📜 Startup Chronicles: 🏀 Kids sports in Luxembourg

My first side project after moving to Europe.

Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash

Problem

As an (English-speaking) parent who just moved to Luxembourg, I want to find and sign up my children for different sports activities, so that they can develop their skills and find new friends.

Story

Trying to scratch my own itch. Here is the situation that caused me to think about this problem. My 13 yo son was invited to participate in a swimming competition representing his school. After the event, he tells me that he really enjoyed freestyle swimming. As a parent, I want to encourage my children to try activities that are interesting to them. So, my immediate question was “Where can he go for swimming lessons/practice?”

After some searching around, I didn’t find any single place to get this simple answer. Additional complexity - the variety of spoken languages in the country. There are many clubs where their main language is German or French, which doesn’t work for us (at the moment). So, in addition to the proximity to our main locations (home, school), we also look for English-speaking clubs. Plus, different clubs have different age groups they train.

Considering how many international expats relocate to Luxembourg to work at big companies, there is a significant number of people in the same shoes. The way people solve a similar problem today is to ask the question in one of the expat Facebook groups. I tried this approach and it was quite underwhelming.

Solution

A directory of sports activities with filtering by child’s age, location, activity type, and spoken languages.

Status: In progress

This time, I wanted to try out a leaner approach with no-code tools. I “hired” my son to source data from a few places and punch the data into an Airtable table. Then, use one of the free visual builders to display data from that table as a filterable directory.

The main challenge is the data quality and lack of English content. So, my son had to send 100+ emails to the addresses he found online to gather data on the age groups and spoken languages. Still lots of gaps in data, and now I will be going through the gaps myself. I already purchased the .lu domain and set up the basic structure of the directory.

More data cleanup and website tweaking are needed, which is what I will be focusing on next. Stay tuned for the progress updates and metrics results that I will be sharing here.