The complete platform for pickleball.
A booking, community, tournament, and venue-operations platform for pickleball, built as a two-sided marketplace plus venue SaaS.
- Seven connected products behind one booking and community platform
- Atomic, transactional slot locking so a double booking cannot occur
- Local payment rails (GCash, Maya, bank transfer) reconciled through webhooks
The problem
Before PickleTime, courts were booked over Messenger and Viber threads and lost in the scroll. Payment proof was a screenshot of a GCash receipt, checked by hand and reconciled later. Two players could end up holding the same slot. Tournaments ran out of spreadsheets with brackets drawn on paper. There was no single place to find a nearby court, see what was open right now, or find a skill-matched open-play session outside a private group chat, and venues were running a real business on phone calls and spreadsheet tabs.
The platform
PickleTime connects players and venues on one platform:
Players can discover courts nearby, book instantly and pay online, join skill-matched open play, hire coaches in the same flow, register for tournaments, and manage every booking in one place.
Venues can manage courts and schedules, automate bookings end to end, accept GCash, Maya, and bank transfers, analyse revenue and utilisation, manage staff and access, and host tournaments and sell merchandise.
Seven connected products make up the ecosystem: court discovery with live availability, a booking engine with instant confirmation and online payment, open-play community matching, a tournament platform from sign-up to standings, a coaching marketplace, venue management with revenue analytics, and a marketplace for gear and venue merchandise.
Engineering challenges
- Preventing double bookings. Slot reservations run through atomic, transactional locking so two taps on the same second cannot both win the same slot.
- Live availability sync. Availability updates push to every viewer instantly, so the grid a player sees reflects the true state of the schedule.
- Local payment rails. GCash, Maya, and bank transfers are integrated with webhook reconciliation, so a "paid" booking is backed by a confirmed transaction.
- Bracket generation. Seeding and multi-format bracket logic hold up as a tournament grows and matches resolve live.
- Multi-role permissions. Players, coaches, staff, and venue operators share one platform with cleanly separated capabilities.
- Event-driven notifications. Confirmations, reminders, and updates fan out over email, push, and Telegram from one event stream.
My role
As founder, I owned product vision and UX strategy, designed the system architecture and data model, built the backend APIs and booking engine, implemented the payment and notification layers, designed and shipped the mobile-first frontend, and drove go-to-market and venue onboarding.
Technology
The frontend is Next.js, React, TypeScript, and Tailwind. The backend runs on Node.js, NestJS, and Fastify, backed by PostgreSQL and Redis. Infrastructure is AWS, Docker, and Cloudflare. Payments integrate GCash, Maya, and bank transfer, and notifications fan out across email, push, and Telegram.
What's next
The roadmap includes native iOS and Android apps, smarter skill-based matching for open play, a trusted skill-rating system, recurring league management with standings and playoffs, and deeper social features such as profiles, friends, and feeds.
