About PlayYourCourt
PlayYourCourt is the #1 tennis community in the United States! With tens of thousands of members, PlayYourCourt offers an app for tennis enthusiasts to find playing partners, take lessons with professionals, and get a plethora of video content on how to improve their game.
The situation
“It felt like we were flying blind, we didn't have the data we needed to understand how to improve and scale. When things were good or bad, we didn't know why and forecasting accurately was nearly impossible.” -Scott Baxter, CEO and Founder
What we built
Our main deliverable was a dashboard providing holistic visibility into PlayYourCourt’s business, with features including:
A view of how every metric in their P&L is pacing against the forecast we established, laddering up into how expected profitability is pacing.
Cohort Retention charts showing what % of members are retained over time, segmented by the membership tier and cohort.
We also ended up recreating PlayYourCourt’s financial forecasting model, with the vast majority of metrics falling within a few percentage points of our forecast.
“Dave built an unbelievable data dash that gives us insight to the most valuable metrics in our business, leading to a palpable difference in our ability to make better decisions that will drive meaningful top and bottom line.” -Scott
The impact
With a detailed forecast and insight into the business, Scott and team have been able to make key improvements. Through visibility into the profitability of different advertising campaigns, we uncovered an insight that led to a shift in strategy and increase of over $150K to the annual bottom line.
“[Boston Data Co] solved data specific problems we've been trying to solve for nearly a decade. This relationship was the unlock for our business to get the information we need to scale. 100% would recommend - I cannot say enough nice things about Dave and his team.” - Scott
The nitty gritty
PlayYourCourt uses several SaaS tools as well as an internal admin database, so we had to set up a data stack that ingested data from all of these sources. We leveraged a combination of Stitch and Fivetran to ingest the data, loaded it into a Snowflake data warehouse, and used dbt Cloud to transform the data into clean and flexible data sets. We then brought in Sigma for the BI visualization layer to create the main dashboard and data exploration functionality.
The tricky parts
PlayYourCourt’s main line of business is their membership offering, which is offered in three different tiers. One is billed monthly, and the other two are billed annually. However, some members will upgrade/downgrade between the tiers at different times in their subscription cycle. We needed to standardize how we attributed a member to their tier over time, accounting for movements in subscriptions.
We also needed to build a system that allowed the PlayYourCourt team to fill out forecasted values and have them compared against actual metrics over a flexible time period. We created a Google Sheet to hold the forecasted values, and aligned them with their actual values in the data model.