Why we are building a club operating system

Klarbeats did not start in a pitch deck. It started on the sideline, with three fathers whose sons play soccer.

We are three fathers, and all of us spend a good part of our weekends watching eight-year-olds chase a ball.

What a Sunday morning looks like

Walk around any youth club and you will find the same picture. Nobody is paid. The training plan lives in a spreadsheet. The match-day information lives in a chat group, or in five of them: one per team, one for the parents, one for the coaches, one that nobody remembers creating. Pitch bookings are a conversation with whoever has the key. Kit orders are a list on someone's phone. Membership fees are tracked by a volunteer treasurer with a lot of patience.

None of this is anyone's fault. Volunteers keep these clubs alive, and they use the tools they already have. But the result is a club held together by a handful of people who know where everything is. The coach is also the organiser, the driver and sometimes the treasurer. When that person gets tired or moves away, the knowledge goes with them.

Parents feel it too. "Is training cancelled because of the rain?" "Which pitch?" "Who is bringing the shirts?" The same questions, every week, in whichever chat the parent happens to open.

What a club actually needs

When we wrote down what a youth club does in a season, the list was long, and it was connected:

• Teams and squads, with the right players in the right age group
• A schedule and the pitches to go with it
• Communication that reaches the right parents, not everyone
• Tournaments and matches, before and after the whistle
• Kit and equipment
• Payments and fees
• Development reports, written by coaches, for the players
• Tactics and training ideas that do not disappear into a notebook

Each of these exists as a separate tool somewhere. The problem is that they do not know about each other. A schedule change does not reach the parents. A new player does not appear on the fee list. A coach's notes do not follow the player to the next team.

A club is one organisation. Its tools should not be ten.

That is the idea behind Klarbeats: one place where the club's information is entered once and reused everywhere else. We call it a club operating system because that is what a club is missing, not another app, but a shared base the other jobs sit on.

Why mobile and web

Two very different people use a club, and they need different things.

Parents live on their phones. They want to know where to be, when, and with what, and they want that answer in about thirty seconds, standing at a bus stop. Coaches are on the pitch with a phone in one hand and a bag of cones in the other. For both, mobile is not a nice extra. It is the product.

Admins and the people who organise are different. Planning a season, managing squads, setting up a tournament or looking at fees is desk work, and it is easier on a big screen. So Klarbeats is a mobile app for the daily jobs and a web dashboard for the organising ones, both working on the same data.

Come and tell us what your Sunday looks like

If you run a club, coach a team or are simply a parent who is tired of five chat groups, we would like to hear from you. What is the one thing that eats your time every week? Get in touch and tell us. It will shape what we build next.