New technology from startup ventures is transforming the sports industry. The mission of our Startup Profile Series is to introduce startup companies in the sports technology space to a broader audience and allow founders of new ventures to tell their story. This particular article is profiling one of the ten startups in the Dodgers Accelerator with R/GA, which is culminating in a Demo Day on November 10th at Dodger Stadium.
Company: DoorStat
CEO: Cole Harper
Headquarters: Los Angeles, CA (with offices in Chicago, New York, and St. Louis)
1. What is your elevator pitch?
DoorStat collects and analyzes detailed customer demographic data through video-based software.
2. Problem & Solution
Businesses in every industry want to better understand their customer demographics. The problem is that surveys, transaction data, and high-level research efforts are often misleading, incomplete, or outdated. Our solution is to automatically analyze customers using passive, anonymous video-based software. DoorStat has the ability to assess the gender, age, ethnicity, and customer sentiment of every person in an area of interest.
3. Market – your target market and the overall market
We primarily target industries where there are inefficiencies to collect data on large crowds or a high volume of customers. These include sporting events, festivals, or busy properties that have dynamic customer behavior over periods of time. The overall market opportunity includes all businesses that want to know more about their customer behavior and demographic. These range from movie theaters, museums, and brand activations to convenience stores, car dealerships, and banks.
4. Business Model – how do you make money?
Most of our services are sold on a SaaS model with subscription fees. The businesses we work with don’t want to invest in hardware, knowing it will become outdated quickly. We agree with them. That’s why they can leverage our services to get a packaged solution where we deploy the technology, provide all the quality assurance, and analyze the insights on their behalf. We can also cover events in special circumstances where customers have a one-time need for data collection.
5. Management Team – with titles
Cole Harper – CEO
Alexander Eu – Principle
Mike Bommarito – CTO
6. Are there any new groundbreaking technologies coming soon that we should know about?
We have recently developed products that can automatically reconcile and audit our information to provide guaranteed accuracy. This is especially useful for machine learning and customers who make high-value decisions from our insights. We also have integrated into existing infrastructure (e.g. surveillance cameras) and social media services that already have collected or analyzed a number of images.
7. Why did you join the Dodgers Accelerator Program?
We joined the Dodger Accelerator with R/GA because we had an up-and-coming technology applicable to both the sports and retail industry, but did not have the strong network who could vet our service and improve it through case studies, mentorship, and of course, access to a tremendous network. The opportunity to spend time in Los Angeles and learn from many of the great companies and leaders on the West Coast has been humbling and inspirational. The Accelerator is supporting us and simultaneously forcing us to execute on a whole new level.
Bonus Questions
If you were able to invite any CEO to dinner who would it be?
If I were to invite any CEO to dinner, it would be Elon Musk. While there are a number of great leaders and entrepreneurs out there, no one is pushing the limits more than Elon. He doesn’t just have aspirations for the globe with solar panels and driverless cars. No, his goals include the colonization of Mars with at least 80,000 people in the next 25 years! I’d love to pick his brain on his views of the future of business, technology, and society as a whole. I’m a firm believer that you have to understand the problems of tomorrow to build a great product or service for today.
If you could attend any sporting event, what would it be and why?
If I were to go to any sporting event, it would be a St. Louis Blues Stanley Cup home clincher. The Blues made the playoffs 25 straight years and have never won a Stanley Cup. While my hometown city has been spoiled by the baseball Cardinals and briefly by Kurt Warner’s football Rams, we’ve been tormented by years of frustration and letdowns from promising teams. Even though many of my friends in Chicago would prefer a World Series clincher at Wrigley for the Cubs, I can’t possibly rank that ahead of the Blues out of respect for our new partners, the Los Angeles Dodgers.
