Why I Built CageList

CageList started with a batting cage I felt weird using. Not mine — a buddy's. He had a great setup in his backyard and he was generous enough to let me bring players by. But every time I did, something about it bugged me, and that feeling is the reason this whole company exists.

The twenty dollars I couldn't give away

I knew a couple of guys with cages, and they were cool about letting me use them. I'd hit there, or run a lesson for someone's kid, and I was grateful. But it never quite sat right. Their family was inside the house. I was out back taking up their space and their time, and I had no real way to make it fair. I remember thinking, over and over, "Man, I just wish I could hand him twenty bucks and not feel weird about it." I basically offered. He wouldn't take it.

That's a small moment, but it stuck with me, because I realized the awkwardness wasn't about the money — it was that there was no system for it. If that cage had simply been listed for rent on a marketplace, none of it would have been strange. He'd have been happy to let me hit for a fair fee, I'd have been happy to pay it, and a great cage that sat empty most of the week would actually have been getting used. Everybody wins, and nobody feels weird. The second I saw it that clearly, I couldn't unsee it.

The supply was already out there

Here's what convinced me it would work: the cages already exist. All over the country there are incredible backyard and private cages sitting idle six days a week while, a few streets over, a kid has nowhere to take swings and a coach is driving around town trying to find open time. It doesn't make sense. It never made sense. The supply is real — it's just been locked up, unlisted, and invisible.

I figured if I could get enough of those cages onto one marketplace and prove the model worked, we could genuinely own this category. So I started. Around COVID I was basically blasting Facebook to land my first handful of users, and honestly, things stayed slow and fragmented for a long time. But I never gave up on it, because the core idea was too obviously right to walk away from.

Who I built it for

I didn't build CageList for one type of person. I built it for all of us: the private coach like me who just needs somewhere to run a lesson; the baseball parent driving all over and paying too much just to get their kid reps; the player who wants to grind but has no place to hit; and the cage owner sitting on a setup that could be earning income and helping their community at the same time. It works because it's two-sided — the person who needs to hit and the person with the empty cage were always meant to find each other.

The one non-negotiable is that we do it responsibly. A cage — especially one with a pitching machine — deserves respect and a community that's smart and safety-first about how it gets used. Get that right, and there's no reason more people shouldn't be able to find a place to train whenever they want.

Where it goes from here

Turning an idle cage into income is just the start. We're connecting hitters to cages, coaches to space, and now owners to the setups they can put to work — and even to the builders who can help create more great cages in the first place. If you've got a cage, you can see what it could earn. If you just want to hit, we're building this so you always have somewhere to go.

It took one slightly awkward favor in a friend's backyard to see the whole thing. I'm just glad I didn't let it go.

— Isaac Hess, Founder of CageList