There are a few websites I use to look for events to join. Meetup was one of the first platforms I used to join hiking and tennis events, and it was popular among the English-speaking crowd. TennisOff also used to be the go-to place to find people to play with in Japan, but that website no longer seems to be actively maintained. That left an opening for TennisBear, which felt newer and eventually became popular in Japan.

I stopped using TennisOff because it felt very outdated. I still use TennisBear, but now I’m annoyed by the number of ads. Whenever I sign up for an event, I’m shown a full-screen, non-cancellable ad that I have to wait a few seconds to skip before I can proceed. The same thing is happening with Meetup—I’m constantly reminded to subscribe whenever I try to open any page.

I understand that these are businesses and that they need to earn money to support themselves—hence the ads—but from a user interface point of view, it’s not a good experience at all.

There has to be a better way.

Then I remembered that I’m also a developer, and I know how to build websites. I took it upon myself to build an alternative. All I really needed was a backend database to store event details and a web interface where organizers could easily keep track of participants.

I won’t put ads on it because I don’t think I’ll have enough users to make ads worthwhile. I also won’t make it tennis-specific, as that would make the user base too niche. I’ll start with a simple event management website and then see where it goes. It might eventually evolve to support tennis events, but that’s not the goal for now.

That was in November 2025, and now I think it’s in a state where it can support simple events—allowing organizers to create events, share a link with people, and keep track of who is joining and who is not.

Neither organizers nor participants need to create an account. At a minimum, they just need to specify a nickname to identify themselves to others in the event. The website can store this nickname in the user’s browser for future use. However, if users want to access their events from other devices, they’ll need to create an account. All they need is an email address, a password, and a nickname.

Right now, I’d say it’s still in the beta stage. I’ve only tested it with my wife and by logging in using a few of my own email addresses. I’m a one-man team, and I’m doing this purely as a hobby. Luckily, I genuinely enjoy working on it. It also helps reduce my YouTube and social media screen time. Visual Studio Code—the app I use to develop this—is now the top app in my screen time reports.

People might use it. People might not. I’ll most likely use it myself when I organize tennis or meetup events in the future. I’ll keep improving it and see how it evolves. Even if nobody else uses it, the enjoyment I get from working on it makes it worth it—at least for now. I guess I’m lucky that I still have my day job, and so does my wife, so we can support ourselves financially. Money isn’t the motivation here. Building something, learning from it, and possibly helping people—that’s what motivates me. Unless, of course, it becomes popular and I become a tech CEO. Then we’ll be having a different discussion.

That would be the day.