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25 Oct 2021 ~ 2 min read

Building my First SaaS


I fall in love with wicked problems and enjoy providing clarity to strategy, design, and engineering by keeping the “main thing the main thing” during a project’s journey.

My first big Software-as-a-Service application experience came when I was doing Freelance Development with my first company. I contracted with a small design firm called Sparkplug out of Portland, Oregon, to build a prototype application called TeamSnap.

I took the paper designs from Sparkplug and built TeamSnap as a sports team management tool. During the project, I convinced Sparkplug to reconsider who manages a sports team. While they thought it would be run by a team manager or a team parent, the actual customer of TeamSnap would most likely be coaches. Coaches were the ones that needed to save time organizing their teams and groups online.

The result was a TeamSnap working prototype, developed as a PHP/MySQL LAMP application that focused on a coach’s perspective of their amateur team. Sparkplug then turned around and sold the prototype to a private investor who turned the application into US$20 million Software-as-a-Service company based in Boulder, Colorado.

The current version of the application still has many of the features I helped create.

The TeamSnap experience taught me how enjoyable developing Software-as-a-Service applications could be. Especially when I could work with others using a whiteboard, butcher-paper sketch pads, and paper-based demos to brainstorm functions, workflows, and features.


Headshot of Kyle Bondo

Hi, I'm Kyle. I'm a UX Designer, Software Engineer and Podcaster based in Fort Worth, Texas. You can listen to me on War Yankee, see some of my work on GitHub, or read more about me on my website.