Coming clean about Squaddle

It's about time I came clean about the origins of Squaddle and what we've got planned next. We've been growing a lot recently and it's been over two years since I've published a blog!

Squaddle was my rebound startup after selling Loco2 (now Rail Europe). I founded it with some friends who are no longer directly involved (thankfully we are still friends). I've made lots of mistakes along the way and invested a lot of money, but Squaddle has made organising football with my friends much easier.

You may have noticed that Squaddle hasn't changed much recently. That's because we've been focusing on backend work, moving from the "MVP" stage of development to a more stable platform which is capable of scaling. Now that work is complete, and because of our recent growth (thanks everyone!), I've decided to put some more of my own money into developing Squaddle.

Until now I've been processing all squad withdrawals manually (this is why they come at random times). This is getting unsustainable and so we're about to launch a deeper integration with Stripe where the process is fully automated.

When we come out of beta we will need to start charging for withdrawals in order to cover costs such as Stripe fees. Later in the year we may also choose to raise a modest amount of crowdfunding so that our users have the chance own a part of Squaddle. Further funding like this would allow us to start work on some exciting and much-requested new features.

I want to thank all of you for your support of Squaddle so far during our beta phase, particularly those of you who have experienced bugs and helped us work through them. There will unfortunately always be some bugs, but we will only move out of beta when we are confident that the platform is working reliably.

I'll be in touch again soon with details of the changes to withdrawals. In the meantime, as ever, please don't hesitate to get in touch with any feedback or questions.