the social network for tennis players. Now, more and more players want to be more flexible and exercise their sport outside of a club. So we offer a community that is for all players, whether or not they are members of a club.

What are your plans for GotCourts?
In addition to our exciting partnership with Swiss Tennis, we concentrate on growing our member base in Germany and Austria at the moment and we see strong growth in these two countries. GotCourts has established a partnership with the tennis association of Baden-Württemberg, which is about as large as its Swiss counterpart. We’re actively looking to establish more of these partnerships and become the go-to digitalization partner of associations and tennis clubs to support them facing their challenges.

What kind of challenges?
The main offering of tennis clubs is membership. But if you look at the number of memberships, they have been in constant decline for almost 20 years now. In Germany, the number of members has halved since the peak. But the reason for this development isn’t that tennis has lost its appeal, it still is a mass sport. However, people want the same sort of access to the sport that they’ve become used to in other parts of life. They want on-demand access, online and mobile. The offer from tennis clubs hasn’t kept up with the times. The hurdles for casual players to join a club are too high. For clubs, which rely heavily on volunteer work, it is difficult to innovate and create new forms of membership without large administrative effort. And this is exactly how we want to help them, by using technology that allows them to reinvigorate club life, by offering new means for exchange between players and for clubs that are open to non-members, by generating additional revenue for them.

For many occasional players, time presumably is the limiting factor. How much time does the CEO of a startup have to play tennis?
Sadly, not as much as I’d like to! But I like to play on outside courts in summer and I still manage to squeeze in a game from time to time.

Despite the challenges to lead a startup and the workload: What keeps you going?
Definitely the feedback from the players. Time and again we are told how cool they find the app, we have a lot of job applicants that say they’d like to join our team because they like the app, and we have a net promoter score of 42 from our club partners, which is quite high for a software-as-a-service company.

What are your next big challenges?
We want to grow and to execute growth plans always poses challenges. GotCours will raise fresh capital next year to expand to new markets, to continue improving the product and to increase the network effects. In Germany alone, we have a potential of 5 million tennis players, in Europe, there are 25 million racket sports players. To reach a big share of them will certainly keep us busy for a while.