Jay Maharaj built TeamLinkt in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, a place not known for software. He saw the problem while coaching his own kids: the hockey team had a budget for a team communication app, and the soccer team didn't, so he either paid for it himself or went without. He launched the TeamLinkt app in 2018 and its back-office platform in 2020.
TeamLinkt now powers more than 3,500 organizations with just over 30 employees and 600,000-plus monthly active users across soccer, hockey, flag football, cheer, dance and more. Revenue is pushing $4.5 million Canadian this year and growing close to 2x a year. There is no SaaS fee and no per-player fee. The platform is free, and TeamLinkt takes a small markup on hundreds of millions of registration payments running through Stripe.
Jay chased venture capital for about half a year, even moving his family to the US, before deciding the math never made sense for the company he was building. Last year he raised $6 million USD in practical growth funding from Growth Street Partners, kept board control, and has been deliberate about spending it. He would rather grow alongside his customers than extract more from them.
Remarkably, TeamLinkt customer service reps now ship code now. They write bug-fix tickets that become pull requests straight from Slack through Linear, reserving engineering for complex development work.
Key Takeaways
- Aligned incentives - As customer programs grow, TeamLinkt grows, so saving admins time is the growth strategy.
- VC mismatch - Six months chasing venture capital ended when the one-in-a-hundred exit math stopped adding up.
- Right capital - Practical growth equity funded leadership hires and discipline, not a land grab; Jay kept board control.
- Free drives virality - Coaches and parents spread the app club to club, replacing trade show booths they can't afford.
Quote from Jay Maharaj, CEO and Founder of TeamLinkt
"Our competitors are gonna charge you tens of thousands of dollars to use that platform. But with TeamLinkt, you get the core platform and there's no SaaS fee -- we're payments-driven. And they can choose to absorb that transaction fee or pass it through registration, so for an organization we're really a net zero cost.
"Everything that you need to run your system is in core. It's free for the organization, and when they set up registration, we power payments through Stripe, and then we have a small markup. We feel it's fair and market, usually very competitive if not better, and we have no per-player fees in addition to that.
"We're very invested in giving them time back so they can grow their programs, because as they grow, we grow. So the less work we do on the back office side, the more energy Greg is gonna have to put into coaching, administering, or helping the youth soccer club grow in their community. And that's really what drives us."
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