How to Monetize Your Badminton Sessions with Smatchy Pro: 10 handy tips

Badminton in France has never had so many players. The French Badminton Federation crossed the symbolic 200,000 licence mark in 2023, with 201,837 registered players counted on 31 August of that season, then passed 210,000 the following season, spread across roughly two thousand affiliated clubs. And that count only covers licence holders: independent estimates put the total number of players, registered and casual combined, at around one million.

Those million people run into three very concrete questions: where to find a court, who to play with, and when. You, as a coach, an athlete, a club or an association, already have the answers. What you usually lack is a simple way to charge for the session without building a website, opening a payment account and chasing bank transfers for three weeks.

That is exactly what the Smatchy professional programme offers: zero euros to sign up, zero euros a month, ten per cent on the tickets you sell. The remaining ninety per cent is yours. Here are ten pieces of advice for turning that into real income rather than theoretical income.

1. Should you sell a session or a subscription?

The most common mistake is to copy the club model: an annual membership fee, a commitment from September to June, a three-figure price. That model works for licence holders, and it puts everyone else off.

The recreational badminton player thinks in weeks. They want to know what Thursday evening costs, not what the year costs. So publish individual, dated events with a price shown per place. You will find that the same player who turns down a 180 euro membership will book twelve sessions at 12 euros without a second thought.

2. How do you set your price from the real court cost?

A badminton court in France rents for an average of 8 to 15 euros an hour, and the larger cities regularly go past 20 euros. That is your floor, and it has to be covered before you have earned a single cent.

Start from that cost, add the shuttlecocks, add your time, then divide by the number of places you can genuinely sell. A court at 15 euros an hour used by four players represents 3.75 euros of cost per person per hour. On a place sold at 12 euros, Smatchy takes 1.20 euros and pays you 10.80 euros; once the court is deducted, you are left with 7.05 euros per player. Do that calculation before you publish, not afterwards.

To position your offer, keep the going rate of the private lesson market in mind: matching platforms list badminton tuition from 15 euros an hour, with an average of around 33 euros. A supervised group session naturally sits between the two.

3. How often should you publish your sessions?

Regularity beats intensity. An identical weekly slot, same time, same hall, settles into your players’ habits and fills itself after a few weeks. A slot that moves around demands a fresh decision every time, and that fresh decision gets paid for in empty places.

So publish six to eight sessions ahead rather than a single one. Your subscribers get the information, they book the ones that suit them, and you get visibility on your occupancy a month and a half in advance.

4. How many players should you take per session?

Badminton has an arithmetic constraint that many organisers discover too late: four players per court in doubles, two in singles. Beyond that, somebody is waiting on the side.

A rotation of six players for one court stays bearable if it is announced and organised. At eight, the session turns into a waiting room and your participants do not come back. Sell the number of places your courts can genuinely absorb, even if it means opening a second slot. A full session is always worth more than two half-empty ones, one of which is frustrating.

5. Where should you state the level of play?

“Recreational badminton” says nothing. “Badminton, beginner to intermediate, sustained rallies, no competition” says everything, and above all filters out the players who would be disappointed.

Mismatched levels are the leading cause of drop-out in group badminton sessions. A ranked player facing a beginner gets bored, the beginner gets discouraged, and you lose both. Writing the level in the title will make you sell slightly fewer places at the start and a great many more over time.

6. What documents should you prepare before applying?

Switching to professional mode is requested from your profile in the app, and it requires supporting documents. An association provides its declaration receipt and its RNA number. A company, or a club incorporated as one, provides its Kbis extract. A coach provides their qualification and their insurance certificate. An athlete provides their professional athlete card.

Our team checks those documents and activates professional mode within a few working days. Gather them before you submit the request and you will publish your first session the following week rather than the following month.

7. How do you make the most of your public page?

Your professional profile brings your entire programme together under your name or your organisation’s. It is the page a player will look at when hesitating between you and the club next door, and it works for you twenty-four hours a day.

Fill it in properly. A sharp photo of the hall, a description that states the exact address, the expected level and what is provided, a session title that can be read at a glance. Every new event you publish notifies your subscribers, which means the work you invest once in your page keeps producing bookings with every publication.

8. How do you cut down on no-shows?

The scourge of the badminton session organised among acquaintances is the player who cancels at six in the evening for an eight o’clock slot. You have paid for the court, you play three-a-side, and you lose on every count.

Ticketing solves that without you having to play the enforcer. The place is paid for at the moment of booking, so the player who does not turn up costs you nothing, and above all they turn up far more often. It is the most immediate benefit of moving to paid events, and it is frequently underestimated.

9. How do you offer several formats to the same community?

Once you have fifty or a hundred subscribers, the weekly session is no longer your only product. The Saturday morning clinic, the internal tournament on the last Friday of the month, the discovery session for beginners, the slot devoted to serve and drop shot technique all sell to the same audience, with the same publishing effort.

That is where the model changes scale. The first session is expensive to fill, the tenth fills on reputation, and the additional formats no longer have to recruit, they only have to convert.

10. How do you measure your fill rate?

A session that sells out in two days is either underpriced or too small. A session still half empty a week before the date is badly placed in the timetable, badly located, or badly described.

Look at those two indicators every cycle and correct one parameter at a time. The price, the time, the stated level, the venue. In three or four iterations you will have found the combination that fills, and you will be able to reproduce it on a second slot.

What to remember in one sentence?

You do not need a website, invoicing software or a launch budget. You need a court, a slot you actually keep, a level stated honestly and a ticketing system that collects the money in your place. The rest, meaning the community, is built session after session, and it belongs to you.

If you already coach badminton players, the request to switch to professional mode is made from your profile in the app. Zero euros to sign up, zero euros a month, ninety per cent of your ticket revenue.