Most of what we're releasing this week wasn't on a roadmap a month ago.
It came from the Dental Flyers, one of our first founder teams. They're a real team with a real season, real goalies to find and real people who forget to answer whether they're coming on Thursday. They started using benchli for their games, and they told us what didn't work.
I want to write about that, because it says more about how we intend to build benchli than any plan we could publish.
What they told us
The president of one of our founder teams asked a simple question: do players who haven't answered get an email before answers close? They didn't. Reminders only appeared inside benchli, and only after it was too late to plan around them. For a manager trying to know whether there will be enough players, that's the whole point missed.
Marina, my co-founder, sat down with benchli as a player would and sent us ten points. Some were small. Some showed us we'd made things harder than they needed to be. Making yourself findable as a guest asked for a postcode, which plenty of places don't have, when all a team needs to know is roughly where you are. Being injured didn't stop teams from finding you for a game.
And when I tapped the button in one of our own reminder emails, the page it opened didn't feel like benchli at all. I wrote that down too.
None of this was dramatic. It's exactly the kind of feedback that usually sits in a list for months. We didn't want that.
What we changed
Reminders that arrive in time. If you haven't answered, benchli now emails you 12 hours before answers close, while there's still time to plan. One email shows the game and your next few events, each with yes, no and maybe, so you can sort out the week in one go. You get at most one a day, and you can switch them off with one click. See how attendance works.
Answering from the email, and nothing more. Tap yes, no or maybe and you're done. No login, no extra screen, no "open the app". Simple polls work the same way. Anything that should stay behind a login, like stats and scores, still does.
Email, because teams asked for it. I'll be honest: I assumed email was on its way out. Most of us don't love our inboxes, and I expected notifications on the phone to do the job. It turns out teams still want email as an option. Plenty of players don't open an app until they have to, and an email they can answer with one tap is the lightest way to say whether they're coming. So email stays, alongside the phone, and you choose.
Every email, redone. While we were in there, we rebuilt every email benchli sends. They look like benchli now, and they arrive in your language: English, German, French, Italian or Spanish.
Being found as a guest, simply. One box: "Find me as a guest", with your country and town. Teams see your area, never your address, and if you're injured you're not offered for games until you're back. How the guest registry works.
Your stats, and every sport's own stats. The team asked to see their season, not a spreadsheet. Your stats page now opens on your season, with the number that matters most in your sport up top and your last five games underneath. Alongside it, we went through all twenty sports on benchli so each one counts what its own players count. More on performance stats.
Your health stays yours. Before you mark yourself injured, benchli now asks for your consent to share that with your team.
The full list is on our new What's new page. From now on, every release will be there.
Why this matters to us
Some of this feedback came to me directly, after a game or in a message. Some arrived through benchli itself, where every player can send an idea and back the ideas others have raised. On 8 October, a Dental Flyers player asked through benchli for team stats by player, because, in their words, it "raises egos 🤣 and performance". Two days later it was built: a team stats page with the leaders and the full table, live for every team with the next release. Either way, feedback ends up in the same place, logged, so it doesn't get lost between a conversation after a game and the next busy week.
Then we decide. Not everything people ask for makes sense, and we'll say so when it doesn't. But when an idea is good, the gap between someone explaining a problem and us shipping a fix should be days or weeks, not seasons. The question about reminders was answered in software in about a week.
Moving quickly only counts if what we ship is dependable. Every change in this release went through the same testing and review as everything else, and some of it took longer precisely because we wanted it right. A reminder that arrives at the wrong time, or records an answer you didn't give, is worse than no reminder at all.
I've spent forty years on amateur teams. The people who keep them running don't need software that tells them how to run their team. They need software that listens when something gets in the way, and fixes it.
What's next
The Dental Flyers have around 150 alumni: people who played for the team over the years and still care about it. We're working on a way for them to stay connected, see the team's history and their own part in it, and vote in team polls. That idea also came from the team.
The same player also asked to set a date range when you know you'll be away, for work or holidays, instead of only a return date. They're right: if you travel a lot, you want to set it once and forget it. That's in this release: set it once, and benchli answers No for you for every game and training in that window.
We're also working on notifications straight to your phone. benchli already works like an app once you add it to your home screen, and you can read about how we approach mobile.
If you run a team, or play on one, I'd love to hear what gets in your way. Tell us inside benchli, or start with your team. The best ideas in this release didn't come from us.
Built for teams. Made for players.