Our vision for Squaddle

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve just raised some initial funding for Squaddle, so it's a good time to share some thoughts on our vision…

For many people, organising weekly sports can be a source of pain and stress, particularly when it comes to collecting money from their friends. With Squaddle, we’re aiming to remove this pain and help people spend less time checking their phone in the run-up to each activity. 

Ultimately we want to make it possible for no single person to feel responsible for making an event happen, for making calls about whether an activity is cancelled, or for covering costs when there is a shortfall. We want to empower organisers and groups to have more relaxing and enriching lives away from noisy, chaotic chats. 

Beyond that, we want to allow users to more easily collect money and eliminate financial risk for individual organisers. Groups of users should be able to collectively manage their finances so that they can become self-sustaining. 

When we eventually start generating revenue to cover our costs, we want to do so in a way that is fair and transparent, and in the interests of our community of users (with the money we collect fuelling the development of more useful tools). 

In future, we may have to make hard decisions, such as whether or not to partner with advertisers as an alternative to charging for our service. But before we do anything like that, we intend to consult closely with our users and only introduce new things if the community agrees it’s a good idea. 

Unlike lots of tech startups, our goal is not simply to become as big as possible as quickly as possible and then sell to the highest bidder. So many companies burn out quickly pursuing this route, and it rarely works out well. 

We are more interested in being thoughtful with our growth strategy, and mindful of the risks associated with growing too quickly. 

We want to avoid making Squaddle yet another addictive digital product, even though there are financial incentives (potential advertising revenue) in pursuing that goal. 

As users of Squaddle ourselves, we know our interests are better served by building a product that takes into account the mental health impacts of too much screen time, and we know we’re happier the more time we spend outside doing the things we love, with other people, in real life.

If you like the sound of our vision and are also interested in using technology responsibly to build a better future, please consider sharing this post. And please feel free to get in touch if you have any thoughts or would like to join our team. We’re looking forward to expanding on our vision as Squaddle grows and we invite you to help us shape it.