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 particular startup is part of the Hype Foundation.
Company name: Playerhunter GmbH
Founder(s): Stevan Radak and Vuk Živković
Headquarters: Vienna, Austria and Belgrade, Serbia
1. What is your elevator pitch?
Playerhunter is a freemium sports recruitment platform and social network enabling athletes, clubs and agents to meet and interact. This platform allows athletes to showcase their talents and abilities through their CV, video material and statistics, while managers and scouts have the opportunity to discover the players they need.
2. Problem & Solution
Young players from lower leagues lack a medium to market themselves, while managers and scouts are wasting time and money travelling and attending games for the first screening of potential players. With digitalization of the old-fashioned system of transfer services, players can enhance their visibility by showcasing their skills to managers and scouts, who can easily search for players they need and decrease the costs of identifying prospective players.
3. Market – your target market and the overall market
From the amount of 500+M playing team sports globally, 265M are playing soccer. There are less than 1% of professionals in the Premier League which is 115K, 15% or 40M players in the lower leagues and youths, while there is 85% or 225M organized amateur teams and occasional players. Primary users are players from the lower leagues and youths, where we see huge potential.
4. Business Model – how do you make money?
The development and testing of our platform has been funded through investments and we will use proceeds from the current financing round to aggressively market and reach a critical mass required for revenues to kick in from early 2018. Revenues from the third revenue stream can possibly kick in earlier. Revenues will be derived from premium profiles for clubs/agents and players, targeted advertising of sports products (e.g. Adidas, Nike, etc.) and football academy scholarships. In addition to revenues providing funds to grow PH, at the same time they will boost engagement and user accumulation.
5. Management Team – with titles
Stevan Radak (Co-founder & CEO) Responsible for strategic and business development, business ops, fundraising and investors relations. With 13 years in EMEA and global markets, worked in some of the largest European banking and financial advisory institutions.
Darko Mandic (CMO) Responsible for leading marketing, PR and growth activities. With 6 years of international experience in leading campaigns, brand management & business development, he became the youngest Executive Director in the region, at the age of 22.
Milan Gujanica (COO) Responsible for implementation of business strategy, overseeing operations of all teams in the company and the work of executives. With more than 10 years of experience in implementation of standards in start-ups, he’s an angel investor and serial entrepreneur, founder of several successful companies.
Dejan Keri (CTO) Responsible for product development activities and technical leadership. He’s a professional with strong experience in the tech industry, entrepreneurship and project/team leadership. With strong engineering background, he’s got more than 7 years of experience in software development.
Stefan Dobric (CFO) Responsible for finance, investor relations, fundraising and analysis. He has huge investment banking, corporate finance and business development experience.
Vuk Zivkovic (Co-Founder & Strategic Advisor) Responsible primarily for sales activities (cooperation with managers and others from sports industries). Former professional soccer player, entrepreneur and idea maker of Playerhunter.
Fredrik Haugan (Board Member Playerhunter GmbH, CEO Nordics, DACH and the U.K.) B.A. and MSc. in Financial Economics from the Norwegian School of Economics, he has 12 years of Investment Banking, Strategy and Business Development experience.
6. Anything else you want the audience to know about your venture?
Playerhunter team is passionate about developing sports industry not only because one of our Co-Founders was a professional football player and the other one was playing basketball in college, but also because all of the team members are in everyday touch with sports people listening to challenges in their sports careers. We’ve received an award from HYPE foundation, being selected as one of the Top 50 most innovative sports brands in the world. This has motivated us to work even harder to provide the best possible experience to our users. Becoming a kind of a LinkedIn for sports, Playerhunter will be able to connect all the stakeholders and help them achieve their goals. We are looking forward to connect with potential investors and cooperation partners that share our vision of digitalized solutions for sports career, as one of the most important drivers of the entire industry.