Justin Roberts

Thirty years of Saturdays

I started clay target shooting as a kid in England in 1991, standing next to my father, and never really stopped. Since then I've shot clays at clubs across New South Wales and Victoria, and a few in the United States, and for the last five years I've shot rifle and pistol as well. That turned out to be useful: three disciplines, three sets of associations, three different ways of running a club, and the same admin problems in every one of them.

That's the thing about being in a sport this long. You stop noticing the range and start noticing the club. Who's opening the gate. Who's doing nominations. Who's chasing the bloke whose licence expired in March. Who's going to do all of that next year when the current lot have had enough.

The committee problem

My wife and I have spent a good chunk of our adult lives around clubs: our kids' sporting clubs, car clubs, shooting clubs. Every one of them runs on the same thing. A small group of volunteers doing a large amount of unpaid admin, with tools that were never designed for the job.

I know, because I've been one of them. Most of the club admin I've ever done happened late at night, after everyone else in the house was asleep, with a laptop, a spreadsheet and a list of people I still had to chase. That's not a complaint. It's just where the work happens, and it's why I think the tools should meet people there.

What I kept seeing wasn't laziness or disorganisation. It was good people using generic software that forced them into workarounds, and then getting blamed when the workarounds broke. Memberships in one place, payments in another, compliance in a folder, scores on paper. Nothing talked to anything. Every year someone rebuilt the spreadsheet.

The activities we love shouldn't be this hard to operate. That's the whole idea.

Twenty-odd years in software

The other half of my working life has been designing and building software. I've spent more than two decades doing it, most of that time as the person responsible for how a product actually works for the people using it, not just whether it ships. SquadSpot isn't the first product I've built; the rest of that history is on LinkedIn if you're curious.

That experience cuts both ways. I've seen software that made hard jobs easy, and I've seen the other kind: the tool that looks impressive in the demo and falls apart the first Saturday morning it meets a real queue of shooters. I've seen what happens when a product is built to a feature list instead of to the work. And I've seen, more than once, what happens to people's data when security is an afterthought.

That last one matters more in this sport than most. A shooting club's member list isn't a mailing list. It's licence numbers, home addresses, permits to acquire, sometimes medical information. If that gets out, it's not embarrassing, it's dangerous. So I care a great deal about where data lives, who can see it, and what happens to it when a club leaves. SquadSpot is hosted in Sydney, and if a club ever moves on, their data goes with them.

Why SquadSpot

SquadSpot is what happens when you put a long-time shooter and a long-time software person in the same body and give him a committee role.

It's built around the actual work: applications and renewals, licence and compliance tracking, shoot-day nominations and squadding, match scoring and results, payments that go where they're supposed to. It's Australian-owned, hosted in Australia, and designed for the way Australian clubs and associations really operate, including the messy bits. It started with shooting clubs, and the same approach now runs car clubs, fishing clubs and sporting clubs too.

I still shoot. I still sit through committee meetings. That's on purpose. It's very hard to build the wrong thing when you have to use it yourself on Saturday.

If you run a club and any of this sounds familiar, I'd like to hear from you. Get in touch.

Shooting since 1991. Clay target for over thirty years across England, New South Wales, Victoria and the US; rifle and pistol for the last five. More than twenty years in software design and development, most recently leading product design and delivery for early-stage companies. Founder of SquadSpot and the club directory findshootingclubs.com.au. Full background on LinkedIn.