How ScorePlay uses Hyperline to minimize billing efforts

A conversation with Peter Starr, Revenue Operations from ScorePlay.

About ScorePlay

Based in New York, ScorePlay is a sports tech startup that uses AI and workflow automation to help professional sports organizations manage and distribute their media assets more effectively. The company provides a suite of products designed to automate media workflows, grow brands, and unlock new revenue streams for sports organizations.

ScorePlay offers a digital, media and production asset management platform specifically designed for sports organizations by experts in the sports industry. Using a design-thinking approach, ScorePlay developed a tool that understands and automates the workflows of sports organizations. The platform connects every stakeholder in the sports ecosystem, including athletes, clubs, leagues, broadcasters, and sports brands, through automated content management and delivery. Notable clients include Inter Miami, AS Monaco, and the Swiss Football League.

Custom pricing for custom needs

In developing their pricing model, the ScorePlay team initially tried a tiered pricing approach with packages based on storage and feature needs. While this model worked for smaller customers, larger clients required a more modular approach. ScorePlay now offers a customizable pricing model, allowing clients to select and combine various modules based on their specific needs.

“Initially, we tried to standardize our pricing model with plans and packaged offers, but it didn't work because the needs and willingness to pay varied so much from one client to another", shares Peter, Revenue Ops and an early employee at ScorePlay.

From manual and painful to automated and smooth billing

After managing billing manually for several months, the team decided to use their previous payment provider to handle their billing. "At that time, it was more of a reflex than a well-considered decision, and we quickly realized it was a mistake", Peter confides.

The limitations of this solution for managing such a custom pricing model soon became apparent: an ever-growing product catalog, poor email reminders feature, difficulty managing purchase orders, and poor handling of retroactive subscriptions.

"It clearly didn't meet our needs for custom enterprise deals. Our sales team ended up creating a new product for each client, and I spent my days on the platform trying to track payments and restore order."

Another significant challenge the team faced was payment delays from their clients. "We operate in an industry with notoriously late payers", says Peter. The difficulty in tracking payments and following up with late-paying clients had a considerable impact on the teams, leading to delays in sales commissions.

As ScorePlay undertook a major project to revamp their tool stack, they took the opportunity to address their current billing process, which was time-consuming, inefficient, and painful for the revenue ops teams.

Finding the right tool to spend less time on billing

Choosing Hyperline

Various options were considered:

Option 1: Turning to established (but rigid) players like Chargebee and Maxio.
The ScorePlay team quickly realized the lack of support and human assistance, the high cost of these solutions, and their impersonal nature.

Option 2: Continuing with their current limited solution and struggling with repetitive, low-value tasks, and even considering hiring a full-time person to manage it all.
ScorePlay quickly understood this wasn't a viable solution. "This solution was designed for tech teams first" adds Peter.

After evaluating several market solutions, the conclusion was clear: Hyperline was the only platform that adequately met ScorePlay's flexibility needs for managing their highly modular enterprise deals.

Using Hyperline

Less time spent on billing

“Since switching to Hyperline, I spend so much less time on billing, it has changed my daily routine! I've set everything up well, and now I almost never need to log into the platform - and that's the highest compliment I could give you!”

Quality support from onboarding to customer service

“The Hyperline team guided me through the tool with dedicated onboarding sessions, setting up the tool and rethinking our process through Hubspot - really easy! The support responsiveness is extraordinary, with someone answering us within minutes if needed.”

A simple, plug-and-play solution designed for Ops teams

“The big advantage of Hyperline is its plug-and-play nature. The platform is extremely simple (in a good way) and I could handle everything myself without bothering my tech team with billing. It's clear the platform was designed for finance and ops teams!”

Differentiating features for Finance teams

“Beyond the flexibility of the billing engine, I really appreciate the added product features designed for daily financial operations. For example, the email reminders have been game-changing for us in minimizing client payment delays.”

A flexible and scalable platform

"Our pricing works well today, but we know we'll test adding usage-based pricing for our storage in the future. It's reassuring to know that Hyperline is flexible enough to scale with us and allows us freedom in our pricing iterations."

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