Harlem goes first
Pickleheart is a free app that tells you what's happening at your courts, how deep the stack is, whether the courts are playable, who's already there, before you leave home.
Pickleheart is a free app that tells you what’s happening at your courts, how deep the stack is, whether the courts are playable, who’s already there, before you leave home
Three things.
Play your normal week around them.
-
Use it every time you play.
Check in when you get to the park, automatically with your location, or with a tap. Report the stack count and court conditions while you're there. Join your parks and communities, and add the friends who are already on the app.
-
Get your people on it.
Pickleheart runs on what people put into it. A stack count is only right because someone reported it. A park only looks busy because people checked in. If everyone at HPA is using it, you can open the app on a Saturday afternoon and know exactly what you're walking into. If it's a handful of you, it's an empty app. So the job isn't only to use it, it's to get the people you play with using it too.
-
Tell us what breaks.
Tap the
logo in the top left, that's the report button, on every screen. Tell us what you were doing, what you expected, and what happened instead. A screenshot beats a paragraph. Every report gets read by a person, and if it's a quick fix, you'll usually see it in the next build.
Beyond that, poke at everything, your profile and planned visits, privacy settings, blocking, notifications. The bugs we most need are hiding in the screens nobody bothers to open.
Why Harlem goes first
Pickleball is one of the few things that reliably gets people out of the house and moving alongside their neighbors. But that doesn't happen on its own. It takes a community that shows up, runs the courts well, and makes new people feel like they belong. HPA does that as well as anyone.
Most places don't have that yet. People have to gather friends, find their four, or hope to be welcomed by someone new. Pickleheart is my attempt to help them get there, and I'm not going to work it out from behind a laptop. I'd rather build it with the community that already figured it out. That's why HPA goes first.
What you tell us over the next few weeks decides what every community after you gets.
What you're getting
Live park data.
Stack count, players, court conditions, weather, and which friends are there, then a straight answer on whether now is a good time to go.
Check-in that runs itself.
Get within range of a park and Pickleheart checks you in. Tap the button yourself if you'd rather.
Friends at your level.
Add friends, see which parks they're at, and set a rating range in Friend Finder to get matched with players you'd want a game with.
Parks and communities.
Join a park for its courts, guidelines, and regulars. Join a community for its members, events, and shops.
What to expect
Things will break.
Dead ends, screens that don't load, numbers that look wrong. Every one you send is one the next person won't hit.
Early on, the data will be thin.
Live counts depend on people checking in, and right now that's just HPA. A park that looks empty might only mean nobody's opened the app yet. That fixes itself as more of you use it.
You choose what's visible.
Your name can be visible to everyone, to friends only, or to nobody. Anonymous still gets you the full app.
Thanks to Jerry, Sheldon, Paul and everyone at HPA for going first. What you break, report, and ask for over the next few weeks is what every community after you gets.
- Bharat & Peter
Founders, Pickleheart
