Why we started Formality

Current solutions were problematic

When organizing sports for children - as a parent - you are required to do one of the following to book sports:

• Fill out a paper form
• Phone someone who manages the team or lessons to negotiate a booking or understand whats on offer.
• Fill out an online form (less common)
• A hybrid option involving more than one of these fore mentioned methods.

In addition to this, the ability for parents to find local sport options for their children is challenging. As an example, we were supprised how many unadvertised pools existed locally that did swimming lessons to anyone in the public. They have operated through word of mouth; missing out on being found by more people.

The schools or clubs that we have seen either tend to pick a large enterprise software package with monthly fees (ie 100 USD per month kind of price bands); or use very manual processes which they manage themselves (costing considerable time instead). Our model however is about charging small fees to end users during payment (if they choose to pay online) to remove barriers for entry. If you were a teacher at a public school organizing sports then you don't have any financial hurdles to get through. Same if you are seasonal coach (such as a soccer coach only working through winter).

Organizing teams can be especially painful in that 20 people play 11 per team hockey requires a push to get a 2nd team; or to have only one team and limit it to say 14 people (ie 11 + 3 reserves). Team selection is a real pain point for parents; where sometimes your child might be in an incomplete team (depending on the sport) or missing out (without enough warning to give the option to recruit more players).

Communicating with children's parents is often by email or SMS which tend to be slower than modern ways of communicating with parents (and lack the online community feel; where open discussion is supported). This is sometimes due to coaches trying to keep students at their skill level or age group; preventing parents from booking the more convenient time (but wrong level).

A Parents View:

From our perspective as parents, we have noticed that:

• Schools often offer people who don't go to their school to join their sports teams (and vice versa clubs often may support running sports on behalf of the school).
• After school activities are generally open to the public as they use the school facilities but often are nothing to do with the school. Finding these tend to be hard if you don't go that school.
• Trying to fill a certain day (ie a Thursday afternoon) with an activity is a lot more difficult than finding a supplier of an activity (ie tennis). Parents often have this challenge of trying to fill availability which is difficult due to a lack of direct comparison across activity providers.
• Activity providers that have expensive software systems usually have significant gaps in features (such as ability to cancel classes). The software also tends to be generic as opposed to being customized for each type of club.
• Some providers insist on direct debit (possibly so that they don't need to chase payment manually) however this can be painful to setup for trialing a new sports provider.

Who we are:

We are busy parents with active children at kindergarten and primary school who like to be busy.

We have a wide range of experience around software; financial services, children and sports which gives us a unique eye and passion for sports enrollment.

Our Mission:

Our mission is to empower schools; sports clubs and extra curricular activity providers to:

• Provide parents the easiest activity booking experience
• Give activity providers a simple way to get more business and save time on admin.
• Minimize children's time on digital devices[1]; through extra curricular activity promotion.

We have noticed (through personal observation) that the children with higher physical activity levels appear to be strong academically (although science is yet to prove or disprove this)[2]. Research does however suggest that there are measurable psychological and emotional development benefits.

How we are different:

We aren't just another sports team app; our solutions are designed to be simple to use by joining together other tools that most people already use (like Spreadsheets, WhatsApp etc). This helps make it easier to onboard and use.

We don't charge reoccurring monthly fees which differentiates us from 99% of competitors. This is important as it can be hard to get permission to funds approved in certain organizations. We instead charge a small fee to those making the booking online (where the event is not free).