GoodRun, Inc.  (dba Simply Good Software)

Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

Simply Good Software is a SaaS-enabled marketplace comprised of two products:

1. Goodrun (Airbnb for court rentals and pickup games)
2. Tetris Rec (formerly Simple Rec (Operating system for sports facilities)

Industry: SportsTech / SaaS-enabled Marketplace

MBA Founding Student Name(s): Brandon Huang (The Wharton School, Class of 2025)

Brief Description of Solution: Simply Good Software modernizes how recreational sports facilities operate through two integrated products:

1) Tetris Rec, a facility management platform that replaces outdated tools with unified scheduling, billing, membership management, and payroll.

2) GoodRun, a marketplace that monetizes unused court time—like Airbnb for gyms and sports facilities. Together, they form an end-to-end operating system for the $40+ billion youth and recreational sports industry, making facilities more profitable while expanding community access to sports.

Funding Dollars: Pre-seed round (friends, family, and Wharton Venture Lab)

What led you to launch this venture? Basketball has been my constant—including youth leagues in Southern California, club ball at Cornell, rec leagues in New York, and pickup games in Taipei during COVID. It gave me identity, community, and confidence.

In January 2021, during a leave of absence from Wharton, I taught myself to code in four weeks and built the first version of GoodRun, a marketplace for pickup basketball. I launched in Taipei and New York, generating $60,000 in revenue.

Until 2024, when I returned to finish my MBA, I kept running GoodRun part-time and started noticing a pattern: facility owners would sometimes ignore emails about pre-authorized booking requests that, with one click, would generate incremental profit. When I dug deeper, I discovered they were drowning in operational chaos: Excel spreadsheets, fragmented systems, double-bookings, payment issues, and manual processes to run their core operations.

Through conversations with hundreds of facility owners and operators, including directors at Penn Campus Recreation and Harvard’s Shad Hall, I honed my ICP. To impact youth and recreational sports at large, I’d need to start by solving problems for 3-4 court, privately-owned facilities using free tools and minimal software to run complex businesses. To make an impact on youth and recreational basketball, I first needed to help facilities operate efficiently.

Throughout Venture Lab, during the second go of my MBA experience, I refocused my energy from marketplace software to facility management software. I launched Simply Good Software because youth and recreational sports should be woven into daily life, and the facilities that power them deserve tools built for 2025, not 1995.

What has been your biggest accomplishment so far with the venture? Bootstrapping the launch of two products: a marketplace and SaaS for sports facilities.

One customer alone has generated over $100,000 in incremental revenue from previously unused court time. Since July, we’ve built facility management software and signed five pilot facility customers.

But our biggest win might be the most personal: a few months ago, I closed a new facility sale near my childhood hometown in Southern California. When I called the manager to handle a booking detail, we eventually realized we already knew each other. Eighteen years earlier, he’d given me my first paycheck for mopping and sweeping his gym floors on Saturday mornings so I could practice basketball alone afterward. Now I was selling him software to run his facility.

What has been the most significant challenge you’ve faced in creating your company and how did you solve it? Building robust facility management software proved exponentially harder than building a marketplace. SaaS for recreational facilities meant mapping dozens of unique workflows (recurring memberships, drop-in rentals, complex scheduling rules with dependencies) into clean, scalable architecture. We were simultaneously doing customer discovery, closing sales, and building the product with a lean team.

The turning point came when I adopted a “sell-before-you-build” philosophy. Instead of perfecting features in isolation, we use facilities’ real workflows to prioritize our roadmap. A facility owner in Brooklyn became a champion, giving constant feedback and believing in the vision even when traction was slow. One of our investors, who plays in our weekly pickup basketball run in Brooklyn, kept encouraging me to push through.

I treat our engineering workflow the way Gad Allon taught students to think about scaling operations. That is, often the hardest problems are the ones worth solving. Our software “factory” needed continuous optimization and focus. We implemented rigorous testing (unit, regression, end-to-end), used AI tools throughout our development cycle, and focused on atomic functionality.

How has your MBA program helped you further this startup venture?

Network that became collaborators: The majority of our pre-seed funding came from my Wharton classmates. Throughout my time at school, these friends became critical thought partners for the business…and then investors. Moreover, I learned a lot from classmates who specialized in tech companies from many angles: private equity (SaaS), scaling and launching in new geographies, fundraising, and sales.

Ecosystem that accelerated launch: Wharton Venture Lab (Jeffrey Babin, John Ondik) provided $12,500 in funding and sharpened our go-to-market strategy. Philadelphia’s startup ecosystem, through PACT’s Mentor Connect, Ben Franklin Technology Partners, and the local sports community provided mentorship and early customer introductions that helped us refine our business strategy.

Which MBA class has been most valuable in building your startup and what was the biggest lesson you gained from it? Gad Allon’s Scaling Operations class. His frameworks on scaling systems and managing bottlenecks influence our approach to company-building. Most notably, his concepts on scaling and capacity planning led us to invest significantly in our product development process. Systematic testing and prioritizing atomic functionality were heavy upfront investments that are paying dividends in increased deployment velocity.

What professor made a significant contribution to your plans and why? Gad Allon fundamentally changed how I think about operations and scaling. Beyond the coursework, we spent time outside of class discussing the venture, with regular notes and check-ins on progress.

How has your local startup ecosystem contributed to your venture’s development and success? Philadelphia’s ecosystem continues to give. Through Wharton’s Venture Lab, I met other sports and tech founders who I still keep in touch with to this day. Jake from Sports Business Leaders welcomed me to a community event where I met Mike, a fellow Wharton grad working in youth sports, and Frank, a successful bootstrapped sports tech founder.

Through PACT’s Mentor Connect program, I met Glen, who is passionate about basketball. As a professional investor, former NCAA Division 3 basketball referee, and active pickup basketball player, his mentorship on company building could not be a better fit for the company.

Similarly, Grace and Sheetal from Ben Franklin Technology Partners have invited me to several local entrepreneurship events, namely the Mid-Atlantic Capital Conference where I met and reconnected with customers new and old.

The city’s entrepreneurship ecosystem is scrappy, helpful, ego-free, and thus approachable and connected. As a result, Philly’s ecosystem facilitates relationship-building more easily than ecosystems in larger cities do. After graduating, I stayed in Philly specifically to keep leveraging these resources while building full-time.

What is your long-term goal with your startup? I want to build the infrastructure layer powering youth and recreational sports across America. Think Shopify for sports facilities, or Toast for gyms.

Our vision: facility operators should be able to launch, manage, and scale their business with Tetris Rec, while any community member can discover and access recreational sports through GoodRun. Long-term, we’re creating the operating system for an industry that impacts 60+ million youth athletes and millions more adult recreational players.

When we succeed, more kids play sports, more facilities thrive, and more communities stay active and connected.

Looking back, what is the biggest lesson you wished you’d known before launching and scaling your venture?

Get started earlier with sales. Sales conversations accelerate product development. Every hour spent with customers adds clarity to a product roadmap.

Ruthlessly prioritize high-leverage activities. We made the mistake of building too many features for a customer request. When we launched, it turned out the customer only needed 60% of what we built in that iteration.

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