Club membership tracking + auto-drafting for small hobby retailers

Executive Summary

Small hobby retailers—game stores, board‑game cafés, climbing gyms, and craft shops—are increasingly selling memberships and running events but struggle to manage member lists, recurring billing, and seat reservations with small staffs and general-purpose tools. Across an estimated 4,000,000 potential membership‑enabled small businesses this creates missed recurring revenue and outsized administrative overhead for shops that often operate with fewer than 10 employees. You could build a lightweight B2B SaaS that combines membership management, auto‑drafting (card‑on‑file recurring billing via Stripe/Square integrations), event/reservation coordination, and simple retention analytics into a single dashboard tailored for non‑technical owners, targeting roughly $300 ACV per customer. Core features would include tiered memberships, automated renewal and dunning flows, POS and calendar sync, and white‑glove onboarding to reduce friction for merchants without dedicated billing teams. Timing is favorable: embedded payments and subscription tooling from Stripe and Square have lowered the technical barrier, and the community‑commerce trend means more small retailers are monetizing experiences; the addressable market is roughly $1.2B, with a Market Score of 90/100 and Revenue Potential of 76/100. That said, competition is medium, merchant CACs can be high, and payments risk (chargebacks, failed cards) and regulatory compliance are nontrivial operational challenges. To stand out you would need deep vertical UX, tight POS and booking integrations, simple but robust auto‑draft and compliance tooling, and channel partnerships (distributors, trade associations) to keep acquisition costs down while proving higher retention and expansion beyond the initial $300 ACV.