SportTechie Startup Profile Series: Dasdak Turns Stadium Mobile Services Into Mobile Sales

New technology from startup ventures is transforming the sports industry. The mission of this series will be to introduce startup companies in the sports technology space to a broader audience and allow Founders of promising new ventures to tell their story. Feel free to contact us if you know of a startup that should be considered for this series.

Company: Dasdak, Inc.

CEO: Swaptak Das

Headquarters: Alexandria, VA

 1. Elevator pitch 

Dasdak is focused on generating new revenue for our clients through mobile services. The most popular service we offer is mobile ordering for food & beverage delivery to your seat.  However, our clients are using multiple mobile solutions that generate new revenue for the team or venue. With most clients, our goal is to generate over $1 million in new mobile sales.  What’s unique about Dasdak is that we guarantee profitability for all of our clients.  In fact, we do not charge an upfront licensing fee. Our mobile services are designed to enhance the fan experience, generate new revenue, improve the team’s app usage, and identify anonymous fans at the venue or those watching at home.  Due to our success generating new sales and traction, many of our existing clients are expanding their relationship with Dasdak for 2016. Our current clients include the Washington Redskins, New Orleans Saints, DC United, DC Convention Center, and the New Orleans Pelicans to name a few.  

2. Problem & solution

Fans do not want to miss any of the game and many times they have to wait in multiple lines to get everything they want to purchase.  Furthermore, if you have children, it can be very difficult to manage them while you wait in a long line.  

Our system offers hundreds of items on the menu that you can order for delivery to your seat in minutes.  This enable fans to skip multiple lines to purchase exactly what they want.  

For our client’s, our service enables them to offer new services to enhance the fan experience in order to attract more fans to the stadium.  They are also able to generate new revenue from sales lost to long lines.  The average customer spend is over $40-$56 and at many client sites, that is 300-500% greater than the per cap spent at concessions stands.  We also have a number of other solutions that engage fans at the parking lot, inside the venue, at home, during away games, and even in the off season.  

Driving Profits through Data

Dasdak is identifying anonymous fans to drive ticket sales, sell dark suites, and monetize their TV/stadium audience etc. 

At some client sites, up to 80% or more fans in attendance and 100% of the TV audience are anonymous fans or unknown to the team.  Identifying these anonymous fans is really important to our clients because they are the most likely to buy tickets, 10 games packages, or suites in the future. 

Dasdak has identified these fans, their contact information, where they like to sit, how often they come to the venue (or watch the game on TV), and what they like to eat. We are working closely with our clients Chief Revenue Officer to help their ticket sales team to drive ticket and suite sales. We are working with the marketing department to monetize the TV audience.   

Please refer to the sample data set, Dasdak Sample Customer Retention Report, that we provide to our clients to help identify anonymous fans.  The first few pages are a summary, and then we provide a detailed report on each customer.  

We don’t just provide the data, we work with our clients to:

1. Convert individual ticket holders into season ticket holders
2. Sell more individual tickets
3. Provide greater value to the customer to win the customer’s business away from the secondary markets such as Stubhub.  
4. Fill dark suites
5. Convert TV viewers into ticket buyers and app users
6. Increase the mobile app usage and monetize through advertisers
7. Create a single sign-on to identify/track all fans at any POS terminal, web purchase, app usage, ticket office, web browsing of content, and TV viewers.

There is no upfront costs/risks to the projects as we do the work and share in the new revenue we generate. 

  3. Market – your target market and the overall market

Stadiums, airports, universities, hotels/casinos, convention centers.

4. Business Model – how do you make money?

We have two models, a Licensing model and a Full-service model.  With both models, there is no upfront or licensing fee to our clients.  For the License model, we charge the customer a service fee that Dasdak receives.  This model is generally used for convention centers, hotels, casinos etc. where the volume of mobile orders is manageable.

For high volume clients, such as professional sports venues and airports, we either train the client’s employees or our subcontractor provides the execution.  In this model, we pay the sales tax and then we pay our clients first to guarantee their profits.  

We also generate revenue for our clients and Dasdak through advertising and fan engagement.  

5. Management Team

Swaptak Das – Founder

Panutat Khunachak – Founder & CIO

Matt Dumblauskas – VP of Operations

6. What else do you want the audience to know about your company?

The truth is that a lot of venues have tried and failed to offer food and beverage mobile ordering delivery in a profitable model.  Some are on their second or third solution that is failing.  Either the mobile sales are very low, or the software/model is not profitable.  In the end, the client and concessionaire have to do a lot of work and often lose money.  Therefore, we hope to get our message out to other potential clients on how we are generating significant new revenue for clients with little or no risk to them.  We pay them first, well actually second after paying the government sales tax. Furthermore, we hope to communicate that although there are a few companies that claim they provide mobile ordering, there is only one company that has the sales/traction who can also guarantee profitability for all parties.  The most frustrating thing about the mobile ordering industry is that it has been sullied by a number of other companies promising success, but charging an unreasonable licensing fee up front with no guarantee of performance or success.  Unfortunately, this is true for a number of tech companies in the sports industry.  

For our clients, we solve a number of pain points:

1. We add new services that dramatically enhances the fan experience.
2. We are on site to guarantee our solutions work and that it is profitable.
3. A little known fact is that most team apps do not generate regular traffic. We help teams generate regular traffic to monetize through advertising and engagement.    
4. We are one of the largest producers of useful data for our clients that can be more valuable and profitable than the sales and profits we generate from food, beverage, parking, and merchandise sales.  We work with our clients to help them mine and monetize the data in a number of ways.  Due to our success, we have a long-term relationship with all of our clients.   

Future milestones and goals

1. Many of our current clients are planning big expansions with Dasdak in 2016. We want to focus and execute well as it presents a big growth opportunity for us.
2. We have a strong pipeline and we want to add more clients.
3. A number of big companies have reached out to Dasdak to conduct their due diligence on our ability to generate new revenue and profits for clients.  After conducting their due diligence, all 13 companies have established strategic partnerships with Dasdak and many include our services in their proposals to clients. We want to pursue opportunities with our strategic partners.  There is one project with a tech giant that is very interesting, could be transformative for the sports industry, and it is exciting to be a part of.
4. We have never raised money and we are poised to grow.  We are hoping to do our first raise to fund our growth.