Introducing the Squaddle beta

After months of testing behind closed doors, we’re excited to announce the launch of our public beta today! 🎉

Squaddle is a new tool for organising group sports and social get-togethers. Our goal is to save organisers lots of time and stress each week through our innovative WhatsApp integration.

We’ve designed Squaddle to work with a variety of different group activities. It’s great for team sports like football, cricket, and rugby, but it’s equally useful for any other kind of regular social get-together, such as book clubs, volunteer groups, or supper clubs. Squaddle is also especially helpful if you need to take payments for pitch hire, venue rental, or any other associated costs.

How does it work?

Squaddle automatically sends out invites and keeps track of who’s in and who’s out, so you don’t have to spend ages scrolling through chats to figure out if you have the right number of attendees — we do the hard work for you.

Our built-in payments help you easily collect money without handing cash or worrying about bank transfers, so you can easily share costs with your squad. Squaddle sends out payment links (securely via Stripe), and gently reminds those who are slow to settle up. You can easily see who’s paid and withdraw funds at any time.

And the best part — squad members can do everything through WhatsApp…

✅ Respond to invites

✅ See who else is going

✅ Get updates from admins

✅ Receive payment links

…all without having to download another app or go through a lengthy signup process.

And don't worry, anyone who’s not on WhatsApp can do all the same things via email and we plan to add more messaging options soon. This means one tool for organisers, while squad members can stick with what they know.

Already like what you hear? Sign up for the Squaddle beta

What makes Squaddle different?

WhatsApp groups are great for chatting with friends, but they quickly get frustrating when used for things like RSVPs and collecting money. With Squaddle, all the boring admin happens in a separate chat, so your WhatsApp group can be reserved for sharing the latest memes.

WhatsApp’s Business API is typically used for customer support, but we’re utilising it differently to make WhatsApp a core part of our user experience. We’ve built an automated chatbot so squad organisers don’t have to spend hours each week sending out messages and gathering responses, and squad members don’t have to bother organisers every five minutes to find out where they need to go or what they need to bring.

Who are we and why are we doing this?

Our small founding team is led by Jamie Andrews as CEO, alongside Scott Scrivens (Product) and Pete Stewart (Tech). Between us we have years of experience building digital products and services, and we’re united by a desire to develop a truly utilitarian tool that helps people free up their precious time for more important things away from their screens.

Our ultimate vision is for activities on Squaddle to become genuinely self-organising, with no single individual needing to take responsibility within a group. By doing this we hope to lower the barrier to people getting active and connected within their local communities — both things that were badly impacted by the pandemic.  

Even though Squaddle is a digital service, we want to encourage better digital wellbeing and help our users spend less time on their phones. We know from personal experience how easy it is to get distracted by something completely unrelated when a notification appears, and so we’ve designed Squaddle to be as unobtrusive as possible, a principle that we hope can be extended to other tasks we perform on our phones.   

Help us shape Squaddle’s future!

We’re hoping to build an engaged and opinionated community of users here at Squaddle — that means we want all of our future product decisions to be shaped by you. So if you’ve got this far, hopefully you’ll be up for going a little further — please sign up for the Squaddle beta and give us as much feedback as humanly possible. Obviously tell us if you think Squaddle is great, but more importantly please tell us what's missing and how we can improve it! We’d love to hear from you either way.

If you have questions or feedback please, get in touch via info@squaddle.co.uk or via Twitter, Facebook or Instagram.