Team Topia Uses WePay to Create World’s Friendliest Swim Team Management Platform
When Team Topia founder Mason Hale first got involved with swim teams, he wasn’t thinking about building a sports management software business. Rather, he knew two things: his kids loved to swim, and as the family “computer guy”, it was his job to support their team with technology.
At the time, Mason had been chief technologist at the cutting-edge product design firm Frog Design for over eight years, so he thought “How hard could it be?”
Really hard, it turned out.
Like many swim teams, Mason’s daughter’s group had more than 200 members, so keeping everything organized was a massive logistics undertaking. To make matters worse, they were managing things with a clunky software package that was designed in the 1990s, the same as 90 percent of swim teams in the country. Mason quickly found himself spending more than 15 hours a week just keeping track of swim meet information. Add to that the need to coordinate the army of volunteers needed to run each swim meet, and it was a major headache.
Being a developer, Mason turned to technology and created a solution using Ruby on Rails. He built SwimTopia initially as a side project and hosted it on Heroku. People loved it. Parents were happy, swim meets were running smoothly, and preparations now took minutes instead of hours. Mason knew a business opportunity when he saw it. Team Topia was born.
In 2011 Mason’s company was accepted into the Capital Factory startup incubator program and won the top prize at the Capital Factory Demo Day pitch competition. After that, Mason was ready to go big.
One of the the top priorities was finding a flexible payment platform that would scale to meet his future business needs. Mason initially started with PayPal, but quickly realized it wasn’t quite right for his business model. PayPal’s complicated onboarding process, which asks for a lot of information up front, stymied efforts to sign up new accounts, and some parents found the checkout process confusing. The difficulties were enough that Mason decided to look for a payments processor that more closely aligned with his vision for SwimTopia as “the world’s friendliest swim team management platform.”
Mason wanted to help swim teams across the US manage not just their meet schedules but also to collect their membership dues and support their fundraising efforts by enabling them to sell branded merchandise, swimsuits and other gear online. Above all, the user experience was top priority. He needed it to be as seamless as possible with every action from account setup to checkout taking place inside the SwimTopia application.
When Mason looked at WePay, it felt right.
“SwimTopia is a platform and WePay really caters to developers building platforms,” he said. “My customers can now setup a new WePay account right from within SwimTopia. By doing so, I was able to replace a page of step-by-step setup instructions and with a single button and a streamlined, integrated experience.”
WePay enables the SwimTopia Online Team Store customer to:
Sell any item to their members without leaving the SwimTopia application;
Offer items for sale on any page of the web site;
Check out with most major credit cards;
Assign processing fees to be paid by each customer or team.
Additional Resources
WePay Ruby SDK
Full example of how to create an online marketplace with WePay and Ruby on Rails