Alex Marinov is a co-founder of Tennis Round, a website that connects tennis players and maps tennis courts anywhere in the United States.
In the winter of 2007, I was part of a Bearing Point team of consultants working on a project at Microsoft, when I got an email from my Managing Director saying that the client’s budget was suddenly cut and I was off the project.
I’d been commuting from San Francisco to Seattle for almost a year for a prior project, so I’d already given up my apartment. Instead of going back to San Francisco and waiting for the next assignment, I decided to change my commute. Perhaps living in Miami and flying to New York would be more fun?
Since there was no immediate project for me, it didn’t matter if I’d be “on the beach” in San Francisco or in Miami. The latter made more sense. I got on a plane to Miami, found a place at the fabulous Flamingo South Beach, and waited for my next assignment from there.
One day I went to the nearby Flamingo Tennis Center looking to play some tennis.
“We have a tennis ladder here”, the facility manager said. “It’s twenty bucks.”
“Can I have a print out?” I asked when I paid.
“No, we don’t have print outs”, he said.
“What about your website? Are these players on the website?” I asked, hoping to look them up online.
“No, there’s no website!” the guy said, as if I’d asked a bad question.
What happened next was so frustrating, that it planted a permanent idea in my head. I sat there forever, trying to read and write hand-written names and numbers from magnets on the side wall. I walked out with a piece of paper and wondered what I’d say to the people I’d call.
“Hey, I just moved to Miami. Do you want to play with me?”
After leaving a few voicemails I got discouraged and even more upset. In the course of a month I played only two guys from that ladder. The rest were no longer in Miami or simply not available.
I thought it would be nice to see tennis players online and just ping them to schedule a match.
My next work assignment sent me to Frontier Communications in Rochester, NY. I didn’t know anyone in Rochester, so I went to the Midtown Athletic Club hoping to find fill my social calendar with new people and some tennis.
On my flight back I was reviewing the club application when the guy next to me suggested I ditched the expensive club membership and went to the University of Rochester instead, where I could play with him for a token fee as a guest.
We stayed in touch and played a few times. We were not evenly matched but it was fun to hit. After all, that was the only tennis friend I had in Rochester.
In April I went to Sonoma, CA for Easter. We were soaking in the Calistoga Spa and Hot Springs, when I told my brother Martin that we should make a website to find other tennis players. He thought about it for exactly two seconds and beamed up in excitement.
“Sure, let’s do it!”
When we were waiting for our parents in the hotel lobby I placed a call to a software developer friend of mine to tell him about the tennis idea. But we didn’t hear back from him for a few months.
Meanwhile I moved back to Seattle to work on a new Microsoft project and faced the old problem – how do I find people to play tennis with? My Bellevue Club membership lapsed, and it was expensive to restart it. The satellite tennis league I usually played wouldn’t start till next season.
Then I heard back from my software friend. He’d never heard of a tennis website and it wouldn’t be hard to do. I found a graphic designer online and asked him to sketch what I’d envisioned. He was in Romania, while my brother was in Menlo Park, CA and I was in Redmond, WA chatting over different design iterations over Skype.
Things started to take shape. We started with the logo. I’d already bought the http://www.tennisround.com/ domain name. It symbolized the competitive nature of the site, like different rounds in a tournament. The idea was being transformed from emails and Skype calls into layouts and mockups.
My software friend pulled in another developer, a common friend of ours, into the tennis project. And I found out that a web designer friend of mine, Nikolay Tchaouchev, had just moved to San Francisco. That was fortuitous timing, because the designer that was helping us from Romania had decided to move on.
Luckily all five guys got along well and we covered the basic business and product needs. We added another common friend as an advisor with finance and strategic questions. At that point we had a complete team.
Raising capital was impractical so early on for a large team without a working product. Since I could not afford to pay anyone, I decided to incorporate the business and issue shares to reward everyone for their potential contribution.
It wasn’t the ideal scenario. We were not in the same office, in fact we had no office, to do white boarding and simply point at the screen. We were not working full time on the project. It was hard to schedule convenient times to meet online regularly. Plus, there were day time jobs to deal with and bills to pay.
But I’d already had my share of canceled projects, budget cuts, change of strategic priorities and general randomization in large corporations. I wanted to build a quality product, focused on a vision that I cared about, with a team that I knew.
Two years later, after hundreds of conference calls, coffee meetings, emails and discussions we have a working site. We’ve mapped the tennis courts in the entire country – in 4,200 cities in the United States. Just drag the map to search for courts, or click a button to send a tennis invite. People can find a tennis court anywhere they go and ping someone who plays there.
I’ve met new friends from Canada, Thailand, Japan, Russia and the US on Tennis Round. I use it to find a match when I go to San Francisco for the weekend. We are amazed to see new tennis player registrations from over 600 cities and we’re thrilled they’ve exchanged nearly 5,000 invitations and scheduling messages.
I haven’t been to the Flamingo Tennis Center in Miami Beach for nearly 4 years. But when I go next time, I’ll make sure to bring Tennis Round poster with me.
