Sports Technology Platform Hudle, Aims to Bring People Closer to their Sport of Choice
Hudle started as a sports events venture exploring how to make an impact in the world of amateur sports. This was the first step as a brand which envisioned and focused on creating a sportier amateur ecosystem in the country. And after having conducted 150+ sports events and interacted with 15,000+ sports enthusiasts, realized that the main problem source at the moment are as follows-
● Users find it difficult to discover and join activities and venues, as the entire process is archaic and managed offline.
● Users find it difficult to find other sports enthusiasts, as their network is limited to their friends and colleagues.
● The activity organizers follow a ‘one size fits all’ approach, which means only those with a very strong intent to play or learn get to participate.
● Untapped infrastructure is in abundance inside schools and colleges which is unavailable for community use.
This led to the realization that the potential of sports lies in streamlining every element of this ecosystem and removing these barriers faced by users would drive participation. This realization, in turn, gave birth to the vision to create a platform (Hudle Consumer App) which can help make booking sports venues, events and finding players as easy as booking a movie ticket or ordering food online.
Soon realizing the problem at hand is much bigger Hudle dwelled into creating a comprehensive platform (Hudle Partner App) for Sports Venues which helped venue owners streamline business operations to drive revenue through this SaaS software and on-ground facility management services. Also giving customers a more professional & hassle-free experience through the software’s one-click invoicing, split payment links, inventory management, weekly sales analysis, etc.
As we witness sports coming up as a major industry with the professional sports market spearheading it by focusing on merchandising, broadcasting, brand promotions etc. based on the premise of targeting the amateur sports audience. The focus is on developing an ecosystem for this amateur mass consumer market thus creating a marketplace for professionals, brands etc to get their TG in one place.
Hudle founder Suhail Narain feels that though there is competition; in a developing industry like sports, competition is always needed to create market awareness and evolution of consumer behaviour. That being said, we as a team are one of the few focusing on solving both, problems faced by the consumer as well as the venue partners focusing on new and improved infrastructure thus making it a collaborative effort.
Also, having a team who have worked on-ground doing amateur sports events and workshops, thus working closely with Sports businesses like venues, retailers, brands etc. the team has acquired a sound knowledge about the existing on ground problems faced in the amateur sports industry, which helps us enhance the features of our newly developed tech product to handle all real case scenarios.
With close to 20,000 sports venues across TIER 1 and TIER 2 cities and 1.3 crore amateur players annually, the pay and play, memberships and amateur coaching market in India is worth a combined Rs. 18000 crores. There is huge potential in integrating the community on 1 social and transactional platform. With the app being into existence for just a year Hudle has managed to cover most of the Delhi NCR market with 150+ badminton courts, 100+ football turfs/grounds, 50+ tennis courts, 30+ swimming pools etc. and other non-conventional sports like Shooting, Rock Climbing, Horse Riding etc. bookable with real time inventory on the consumer platform.
Seeing every branch of India’s sports industry rapidly evolving; be it, infrastructure, consumers, government & private funding, sports education, sports advertising, etc the product complements every branch thus having the potential to disrupt the market by being the aggregator to every aspect of the amateur sports industry.
