David is the acting general manager at a location inside a national pickleball franchise. He's also a longtime player and coach, and the brief he got from the franchise owner was straightforward: grow the membership base, and grow the recurring revenue line.
A subscription that wasn't selling.
The franchise had a corporate-wide subscription tier built around an AI court-camera system from another vendor. Members paid an extra $30 a month on top of base dues for shot tracking and game replays. Almost no one actually used it. At David's location, less than 1% of members were enrolled — and even that number overstated real usage.
The tier was technically a recurring revenue line. In practice, it was barely generating anything.
Bringing Volley in.
David had been introduced to Volley a few months earlier through a mutual contact. He demoed the unit, ran it himself, and went to the franchise owner with a proposal: put a Volley machine into the facility and rebuild the AI subscription tier around something members would actually use.
Ownership agreed. The Volley trainer went live on the court at the front of the building — the one every member walks past on the way in. David made it a rule that anyone using it had to book that court, so every member who came through the door saw it in action.
The results.
Once Volley was on the floor, the subscription tier started moving. Within two weeks, the membership grew from 3 to 20. A few weeks after that, it was at 30-plus. The first machine was booked six to eight hours a day, so the location added a second unit to keep up with demand. Corporate even raised the new-member price from $29 to $39 a month — and sign-ups kept coming in. For a stretch, the location became the highest-utilization site in the entire Volley network.
Why it stuck.
The old AI subscription failed because almost nobody used it. Volley grew because it solved an everyday problem for the people paying for it.
That pull was strongest where it's hardest to win loyalty. “I have lower-level players, aged 60-plus, who use Volley three days a week,” David says. “They do not miss a session.” Members from other franchise locations began enrolling in a second AI membership at David's site just for access to the trainer, and another nearby franchise walked in unannounced and asked to see it.
The bottom line.
A recurring AI subscription tier that used to generate roughly $90 a month at this location is now generating more than 10x that — thanks to Volley.
