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: Koachify
CEO: Troy Ruediger
Headquarters: New York, NY
1. What is your elevator pitch?
Koachify is a sports-based management and organizational platform, providing coaches and teams with modern technological solutions to everyday mundane tasks. At its core, Koachify is a suite of tools surrounding scheduling, communication, and tracking that’s built to help streamline success both on and off the field.
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2. Problem & Solution
Coaches have largely become pigeonholed into archaic systems of communication and analytics, forcing them to spend valuable time on these simple exhausting tasks. An inherently analytically-oriented field, the overwhelming lack of tools existing for sports-based management and organization at the larger team level is striking. With so much attention paid to statistical and analytical tracking of players (player stats, division rankings, projections, etc.) one would think that the same degree of attention should be given to the organizational side as well; streamlining organizational efficiencies presents a major driver for team-wide success, as successful team management translates to equal success and productivity with relation to the individual players.
An initial suite of proprietary tools centered around communication, scheduling, and statistical tracking streamline the presently time-consuming task-oriented routines the average coach currently endures on a daily basis and provides the basic lines of development necessary within individual organizations to drive Koachify to become a technological juggernaut within the sports world.
Communication integrations include products allowing for the creation of discrete groups to facilitate inter-team communication (e.g. for a football team, it’s easy to imagine the immediate benefits of having groups like “special teams” and “offense”), as well as an instant-messaging client. Scheduling simplification revolves around the ability for the coach to live-edit the team schedule, send push notifications to all relevant players, and also view his players’ individual schedules to provide transparency into the typical over-scheduling issues which arise for every team.
Overall ease of roster management combined with analytical and statistical tracking (both at the team-level as well as the level of the individual) and various widgets designed to provide visibility for our end-user into the status of his team give the coaches and players another leg-up on their competition while allowing them to better prepare and develop themselves.
3. Market
Koachify is planning to have a total of 25 teams on board using our platform by our January 1 release. Our target market currently centers around American High-School and Collegiate Football teams, and will look to expand to over a 100-team platform within the first 6 months of our Beta Release. The overall market for American Football at these levels is huge, and by our calculations consists of almost 15,000 teams (mainly high-school teams).
Such an overwhelmingly large market allows our platform to flourish and prosper before even crack into the upper-tier collegiate divisions, and allows us to focus on players in early-stage development levels as they will be the ones which will see a much more impactful response to the platform.
4. Business Model
Our initial release of the platform is currently slated for January 1 and will be an invitation-only free Beta in which we will test the platform with 25-50 teams and gather detailed user feedback. Once we have updated the platform following the first round Beta Release and development of both Android and ioS apps, we will begin to use a tiered pricing structure for the platform as a subscription based service, increasing the amount charged to customers at the team-level as product development accelerates.
Under this SaaS business model, team contracts will include a yearly subscription granting usage rights for the platform and will be broken down into both in-season and off-season models.
5. Management Team
Troy Ruediger – Founder/CEO
Troy is a sports and entertainment management major from the University of South Carolina. He is a lifetime athlete in a number of sports including over 10 years of football experience playing one year of D3 college football at Shenandoah University. Troy brings a full roster of contacts to the platform, including everything from recreation league directors to NFL athletes and will be working directly with our teams to constantly gather feedback and continue to improve the product.
Bobby Steinbach – Co-Founder/CTO (Chief Technology Officer)
Bobby holds a degree in Computer and Information Science from Northeastern University. With his extensive experience building web, Android, and iOS apps, he is the architect of our entire platform, from front-end application all the way to back-end systems management.
Travis Lydon – Co-Founder/CPO (Chief Product Officer)
Travis is an Architectural Designer from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with a diverse background in all phases of design. Drawing on a deep personal interest in Industrial Design, he has always been intrigued by personal wearables and will be a unique asset when Koachify makes the foray into hardware design and prototyping of components.
6. What else do you want the audience to know about your venture?
Koachify was just accepted into the 2015 Fall Cohort of Startup Next in NYC. It’s a pre accelerator that was just recently bought by Techstars. It’s geared towards getting early stage startups off their feet, with the end result being early stage investment or acceptance into an accelerator. We are one of 4 other companies that were accepted and we couldn’t be more excited to be apart of the talented group.
We are working very hard to get our product to market as soon as possible and in the hands of as many coaches as possible. We have made tremendous strides on all fronts in just a short amount of time, we are very confident that Startup Next will only bring us along that much quicker.
We are an ambitious group of individuals that want to change the way coaches and players interact at a fundamental level. If you are a coach or player at any level (high-school, collegiate, professional, or even recreational), we want you to join our team and help us build the future of sports. We are very confident that the integration of technology and sports is an industry that is destined to see rapid growth in the near future. We are working very hard to place ourselves on the forefront of that revolution.
Bonus questions:
If you were to invite any CEO to dinner who would it be and why?
Without a doubt would have to be Stewart Butterfield, CEO of Slack. What he has been able to do with Slack in just a very short amount of time is incredible. I would have never thought people could LOVE a communication tool as much as people love slack. He really has changed the game for a lot of SaaS businesses.
Aside from the explosion of growth they have seen, the story of how Slack came to be is pretty interesting. It was basically built for inter-team communications for a different failed startup of Stewarts. After the startup failed they realised the potential of the communication tool they built (what is now Slack) and decided to run with it. He obviously knows what he is doing and I could imagine a dinner with him could be pretty enlightening.
If you could go to any sporting event, what would it be and why?
Since I was a little I have always wanted to attend the Super Bowl. The excitement that surrounds that game is incredible. A buddy of mine that I grew up with was playing for the Seahawks when they won the superbowl in 2013. I will forever regret not going to that game until the day I make it to a Super Bowl.