Why we built Rally.

I started playing tennis as a kid, but it never became my passion. Basketball was my primary sport growing up. After high school, I realized basketball wasn't a sport I could easily keep playing, so I started thinking about tennis again.

I picked up a racket and quickly ran into a problem: my friends who'd played tennis in high school were way too good. Playing with them meant spending the whole hour chasing balls. It wasn't much fun for either of us.

I just wanted someone at my level who was free when I was, and that turned out to be hard to find. I tried Meetup. I joined Facebook groups. They were difficult to use and never felt organic.

So I decided to build something. It started as notes on my phone, then sketches of how an app could match players by skill, availability, and location. I couldn't build it myself, so I started looking for someone who could.

That's when I was introduced to Brian, a tennis player, serial entrepreneur, and software engineer who had previously built and scaled a social networking app to over 13 million users. I pitched him my idea, and he was immediately excited about it.

We launched in Palo Alto first, as a pilot to see if the idea would actually work. The marketing was basic. I zip-tied flyers to the fences at every public court in town and tucked more under windshield wipers in the parking lots. The city emailed me about the flyers, but I kept going.

We knew an app like this doesn't work until it reaches a certain size, because with too few users there's no one to match. What we learned in Palo Alto was that we needed around a hundred players before things clicked into place. Once we hit that number, match requests started getting filled at a rate of 50%. That was enough to convince me it could work, and enough to convince investors. We raised a round to support the app's expansion.

We added two more people to the team and started running ads and creating content for social media, first in the Bay Area, then across California, and now nationwide. It's become one of the fastest-growing tennis apps in the country.

Our goal is to let anyone find someone to play tennis with in under 30 seconds, for free. For many cities, this is now already a reality.

— Emilia, Rally Matchmaking