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.
Company: Eyeball Inc.
CEO: Jay Steele, CTO: Shaun Johansen
Headquarters: Halifax, Canada
1. What is your elevator pitch?
As the amateur sports industry booms, so does the need for coaches, parents and players to better organize around it. Scheduling practices, coordinating carpooling, tracking stats and countless other details for each team can be daunting for already-busy coaches, parents and players.
Enter Eyeball, an online community and app that helps coaches, fans and players communicate, coordinate and celebrate amateur sports at any time and from any location. With features such as instant chat and real-time scorekeeping, the company’s app helps update the user community on everything from game or practice time changes to which team is winning a tournament.
2. Problem & Solution
We saw a need in the amateur sports industry to improve communication between parents, coaches and kids, especially for busy working parents. More than 50 percent of the American population is involved in some way with amateur sports, but there is nothing that provides a complete set of solutions required for sports organizations in the digital age. Additionally, the solutions often focus on the administration and management of sports, instead of the important things: cheering, celebrating and communicating. The fun stuff.
We explored existing sports-based publishing platforms and found that they are typically built on outdated technology and operate almost strictly as tools for team managers to communicate schedules and results. Existing social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter can reach broad audiences, but are ineffective at publishing sports-related information like scores and stats.
Eyeball bridges these worlds into one cohesive platform. Users can chat privately within their teams, cheer on a team’s public channel, keep live score at any event, post digital play-by-play, and share all of it on social media channels of their choice.
3. Market – your target market and the overall market
Our target market is North American organized amateur sports clubs and associations, and our overall user base consists of the people running those organizations combined with the athletes, parents and fans.
4. Business Model – how do you make money?
Our freemium model allows users and organizations to use the service at an entry level for free.
The service will be tiered with premium features that users and organizations can pay for.
5. Management Team – with titles
Jay Steele: CEO
Shaun Johansen: CTO
Bonus Questions:
If you were to invite any CEO to dinner who would it be and why?
Jay – Andy Grove, since he was the original master of market disruption.
Shaun – Elon Musk, because he’s a mad scientist.
If you could go to any sporting event, what would it be and why?
Jay – Without question, anything my daughters are participating in. Otherwise, I bleed Toronto Maple Leafs blue.
Shaun – I’d love to have been at “The Shot”