Bound triples customer base while staying lean, cutting setup from 1 week to under 12 hours with Rubie

Bound is an all-in-one software platform with over 20 solutions designed to help athletic directors, activities directors, and schools simplify operations. Starting in Iowa, the company has expanded to over 25 states, serving high schools and middle schools with everything from scheduling and ticketing to activity registration and facility management.

As Data Team Manager, Lori Pleiness oversees 17 people. Her team is responsible for getting schools set up and running on the Bound platform. One of the most critical and time-consuming tasks was a new state setup: preparing a complete database of schools with mascots, colors, handles, and naming conventions before a single school customer could go live.

The process involved approximately 20 manual steps per school. Team members would take a raw spreadsheet of schools in a state, add 6-7 additional columns, then begin researching, Googling each school to find mascots, checking for duplicate slugs that would cause database errors, and manually formatting everything to meet Bound's naming conventions. Even after adopting ChatGPT and Claude, the team had to work in small batches to avoid hitting usage limits. The entire process took about a week per state, and when the sales team asked about the timeline, Lori's default answer was 2-3 weeks.

After initial meetings, it became clear that Rubie could solve the state setup problem. Lori shared the 20-step instruction document and showed what the final import spreadsheet needed to look like. The first playbook was born.

Now, instead of adding columns and manually researching each school, Lori downloads a raw state file, feeds it into Rubie, and receives completed data with all required fields, populated automatically. Rubie flags items it couldn't verify, and Lori runs a quick verification pass. The entire process for setting up three states simultaneously took less than 12 hours to get all the data into Bound to go live.

The team quickly expanded to additional use cases. A second playbook handles first-year schedule entry, a service Bound offers to top-tier subscribers. Schedules arrive in every format imaginable: PDFs, screenshots, documents, and occasionally bizarre spreadsheets with dates as rows and sports as columns. Rubie built a playbook that reformats any input into the correct import structure. When Lori tested the worst schedule format they'd ever received, the playbook processed it perfectly without modification.

A third playbook handles facilities and venues for Bound's facility management product. Schools have dozens of gyms, auditoriums, locker rooms, classrooms, outdoor fields, and other spaces that need to be imported. Lori provided a sample template and an example of what they typically receive; the playbook worked on the first try with zero iterations. Every subsequent test import has worked perfectly.

The most dramatic shift has been in sales velocity. When someone messages a new state name in Slack, Lori can often respond “already done” before the contract is even signed. The 2-3 week timeline that sales used to quote has been replaced with states going live within days. New York, Bound's first playbook, now has a section with 47 schools going live this fall.

The efficiency gains have enabled remarkable growth without proportional headcount increases. Over the past year Bound has over tripled their customers without tripling their data team staff. They've added a few people where necessary, but the core team of 17 continues to handle the increased workload. Rubie has been the key to staying lean while meeting onboarding deadlines.

The customer experience has also improved dramatically. Customers no longer hear “you have to wait for data”, it's done before they expect it. For schedule entry, a service that previously required manual entry of dozens of sports with 10-20 events each across multiple levels, the process now runs through Rubie automatically. Lori's team members are now excited to see which “new states” we are growing into.