New technology from startup ventures is transforming the global sports industry. This Startup Series has introduced over 300 startup companies in the sports technology space to a broader audience by allowing Founders of promising new ventures to tell their story and pitch their idea. Feel free to submit your startup’s answers to the below questions or contact us if you know of a startup that should be considered for inclusion in this series.
This series is supported by Stadia Ventures. If you are a sports technology startup looking for strategic investors, we recommend checking out their upcoming accelerator programs.
Company name: ZenSports
Founder(s): Mark Thomas, Karsh Kumar, Etan Mizrahi-Shalom
Headquarters: San Francisco, CA
1. What is your elevator pitch?
ZenSports is a social network for recreation and amateur sports that makes it easy for you to find and schedule matches with other individual players and teams near you, as well as find, register, and pay for leagues, tournaments, pickup games, and social sporting events.
2. Problem & Solution
There are over 52M people in the United States that play in recreation and amateur sports each year, and hundreds of millions of more worldwide. The current landscape for these players is extremely fragmented, and it’s very difficult to find and connect with other players and competitions in order to play and compete. Currently, anyone looking to play a pickup game of basketball or play in a tennis tournament has to use a combination of text, Facebook, or Meetup to find friends or new people to play with. There’s no quick and easy way to find other players in your area that are into the sports you’re into, and that you can instantly schedule a match or competition with.
In addition, there’s no software component with those other products to manage your competitions, such as brackets, match play results, etc.
From a broadcasting and going live perspective, the problem with Facebook Live and YouTube is that your sports live streaming gets lost in all of the other noise that those social networks have. With ZenSports, you know that the live streams that you’re getting notified about are 100% geared towards the sports that people that you’re following are playing. Similarly, when you broadcast your live stream, you know that your audience is 100% interested in watching you play sports. This kind of focus is crucial when it comes to targeted, relevant content.
Lastly, once your competition is over, there’s no central database that exists right now to manage all of the stats, ratings, and record keeping for recreation/amateur sports.
3. Market – your target market and the overall market
Our target market is the 52M people in the United States that play in recreation and amateur sports, and the hundreds of millions of more worldwide. These people spend billions every year on competition entry fees/dues and sporting equipment. It's a huge market.
4. Business Model – how do you make money?
We're not currently charging for our product, since we're a social network and discovery platform for amateur/recreational sports. However, there are several ways that we can monetize once we're ready to generate revenue:
1) Offer a marketplace where players can buy/sell sporting goods, and take 10% of the GMV. There's been an explosion in Facebook groups that allow for buying/selling of sporting equipment. We’ve had several users already ask for this feature.
2) Charge competition directors/organizers 10% of player entry fees and dues that are processed through ZenSports.
3) Charge facilities for helping players make reservations there when scheduling a competition or a match. We can recommend nearby facilities to hold a match or competition, allow the players to pay for a reservation through ZenSports, and then take a 10% cut before paying the facility.
4) Run competitions ourselves and keep all of the entry fees/dues. While it’s certainly more work than being purely a technology company, we would also get to keep a higher percentage of the entry fees/dues (from 20%-25% instead of 10%).
5) Ads. This can take several forms. Directors could pay to promote their competitions locally or nationwide. Sporting equipment manufacturers could accurately target their products to players within a given sport. We can also allow service providers, like coaches or trainers, to advertise their services.
5. Management Team – with titles
Mark Thomas - Co-Founder & CEO
Karsh Kumar - Co-Founder, CTO, & Chief iOS Engineer
Etan Mizrahi-Shalom - Co-Founder & Chief Android Engineer
6. Financial Needs: are you currently looking for investment? Have you raised investment already? If so, who are your investors?
We're going to begin fundraising on September 7, 2017 for a $1M seed round.
We've already raised a $215K Friends & Family round so far. Notable investors include Steven Fan from Tencent and Johnson Juanda - member of the Poker Hall of Fame. Mark Thomas has also invested in the company since he had a successful exit with his prior startup.
