Wylas Timing provides automated timing systems to swim clubs so they can speed up their race meets, turning them back into fun events focused on the kids, rather than a stressful task for parent volunteers.
When William Feguson’s kids started school and joined the swim club, he became heavily involved as both president and chief recorder. As the club saw quick expansion, it faced growth issues.
“When my kids first started school and joined the program the club nights finished at 9pm. But with this growth they weren’t finishing until 11pm, which is extremely late for young children,” William says.
“This was leading to stress and frustration with the running of meets. Recording race times manually was inefficient and error prone, so I went looking for solutions.”
Unfortunately the solutions he found came back with a price tag of around $30,000, which was just too expensive for almost all clubs.
“Being a software developer, I decided to see how far I could get putting together my own solution. Two months later and I had a solid prototype that we were trialling at the club and seeing significant improvement with.
“The average time spent race recording halved from two minutes down to 60 seconds, meaning the length of the meets shortened and stress levels dropped. Suddenly we were enjoying the swimming again.”
A few surrounding clubs saw the system and wanted it too.
“After doing some numbers I realised it was a viable business if we went global, so I registered the name Wylas - a play on wireless, because we don’t run cables across the pool deck - and founded the business.
“Because our solution has put the smarts into the software and largely uses commodity hardware, we have been able to bring the price down to a point that every swim club is able to afford. An entry level system is less than $3000, which includes being able to turn any TV into a multi-lane results display board.
“Every kid gets to see their names up in lights, with the results being posted as soon as they hit the end of the pool.”
This month sees a big achievement for the Brisbane-founded company with the release of the Wave Touchpad, the world’s first wireless touchpad.
“There’s no longer any need to run cables through or across your pool deck, or deal with cable failures due to corrosion,” William says.
“We are already delivering our new product to three customers, including one international customer.”
The biggest challenge they are facing is getting the word out that there is a better and more affordable solution.
“We have a solution that provides all the bells and whistles of a high-end system, on a beer budget,” William says.
But they are making headway.
“When we exhibited at the 2018 FINA World Aquatics Convention in Hangzhou we were run off our feet for three days straight, while our competitors were twiddling their thumbs.
“That was a great high and was a good vindication that we are on the right path.”
The business has largely been bootstrapped but received $5,000 from the Lord Mayor's Global Entrepreneurship Fund, which has been used to help expand into the US and UK.
“Roughly 50% of our clients are now from overseas, which will continue to grow, with the natural next target for us being the US as its swimming market while different to Australia's has about the same penetration.”
