Building in public

Late 2023 — SportsWell LLC, a vision and not much else

I want to tell you the real story of how Klubbi got here. Not the polished version. The actual one. It starts in 2023. I had two sports management degrees, years of running youth sports programs across 23 zip codes in Brazoria County, and a growing feeling that I was building things for everyone except the families who needed it most. I knew what the problem was. I'd lived it. Parents couldn't find programs. Programs couldn't find families. The gap between them wasn't passion — it was infrastructure. So I started a company called SportsWell LLC. I had a vision, a name, and absolutely no idea what I was actually going to build yet. This is that story. All of it. 🧵 #buildinpublic #youthsports #founder

Late 2024 — still at i9 Sports, burning out

Here's what nobody tells you about running youth sports programs at the operational level: It is relentless. Staffing crises. Weather cancellations. Opening day chaos. 23 zip codes worth of problems landing on one person. I was good at it. Really good at it. And it was slowly flattening me. My brain — AuDHD, pattern recognition on overdrive — kept seeing the bigger picture while my job required me to stay in the weeds. I kept thinking about the infrastructure problem. The access gap. The families in one zip code with 12 options and the families in the next zip code with one. In early 2025 I made the decision. March 7th was my last day at i9 Sports. Full time founder. No safety net. Let's go. #buildinpublic #solofounder #youthsports

Early 2025 — Let's Play, Houston! takes shape

The first version of the idea was called Let's Play, Houston! Local. Houston-specific. A place where families could find youth sports programs without just Googling and hoping. I started building the database. Just me, Claude, and a Python scraping script that I debugged approximately one million times. The first real milestone: 4,000+ organizations in the database. That felt huge! It was huge! And then I started cleaning the data and immediately found the thing we didn't account for. Some organizations offer multiple sports. We built the whole first round of scraping as if every org did one thing. They do not do one thing. 😅 Back to the drawing board. This is actually where I am right now. #buildinpublic #Klubbi #startuplife

Early 2026 — the name changes

At some point I had to ask myself an honest question. If this works — if this actually solves the problem I think it solves — does "Let's Play, Houston!" scale? The answer was no. The name had Houston baked into it. The vision didn't. The access gap I kept losing sleep over wasn't just a Houston problem. It was everywhere. Every city has a Pearland and an Acres Homes. Every city has families who can't find programs and programs that can't find families. So I rebranded. Say hello to Klubbi. 👋 Domain: secured. Social handles: secured. Business registration, EIN, bank account: done. It's the same mission. It's just finally wearing the right name. #buildinpublic #Klubbi #youthsports

Early 2026 — website build begins

Can I tell you what building a marketplace actually looks like from the inside? It looks like sitting down at 8am and looking up and it's 6pm and you're not sure where the day went. It looks like a 21-phase build guide, one prompt at a time, watching Claude Code write real things into your WordPress site while you hold your breath a little. It looks like TabErrors in Python scripts at 11pm. It looks like fixing one thing and breaking two others. It looks like celebrating a working scraper like you just won something important — because you did. I am not a developer. I want to be clear about that! I'm a systems thinker who learned just enough to be dangerous and then got very stubborn about it. The stubbornness is working, slowly. #buildinpublic #Klubbi #nocode #solofounder

Present — the whole ecosystem

Here's something I've stopped apologizing for. I'm not building one thing. I'm building several. Klubbi — the marketplace. Sideline Assist — a sports planning app. The Let's Play, Houston discount card for families. Full Circle Sports — the foundation that holds the mission. People will tell you to focus. Pick one thing. Go all in. I hear that. I also know my brain. I have AuDHD. I run parallel processes. I have always worked best when I have multiple things going because the momentum on one feeds the others. I'm not scattered. I'm building an ecosystem. And every single piece of it points at the same problem: Youth sports access isn't equally distributed. And that can change. #buildinpublic #youthsports #AuDHD #solofounder

This week — current state

Okay so I'm in full freeze mode today and I'm going to tell on myself. I have 4,000+ youth sports organizations in the Klubbi database. Sounds great! It is not currently great! When we scraped the data the first time, we didn't account for orgs that offer multiple sports. So now I have a soccer org that also does basketball that also does flag football and the database has absolutely no idea what to do with any of that. Neither do I, at this exact moment. This is the unglamorous middle part of building something. Nobody posts about the freeze. I'm posting about the freeze. Sitting with it. Brain is loading. Will report back. #buildinpublic #Klubbi

Present — closing the origin thread

If you made it to the end of this thread — hi! I'm Shannon. I'm a single mom, AuDHD founder, former youth sports program director, and someone who cannot stop thinking about why some kids have 12 options and some kids have one. I'm building Klubbi in public. The wins, the freezes, the TabErrors, the kitchen dances when something finally works. If you're a parent who has ever Googled "youth sports near me" and gotten nothing useful — this is for you. If you're a youth sports org trying to get found — this is for you too. If you just want to watch someone build something real from the ground up — pull up a chair. I'm glad you're here. 🤍 #buildinpublic #Klubbi #youthsports #solofounder