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The first half of the year has been a time of big changes at Thril. In February we closed a €0.6 million pre-seed round, which transformed life at Thril in more ways than one. The team doubled in size, we moved into our own office on Unioninkatu in Helsinki, and pretty much everything else grew along with it. In the whirl of a growing company, life gets raised to a power.
Growth, raised to a power
Living through the growth leap that follows a funding round is exhilarating. More happens around you than before, and the company’s growing credibility opens doors that were closed a year ago.
The changes have their shadow side, too. The amount of work that doesn’t directly create value grows enormously, and holding on to focus gets harder at exactly the moment you need it most. As the volume of work grows, responsibility spreads wider than before, which makes culture all the more important. In the very earliest days, culture more or less forms by itself. Keeping that same small, action-oriented atmosphere alive as the team grows takes actual work.
Spring’s most important build
In a software company you can iterate on almost everything. The wrong feature gets fixed in the next release, the wrong price gets changed in the price list, the wrong message gets rewritten. Hiring is the exception: in a ten-person team, one new person is 10 percent of the company’s culture, and you live with that decision for years.
That is why spring’s most important build was nearly doubling the size of the team from the start of the year. In March and April we spent an exceptional amount of time making sure we brought in the most capable people we could find to support both growth and technical development. Now that the training wheels of the first few months are off, it is fair to say we landed some outstanding people.
To lead international expansion we hired Lauri Golnick, who previously ran Foodora’s market launches in Finland. Lauri has quickly become a cornerstone of the growth team, coaching the rest of the team toward new heights alongside his own sales work. Nelli Tamminen joined the sales team and, inspired by her own CrossFit background, has taken firm ownership of building out Thril’s group fitness sector. On the technical side we brought in Roni Äikäs, who from day one has actively put his own ideas forward and then gone and built them, and Benjamin Misini, who single-handedly solved the testing bottleneck that had been holding back product development earlier in the year.
The fruits of these hires are only starting to materialise, but it strongly looks like the recruiting behind this growth leap was a success.
Almost a million impressions, zero shortcuts
Alongside hiring, March was all about marketing, as Thril came out of stealth on LinkedIn. At the same time we ran our first large marketing campaigns to get everything we could out of the visibility. Over the course of March, Thril racked up close to a million impressions, which made the scale of the project concrete inside the team as well.
It still came as a mild surprise that significant visibility did not accelerate sales much at all. Our thesis that visibility for the Thril marketplace also works in our customers’ favour clearly had not yet reached the level where it could lift growth to the next stage.
What the data did surface was a different pattern: large accounts are by far the most effective source of growth. Not only because they bring the most payment volume themselves, but because they bring the most users, and those users are of interest to the smaller operators in the region too. Decision-making at these venues is slow and the bar is high, but winning one makes the next ones easier.
That observation defined the rest of the spring: product development moved the things the market’s biggest players were asking of us to the top of the list.
A software company meets a screwdriver
In practice that meant two things: our own point-of-sale system, Thril POS, and our access control system, Thrilock. Both include physical components, which posed a new kind of challenge for a company that had only ever built software. Cables, voltages and lock bodies were not part of the spring’s planned curriculum, but we got through it: both solutions are now in use with customers.
Alongside those we released, among other things, sales of services and coaching, courses with waiting lists, and the Netvisor integration, which was one of the most requested features among our customers. All in all, the half-year included over 250 production releases and more than 1,400 pull requests shipped to production.
Speed and what it costs
The development team’s monthly output grew by roughly 50% from the first quarter to the second. Our pace has stayed at the Elite tier of the DORA framework throughout the half-year, and in LinearB’s benchmarking the team ranks among the most efficient companies in the software industry as a whole.
That increase in pace is the sum of many factors, but the most significant driver is our use of AI in support of development. Over 90% of the code the team produces is now written by AI, every implementation is reviewed through AI before it goes to production, and when a new fix request comes in, an agent first attempts to break down and solve the problem independently before it reaches a developer. On top of that, we have automated sales processes, reporting and a number of internal administrative tasks with AI. The trend continues: we now hold an AI Hackday once a month, where everyone at Thril automates one process that weighs on their own working days. The guiding idea is ”automate everything”.
That speed did come with some tuition fees. When AI makes it possible to build large features to something close to working order in a very short time, the weight of planning shifts further toward the front of the process. Some of the spring’s larger features started off on too thin a plan, which led to a long period of refinement. That was a burden both on the team and on the customers waiting for those features. We developed our planning and work organisation processes considerably over the spring: large features are now planned and broken down more carefully before the first line of code, progress is tracked more regularly, and timelines are clear on smaller pieces of work too. The results of those changes are already visible in the numbers. Over the course of the half-year, development work broke into smaller pieces that reached production faster than before.
We also made our infrastructure more efficient during the spring: we migrated our services to a new, largely self-managed server environment. The change cut server costs to roughly a tenth of what they were and gave the team more control over optimising the environment. Thril was also selected for the NVIDIA Inception and AWS Activate programmes, as well as the EU Interreg-funded GSAI growth programme, all of which support scaling up our AI development.
The numbers point the way
Over the first half of the year, the number of sports venues on Thril more than doubled and annual recurring revenue grew by over 300%.
Several significant anchor customers joined Thril, among them Poropadel, Padelkeskus, Pego Golf School, Hutunki and PadelMarina, whose presence alone has pushed the platform forward enormously.
In the middle of all that growth, we have also managed to take care of our customers: by the end of the first half of the year, not a single customer had left the platform, which is a very significant achievement. As for why that is, you can read about it in the customer stories of Pallohai, Olybet Golf Arena, Bella Golf and Gaia Studios among others.
The lines between sports are blurring
In simulator golf, we estimate that Thril has already grown into one of the largest booking platforms in our home market, and at the current pace it looks like the same will soon be true of several other sport sectors.
During the spring we opened up new territory in group fitness. Over the first half of the year several pilates and yoga businesses joined Thril, and after them the platform welcomed its first CrossFit gym as well. This is Thril’s core thesis in practice. The fitness market is becoming multi-sport, with court time, courses, coaching and retail products all sold under one roof, yet the majority of the industry’s systems are built around the logic of a single sport. We are building a platform that serves the customer regardless of sport or size.
Beyond Finland, expansion has begun in the Baltics and in Sweden. The longer-term goal is clear: Thril will become Europe’s leading management platform for sports venues.
The next floor: AI in the product
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Now that the requirements of the market’s largest players have been shipped, AI is moving up to become a product development priority as well.
As in many other industries, the days of businesses in the fitness sector are filled with manual and semi-manual processes that can be solved with AI. We have built a highly capable booking system that is nonetheless young enough in its development that it is still possible to build an AI layer into it in something close to a native way. Not as a separate feature in a menu, then, but as a way of using the entire system.
In practice, a customer can carry out any action possible in Thril through AI, or set that action as part of an automation pipeline, at which point a venue’s day-to-day routines start taking care of themselves without manual work. Later this summer we will also open up our API and release MCP support, so that our customers can build their own solutions on top of Thril.
There is also a whole raft of other features and updates in the works to make the platform more efficient and easier to use, and they are being completed faster than ever before.
And about that culture
Growth and the distribution of responsibility that comes with it is inspiring, but as the ropes slip from your own hands into someone else’s, it is also a little frightening. Culture is the single strongest factor in keeping the bow of the ship pointed in the right direction, even when nobody can know everything about everything. Looking at what was achieved during the first half of the year, and at how much stretching the changes demanded, it is satisfying to note that the atmosphere of the early days is still very much present.
Want to see what Thril looks like in the day-to-day life of your own venue? Book a demo — we’ll walk through the processes at your specific location.
Juuso Hirsimäki, Co-Founder & CEO, Thril
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