King of the Club

The brief

King of the Club came to us with a vision that didn't fit any off-the-shelf product: a digital home for serious pool players. Walk into the club, check in on your phone, get matched to an opponent at your level, challenge them, scan a QR code to start the match, have your walk-on music play as you're called to the table, order a round to your seat without queueing, record a clip of your best clearance, climb a national-style ELO ladder, and have it all count towards a season-long ranking.

Membership had to feel premium — a tap-to-show digital card in lieu of a printed pass, with auto-renew, gifting, and tier perks. The whole thing had to run on a phone, fast, with no app store install required, and had to be designed multi-tenant from day one because the platform was always intended to scale beyond a single venue (it now powers multiple clubs, including The Break Room in Ashford).

How we approached it

This wasn't a website project — it was a full SaaS product build. We mapped the entire member journey before writing a line of code: arriving at the venue, checking in, finding an opponent, scheduling a match, paying, playing, earning points, ordering drinks, posting a clip, and leaving. Every screen was designed to remove friction at the exact moment a paying member might lose interest.

We built the front-end as a hand-crafted progressive web app in vanilla HTML, CSS and JavaScript — no framework overhead, no plugin bloat. Firebase handles auth, real-time data, hosting and serverless functions; Stripe handles every payment (memberships, drinks, table bookings, competition entries, gift memberships); Twilio and SendPulse handle SMS and email comms; and a custom live-messaging layer keeps players, staff and the bar in sync the moment anything happens.

Multi-tenancy was a foundational decision — clubs are first-class entities, members can belong to multiple clubs, and each club can configure its own table count, opening hours, member tiers, table rates, league fixtures and rewards.

The outcome

King of the Club now runs every part of the members' experience through the platform — arrival, play, payment, comms, ranking, league fixtures, gold-tier bookings, clip sharing, predictions, and the bar. The queue at the bar is gone, the door check-in is paperless, the league table updates the moment a frame finishes, and the King is named at the end of every season.

Because the platform is multi-tenant, it's already powering a second venue (The Break Room in Ashford), with more on the roadmap. Each club configures its own table count, opening hours, member tiers, table rates, leagues and rewards — and members can belong to multiple clubs from a single account.

Because the front-end is hand-built and the backend is on Firebase, the whole thing loads in under 1.5 seconds on 4G and scales without us touching it. New features (player stats, season trophies, member-only events, Killer Pool variants) ship in days, not weeks.

If you've got a product idea that doesn't fit a template — payments, real-time, multi-tenant, integrations, the works — take a look at our web apps service, our broader capabilities, or just drop us a line.