New technology from startup ventures is transforming the global sports industry. This Startup Series has introduced over 200 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.
Company name: Freestyle King, LLC
Founder(s): Emily Root, Tomiwa Ogunsola
Headquarters: Washington DC
1. What is your elevator pitch?
Freestyle King is a mobile platform that is focused on bridging the gap between coach and player engagement outside of practice by allowing coaches to send personalized challenges to their players in the form of short videos.
2. Problem & Solution
There is no organized or easy way to engage and ensure players are training outside of practice. As of right now, coaches are stuck using unidirectional platforms to bring their players skill videos. Due to this ‘one way traffic’, coaches have no idea if players are actually putting in the time to learn these skills or concepts.
Our solution is to bring customization and creativity to our users. Freestyle King brings it all together by closing the gap from when a player leaves practice to when they return to practice. Coaches can create their own specialized challenges for their players, or they can use one of many challenges from our library. Once they have set the challenge parameters, they send it out for players to watch, practice, and record themselves doing the challenge. A coach can then review and provide feedback to their players. How easy does that sound?
3. Market – your target market and the overall market
Fans of the beautiful game are our initial target market. Since soccer (futbol, futebol or whatever name you choose to call it) is an inclusive game, we wanted to focus on including all kinds of fans– from the weekend warriors to the die-hard players. We do plan on expanding to other sports in the near future and are constantly developing and growing, so our demographic will develop as well.
4. Business Model – how do you make money?
Our vision is to be the go-to supplemental training platform for all competitive players, as well as other fans of soccer through our gamified approach. We currently have an annual subscription fee for our users who want full access to Freestyle King as well as a free version with limited but awesome features. In our future releases, users will receive ads in the form of challenges that will enhance their experiences rather than just being an annoying promo that they are subjected to.
5. Management Team
CEO – Tomiwa Ogunsola
CMO – Emily Root
Advisor – Paul Murphy
6. Anything else you want the audience to know about your venture?
Our goal is to foster creativity, for coaches and players. We wanted to make this a platform that puts the coaches and players first. Who knows a team better than the coach? This is why we left our platform very open so it could be personalized to fit our users’ needs. Freestyle King is just a valuable tool that creates an educational and competitive environment for players to continually develop. Our passion has, and will always be, player development and fun.