The cheque
Every summer the invoice arrives. One document, forty-odd line items, one number at the bottom that you pay in a lump before a single puck has dropped. It is, by a distance, the largest discretionary thing I buy in a year.
You don’t buy it for the maths. You buy it because you sat in those two seats last February with your father and it was a good night, and because the same forty people are around you every year, and because giving it up feels like giving something up.
But the maths is still there. Forty-one home dates. Work, travel, weeknights, a kid’s game at seven. I make maybe half. That is not a failure of enthusiasm, it’s a calendar. Everyone I know with seats says the same number.
Half the season is somebody else’s night. The only question is whose.
And that was never a sad thought. It was the best part of it. My brother gets a Tuesday. A client gets the good Saturday. Two guys from work get the one against the team they grew up on. The seats get used, someone has a night out, and I get back a piece of what the season cost me. That is the entire idea, and it worked fine for years.
What didn’t work was running it.
The spreadsheet
Here is the honest version of my system, held for roughly a decade: a spreadsheet with a row per game, a column for who has it, a column for what they paid, and a column I called “notes” that was really a graveyard of half-remembered conversations.
It was stale about four days into October. Somebody would text me on a Tuesday, I’d say yes, and I’d intend to update the sheet later. Later is a place things go to not happen. By December I had three sources of truth — the sheet, my texts, and my memory — and they disagreed with each other.
The specific failure that stung was promising the same night twice. It only happened a couple of times, and both times I sorted it out, and both times I felt like an idiot for a week. There is no version of “actually, sorry, I already gave that one to Dev” that isn’t a small humiliation.
The other failure was quieter. I would look at the sheet in March and have no real idea where I stood. Had I got half of it back? Two thirds? I’d paid one big number in August and collected thirty small ones since, in cash, e-transfer, and favours, and I could not have told you the answer within a couple of thousand dollars.
The switchboard
The thing nobody warns you about is that you become a switchboard.
Every person in your life who might want a game has to route through you, one at a time, in a text thread. They can’t see what’s free. They can’t see what someone else already took. So they ask. And because they can’t see it, they ask the same six questions, on six different days, in six different threads:
- “is the montreal game still open?”
- “how much for two on the 21st?”
- “did anyone take Wednesday? my brother’s in town”
- “something came up, I can’t do the 18th anymore”
- “anything next month?”
- “who has Friday?”
Nine messages in a normal week. One game actually placed. And frequently a seat still empty on the night in question, because the person who would have taken it asked me on Wednesday and I answered on Friday.
Then there is the money. Chasing an e-transfer from a friend is one of the more socially expensive things you can do. You send the first reminder as a joke. You send the second one as a slightly less funny joke. You never send the third, so you eat it, and then it sits between you for a bit.
None of this is hard. It’s just relentless.
Four in the afternoon
Every few weeks a game would arrive that I couldn’t attend and hadn’t got to anybody. Not because it was a bad game. Because it hadn’t come up, and nobody had asked, and I hadn’t looked at the sheet.
So at four in the afternoon I’d start texting. Neighbour. Cousin. The client who always says yes. Whoever picked up. Sometimes it worked. A lot of the time it was too late, because the people who would have loved that night had already made other plans by four in the afternoon on a Wednesday, the way adults do.
Those nights are the ones that actually bother me. Not the money — the money is annoying but it’s a known quantity. It’s that two seats I paid for sat empty in a full building while three people I know would have taken them in a heartbeat if they’d known thirty-six hours earlier.
That gap — between someone wanting the night and knowing the night exists — is the whole product. Everything else is bookkeeping.
What I actually wanted
I want to say clearly what I was after, because it isn’t what people assume when you say you built something for season seats.
I did not want a way to move tickets faster. I did not want a bigger audience. I did not want strangers. I already had the people — forty of them, easily, between family, work, clients, neighbours and a group chat that has been going since 2019. Demand was never my problem.
What I wanted was a single place that knew four things at once:
- Every game on my schedule, and what each one cost me
- Which nights I’m taking myself
- Who has each of the others
- Which ones still need somewhere to go, early enough to do something about it
That’s it. That’s the whole brief. Everything SZN does is one of those four things or a consequence of them.
If a night is still open a few days out, I want to be able to send it to my list in one action rather than starting a phone tree — that became SZN DROP. If somebody wants a specific game and I happen to have it free, I want that to be able to find me quietly without anything of mine being on display — that became SZN CALL. Both are the same idea from opposite ends: get the night to the person, without either of you doing the work of finding the other.
I stopped being the switchboard. That was the point.
What this isn’t
SZN is not a place where anyone shops. Your season is never published, indexed or searchable. There is no page a stranger can land on that shows what you have. Access to your games begins and ends with a link you sent to a person you chose.
SZN doesn’t set your prices. It shows you what a night cost you, from your own invoice, and then it gets out of the way. Half the nights on my own season go to people for nothing. The tool works identically either way, and if it only made sense for the games you charge for, I’d have built the wrong thing.
SZN never touches the money for a game. What you agree with someone is between the two of you, settled the way you already settle it. And SZN never holds a ticket — they stay in the ticket account you already have, and you send them the way you always have. SZN just knows whether you’ve done it yet.
That’s not modesty about the product. It’s the design. The moment a tool like this starts holding tickets or money, it becomes a different, worse, riskier thing — for you and for your relationship with the team you buy from. I hold seats too. I’m not building something that puts mine at risk, which means I’m not building something that puts yours at risk.
Running the season
The first thing SZN solves is getting games to people, because that’s the loudest pain and the one every holder recognises within about four seconds. But it isn’t the category.
The category is running the season. A season package is a small operation you’re accidentally in charge of for seven months: forty-one dates, a couple of dozen people, real money, an ongoing relationship with the team, and a set of promises you made in text threads. Right now almost everyone runs that operation on a spreadsheet and their memory, and everyone I’ve spoken to about it has the same slightly embarrassed laugh at exactly the same moment in the conversation.
Where it goes next is the parts of the season I haven’t solved yet. Splitting a package between partners without the September argument. Companies that hand seats to staff and clients and cannot say in April what the package returned. Same spine, different shape.
But the test I keep coming back to is a simple one, and it’s the one I’d ask you to hold this to.
If you gave every unused game away for free, this should still be worth having.
If it isn’t, I built a tool for moving tickets, and there are plenty of those. If it is, I built what I actually wanted ten seasons ago: a way to make sure the seats get used, by people I chose, without it turning into a second job.
AliSeason-seat holder
Ten seasons
Toronto