Welcome to our Featured Founder series, where you’ll meet startup founders from Tampa-St. Petersburg who are building and scaling their ventures to solve some of the world’s greatest challenges. We interviewed Scott Rosen & Chris Singh of NextKourt, a self-service automation system for unstaffed public venues, creating digital venue management hubs for recreation facilities managed by parks & recreation city employees.

Please provide a brief one-liner about your company.

NextKourt is a self-service automation system for unstaffed public venues, creating digital venue management hubs for recreation facilities managed by parks & recreation city employees.

What inspired you to launch your company?

It’s well known in the tennis community that courts get very busy during certain times of the day. There’s no access to information prior to showing up in person to a public recreation facility that does not have staffing. You’re basically forced to cross your fingers that when you show up you’ll be able to play. The inspiration came from a severe lack of information and no digital concept of these public venues, which brought the idea that all recreation/sports lack the same needs for information transparency and digital accessibility to these locations.

What pain point is your company solving? What gets you excited to go to work every day?

Digital venue accessibility. For all residents that access public recreation facilities that do not have staffing, we can solve for the information transparency gap, allow people to subscribe to updates to these venues without physically showing up, allow facilities to post programs/events through our digital venue, allow self-service scheduling to be an option for unstaffed situations, create a coaching network that creates a marketplace of approved coaches to access public facilities and allow residents to find these coaches easily.

Name the biggest challenge you faced in the process of launching the company. How did you overcome it?

This is a new concept to the world of parks and rec. Very few cities in the country currently employ an unstaffed venue management system, particularly for the need of scheduling, crowd-sourced incident reporting and coaching management tools for their facilities. It’s generally handled by word of mouth, physical pieces of printed paper posting information about leagues and events or scattered somewhere within a city website people aren’t familiar with.

Where do you see your company headed next?

Transforming cities with digital footprints while accounting for a variety of other customer segments: creating digital accessibility for Owners Association communities (HOAs, CDDs, Condo Associations, Apartment Complexes, etc.). Our system works directly in line with private communities as an MVP today, but our next aim is to provide the same value for public spaces through the self-service automation initiative. In the future we can also support other customer segments such as: gyms, country clubs, private community centers, etc.

Give us a tactical piece of advice that you’d share with another founder just starting out.

Focus on time management as it relates to revenue-generating activities from the very beginning. What is the least amount of time investment to get from product being an MVP to getting sales. Have a strict product and sales mindset in terms of what gets done. The product and sales should heavily outweigh all other activities that use up your time even if other activities appear to be important.

Why Florida?

We were born and raised in Florida. We grew up in Central Florida for most of our lives, and the area in which we live is a hub of recreation, thanks to the climate that allows for year-round outdoor activities.