BUILDING IN PUBLIC

Why I started: the gap I couldn't unsee

I want to tell you the real story of how Klubbi got here. The actual one, seams and all. I've got two degrees in sport management, a B.S. from Texas A&M and a master's from the University of Houston, plus more than a decade actually inside it: building rec, club, and wellness programs from the ground up, and directing a youth club through years of real growth. Long enough to see the same thing over and over. The families in one zip code had twelve options. The families a few miles away had one. It was never about the kids. The potential is everywhere. The path to it isn't, and I don't think anyone designed it to work that way. The information is just scattered, and nobody had built the thing that pulls it together. I'd actually set up an LLC, SportsWell, back in 2018, then sat on it for years because I knew I wanted to build in sports but not what. It's finally becoming what I hoped: a little lab for the sports tech I keep dreaming up. Klubbi is the build this thread follows. #buildinpublic #youthsports #sportsequity

Early 2026: the first version, built on WordPress

The first version of this was called Let's Play, Houston! Local, Houston shaped, a place where families could find youth sports without just Googling and hoping. I started building it the way a lot of non-technical founders start: on WordPress, with a stack of plugins that promised to do most of the work for me. I even had a clickable demo to show the idea. It looked like progress. For a while, it was. Then I started building the features that actually make this different, the real cost of a season, the culture of a program, the things parents can never find anywhere, and I kept hitting the same wall. The plugins fought me on every single one. This is the unglamorous middle part. I was in it. #buildinpublic #youthsports

March 2026: I tore it up and started over

So I made a call that scared me a little. I tore up the WordPress version and started over. Here's the thinking. WordPress would have gotten me sixty percent of the way fast, then made the last forty percent, the part that's actually the product, slow and fragile. And the whole point is to grow this city by city. A pile of plugins doesn't travel to the next city. Clean code I own does. So I moved the whole build to a real codebase: Next.js, Supabase, the modern stack. No more plugins fighting me. Just the thing, built the way it needed to be built. I want to be honest about something. I'm not a developer. I'm a systems thinker who learned just enough to be dangerous and got very stubborn about it. I direct the build, I read every line, and I hold my breath a little every time something ships. The stubbornness is working. #buildinpublic #solofounder

March 2026: the name becomes Klubbi

Around the same time, I had to ask myself an honest question. If this works, if it actually closes the gap I keep losing sleep over, does "Let's Play, Houston!" scale? No. The name had Houston baked into it. The mission didn't. Every city has a version of the same story, families who can't find programs and programs that can't find families. Doing "Let's Play, Austin" and "Let's Play, Dallas" forever would have been a naming and SEO nightmare, and worse, it would have made the mission sound smaller than it is. So the marketplace became Klubbi. One name that works in any city. Domain, handles, LLC, all of it, squared away. And here's the part I love: the name Let's Play, Houston! didn't go away. It became its own build, a discount card that takes on the affordability side of the gap for Houston families. Same family of ideas, two different jobs. #buildinpublic #Klubbi #youthsports

Spring 2026: the part nobody posts about

Let me tell you about the part nobody posts about. To launch a directory, you need the directory. So I started pulling together every youth sports organization in Houston I could find. The first pass came back with over eleven thousand records. Felt huge. It was not, yet. Buried in there were doctors, daycares, tutoring centers, gyms, all kinds of things that are not youth sports. And the real puzzle: a single soccer club that also runs basketball and flag football, and the database had no idea what to do with an org that's three sports at once. So I built the cleaning. A pipeline that strips the noise, matches the duplicates (the same org listed three slightly different ways), and tags each one to the sports it actually offers. Eleven thousand noisy rows down to a few thousand real, trustworthy youth sports organizations. That part wasn't glamorous. It was the work that makes parents able to trust what they find. Which is the whole point. #buildinpublic #Klubbi

Early summer 2026: real money on the line

Can I show you what building a marketplace actually feels like from the inside? It looks like sitting down in the morning, looking up, and it's somehow evening. Right now I'm building the part where parents register and pay, and the organization gets paid directly. Real money. The kind of thing where a single wrong number isn't a typo, it's somebody's payment. The honest version of one week: I caught a confirmation email that was about to send an org the wrong dollar amount. I found a gap in the code that could have shown the wrong account the wrong information. And I ran a real payment, in test mode, end to end, with a real Houston club, and watched it land exactly where it was supposed to. That last one is the kitchen dance. The first two are why I read every single line. #buildinpublic #Klubbi #solofounder

Now: I'm not building one thing, I'm building a lab

People will tell you to focus. Pick one thing. Go all in on it. I hear it. I also know how I work. My brain runs parallel, it always has, and momentum on one thing feeds the next. That's not scatter. It's the engine. So under SportsWell, my little sports tech lab, there's more than one build, and every one points at the same gap from a different angle. Klubbi, the marketplace, so families can find programs and programs can get found. Let's Play, Houston!, the discount card, so cost stops being the reason a kid doesn't play. And Sideline Assist, a planning app for the parent juggling three kids, four schedules, and a job. One problem. A few different tools. I'm not scattered. I'm building the whole path. (You can see all of them at shannonbaylor.com/builds.) #buildinpublic #youthsports #sportstech

Now: weeks from launch, telling on myself

Okay, telling on myself a little. Some days the build flies. Some days I sit down with everything I'm holding, the code, the outreach, the data, the legal, the money side, all of it, all me, and my brain just loads. Spinning wheel. Nothing comes out for a while. That used to scare me. Now I know it for what it is. It's the shape of how my focus works, and it's usually the quiet right before a bunch of things click at once. So I build my whole week around it on purpose. Structure, with room to breathe. That's the part of building in public people don't show. Not the freeze. I'm showing the freeze. We're weeks from launch now. I can see it from here. #buildinpublic #Klubbi #solofounder