Women's POWER Pickleball League

In short: A franchising pickleball league needed to know what a new membership platform would cost to build. In three meetings over 17 days, we delivered a complete, buildable specification of her business for a fixed $5,000 — and told her honestly it was worth more to build than it was worth to her. She took our spec to a partner who could fund it. That’s exactly what she paid us for.

Women’s POWER Pickleball League (PWR) · Discovery engagement · 2026

The situation

The Women’s POWER Pickleball League was expanding out of Palm Beach County and franchising into new markets. It ran on two platforms that were never built to work together — one for member registration, another for scores and results across the league’s thirteen skill-based divisions.

Neither modeled how the league actually worked. New chapters were set up by hand across disconnected systems. Member communication — the push notifications and texts that keep a seasonal membership from churning between seasons — ran through tooling that couldn’t support a franchise rollout. And registration billed per user, per month, against a business that runs three concentrated seasons a year. The league paid full freight through its quiet months.

Catherine Barton had no internal software team. She had a growth problem, and her platform had become the constraint on it.

What she was buying

Not a build. A fixed-price, fixed-scope discovery — $5,000, half up front, half on delivery — aimed at one thing: the membership workflow. Not the tournament engine, not the franchise model, not statistics.

The question it existed to answer: what would this cost to build, and is it worth building?

How little of her time it took

Three working sessions. A kickoff, then two reviews. All three inside seventeen days.

Between them, working independently:

• Day 6 — product brief complete
• Day 12 — full product requirements document drafted: the league’s operational hierarchy, its role-based access model, its registration and payment workflows
• Days 12 and 16 — both documents walked through with the client across the two review calls
• Final package — epics with story-level decomposition, and a requirements matrix she could read and mark up herself
• A senior engineer’s level-of-effort estimate, sized against the epics

Twelve days from kickoff to a reviewed PRD, off three meetings. Catherine was not pulled into a discovery process. She was interviewed, she reviewed, she signed off, and she went back to running her league.

The method

Epics and a first-pass effort model were generated with AI tooling. A senior engineer then sized the same scope independently, and the two estimates were reconciled against each other.

The AI pass was a cross-check on the human number, not a substitute for it. That discipline is why three meetings could produce a document a third-party development team could build from.

The honest answer

The estimate came back large — meaningfully more than Catherine had in mind.

We didn’t shave the number or pad a phase one to reach something signable. We put the tradeoffs in front of her: where the cost sat, which requirements were driving it, what a heavier-AI build bought and what it cost in maintainability. Then we asked her to sort her own requirements into must-have and can-live-without.

What she did with it

That conversation gave her something she could act on. She found a development partner able to fund the build and deliver against her specification — the design was already done, reviewed, and approved, so they could start against it rather than restart requirements from scratch. Because they were extending an existing league platform rather than starting from zero, the economics worked on their side in a way they never would have on ours.

By her account, the partner’s team was struck by the depth of the requirements work.

Total spend with Razoyo: $5,000. Both invoices paid. No overage, no change orders.

What she got for it: a rigorous specification of her own business, a defensible cost model, the confidence to decline a build she couldn’t justify, and a document that transferred intact to a team we never met. She kept her capital and her attention on growing the association.

Three meetings in, Catherine had a complete specification of her own business. We told her what it would cost to build, and it was more than it was worth to her — so she took the document to someone who could fund and build it. That’s what she paid us for.

By the numbers