Three local software developers are getting the ball rolling on a new sports-based startup.
The main feed on the Pickup app. (Photos courtesy Sheikh Uddin)
Sheikh Uddin, Mahir Rahman and Prakash Chatlani last month launched Pickup, an app for users to schedule and join in on local-to-Richmond pickup sports games.
Uddin, Rahman and Chatlani, who serve as Pickup’s CEO, CTO and CIO, respectively, are friends and fellow computer science graduates from VCU. They work together at Henrico-based Kinsale Insurance and have been developing Pickup on the side.
Uddin said that, as a longtime pickup basketball player, he previously lamented to his two co-founders about the difficulty of finding people to play with.
“I talked to my friends and I said, ‘Why don’t we just build the solution we wish existed?’” Uddin said.
They began building Pickup late last year. The app officially launched last month.
After the initial launch, Uddin said the team realized the need for chat functionality, noticing that users could not communicate effectively when joining a pickup game. The chat function launched this week.
When users download Pickup, they’re greeted with an onboarding process that asks for their first name, date of birth, gender, and height and weight. Height and weight can be hidden on users’ profiles if they wish to keep that private, Uddin said. Users can also add a profile photo and short bio.
Pickup has 15 sports that users can choose from. When users sign up, they choose three sports to display on their profile, denoting their experience in, frequency of and competition level at which they play.
Users can then create pickup games for specific locations and times to play any of the three sports listed on their profile. These listed sports on a user’s profile can be changed at any time, Uddin said.
When users get to the main feed showing pickup games other users have scheduled, they can click a game and sign up to play. Users can chat with other people who are set to play the game.
From left, Pickup CEO Sheik Uddin, CTO Mahir Rahman and CIO Prakash Chatlani.
The app’s pickup game locations are based in the greater Richmond area, but can expand farther depending on a user’s location. Users can search for pickup games at up to a 100-mile radius from their location and can also filter by date or skill level to find games that work for them.
Users can make both co-ed and female- or male-only games and can also make games that are private that users must request to join. The locations of those private games are hidden until the creator of the game lets a user in.
After a pickup game, users will be given a survey where they can discuss the game and share any issues. Uddin said this feature was added to help with things like addressing inappropriate behavior or users not showing up to games.
“It’s kind of enforcing a safe place, so if there’s any misconduct, it’s reported and taken care of accordingly,” he said.
Users must be 18 or older to use Pickup and Uddin said the Pickup team is looking to target 18- to 45-year-olds. He added that much of the app’s marketing is directed at basketball and pickleball players, since basketball remains a pickup game staple and pickleball continues to explode in popularity.
Pickup is free to use. Uddin said the team wanted to build a user base and keep the app as “least restrictive as possible” while it gets off the ground.
“For our initial release, we wanted to just give the users all the features they’d enjoy,” he said. “We want to promote people getting out there and playing sports.”
In the future, Pickup plans to offer a premium paid membership that could include things such as the app finding games for the users instead of the users seeking games themselves.
A paid membership option would likely come sometime next year.
Currently, Pickup has a couple hundred users, Uddin said. The team began marketing the app when it launched in early May and hopes it can gain more traction as Pickup markets its new chat feature.
Uddin said the team hopes for continued growth in Richmond by the end of this year and would then look to expand the app’s reach to northern Virginia and the greater D.C.-Maryland-Virginia region next year, with a long-term goal of being able to implement Pickup games throughout the East Coast.
Uddin said that while it’s not unusual for pickup game players to find people to play with online, the piecemeal process of finding a whole group of people makes setting up a game difficult.
“There’s so many ways to find sports, but there’s no one unified platform. You have this platform fragmentation where you might find one user on Facebook, one user on WhatsApp, and you have to scramble through and find users,” he said. “We decided to build a platform that solves all of that.”
Pickup is completely self-funded by Uddin, Rahman and Chatlani. The three have put “a couple thousand dollars” into the business thus far, Uddin said.
The three founders will continue working at Kinsale Insurance while they run the app. Pickup also has a brand ambassador at VCU, and is looking to hire a CMO and potentially a social media coordinator in the future.
