RosterBot Launches Mobile Apps To Organize Little League And Pickup Games

Nearly six years after its debut in TechCrunch, and five months after raising $1 million in seed funding, the online organizational tool for little league and pickup games, RosterBot has launched a mobile app for iOS and Android.

The company’s founders Ian Bell and Bret Hedican met in a pick-up hockey league and developed the service as an online tool to organize pick-up hockey games around their towns.

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After RosterBot’s TechCrunch debut, Ian left the site alone, but it kept growing. Now, he estimates there are tens of thousands of active users on the service. So, now as the world moves mobile, RosterBot is following its customers onto the app stores.

“We’re not interested right now in adding any of the business model stuff,” says Bell in an interview. “We’re really focused on growth. We are generating a bit of revenue through the transactional stuff.”

The reason? It’s actually really expensive to organize pick-up games. To bring the equipment, rent the space, ensure that people show up and that you can actually get a league or a game going, says Bell. “A shitload of money gets lost, and dealing with that is a huge hit.”

PayPal fulfills transactions, and using that platform is helpful for a nascent company that has users in 60 countries around the world.

“Our obligation is to chip away at all those tediums involved in organizing,” Bell says. He hopes to introduce a gamification layer to the events on the site, in much the way Strava has done for running and racing. “We can do that for really cool sports.”

Watch a fancy video about RosterBot here:

Photo via Flickr user USAG-Humphreys