Why I built Rembo

The businesses that deserve to grow in this sports infrastructure industry need more than a reception to facilitate — this is more on why your morning booking conflicts and chaos deserves a cure.

My Experience with Sports Venues

I’m not really a sports person — I play for fun, that’s it. But I’ve started seeing these local venues differently: turfs, pools, courts. No institute or federation spots and pushes athletes the way these places do, quietly, every day.

Swimming’s my thing right now. Something about it hits every muscle with a kind of dopamine rush. The pool operator was sort of a friend — always looked stressed, though I never asked why.

Then one sunset session, I found out my membership had expired. Nobody caught it — not the operator, not the desk. I paid for the extra session and thought nothing of it.

Except I wasn’t the only one. This “small mistake” was happening to almost everyone at that pool. That’s when it stopped being my problem and started being theirs.

The Problems They Face

Fraud crept in fast.

Checking in on expired memberships, multiple check-ins in a single day, changing slots without telling the operator — all of it was increasing quickly.

The card fix. To stop it, they issued membership cards to every user, plus paper bills for one-day bookings. Printing and distributing a card for every player bumped costs fast.

Paper, same problem. The card system didn’t last a month — printing costs and delays killed it. They switched to paper cards instead, fragile ones, and people, including me, kept losing them.

Check-in chaos.

A receptionist and an Excel sheet can’t run this alone. Most players, me included, lost their cards at some point, and some had to cancel sessions because of it.

Face over spreadsheet. Recognizing a face was somehow faster than searching the sheet — but that shortcut missed everything else: plan, slot, and especially when a membership was about to end. Six or seven people in line to be verified, and the sheet slowed everything to a crawl.

Complaints, unlogged.

Genuine player issues kept piling up, and the operator had no way to track or report back on them. Heard, a few solved, most forgotten — the same small problems resurfacing because nothing was ever actually logged.

Then, May 29th.

A water issue in the pool, compounded by other maintenance problems, forced a shutdown — and the operator, buried in manual bookings and face-checking, never saw it coming.

The blackout. The pool shut down in the middle of summer vacation — peak season, the exact window they could’ve grown the business. No announcement, no reason given, no reopening date. Most bookings got cancelled outright.

Reopening, reset. It reopened a week later, but the system had basically reset. Bookings were gone, memberships had quietly expired. The pool survived — but its reputation in the city didn’t come back the same.

The Conclusion

Watching that play out — not just at my pool, but at nearly every venue like it — is what got me building Rembo. Real-time membership status, attendance that doesn’t rely on a receptionist recognizing your face, slot changes that actually reach the operator.

Small thing. Turns out it’s the thing. If it wasn’t going to be someone, it was going to have to be me.

Thanks for reading,
Ramkrishna Raj Sinha