New technology from startup ventures is transforming the global sports industry. The mission of this series is to introduce startup companies in the sports technology space to a broader audience and allow 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: PLT4M
Founder(s): Sam Breslin, Alex Relph
Headquarters: Boston, MA
1. What is your elevator pitch?
PLT4M is a cloud-based strength and conditioning platform that is transforming the training experience at the high school level by providing the highest quality training programs at an affordable price, and supplementing those programs with an online management system that saves coaches time and boosts athlete engagement.
2. Problem & Solution
There are two fundamental problems when it comes to training at the high school level.
First, on the coach’s side, the vast majority of high school coaches are not certified strength coaches, yet they are tasked with the burden of providing training to all their athletes. That’s a huge ask! The PLT4M system delivers professionally built programs specifically tailored for each school based on their equipment input, reducing the knowledge burden placed on coaches. For schools lucky enough to have a qualified strength coach who wants more control over programming, we offer the ability to either customize our existing programs or integrate their own onto our platform. Regardless of the programs they ultimately use, our cloud-based system is equipped with an array of management tools that make it easy to manage training for hundreds of athletes, track all the relevant data, and analyze what your athletes are doing on a day to day basis.
The second issue is that today’s high school student-athlete expects more from their training experience. That is to say that the old-school approach of pen and paper and whiteboards isn’t going to generate the level of athlete participation and engagement coaches are looking for. We deliver training to athletes through a medium they understand: their smartphones and tablets. By doing this, we can place a professional strength coach in every kid’s hand, improving safety and effectiveness while boosting engagement.
3. Market – your target market and the overall market
We are heavily focused on winning at the high school level, though we do have some colleges using our software. Our first few years we focused exclusively on sports teams and athletic departments, but we are now branching into Physical Education as well after discovering that 50% of our users were using our system in their PE classes. One of the unique things about our PLT4M is that teachers and coaches can all work together through our platform to efficiently manage and monitor training for multi-sport athletes and PE students, building a school wide approach to training.
4. Business Model – how do you make money?
We provide annual subscriptions at three price points:
$400 (Under 50 Athletes)
$800 (Under 100 Athletes)
$1,200 (101-1,000 Athletes)
5. Management Team – with titles
Alex Relph- Co-Founder
Sam Breslin – Co-Founder
6. What else do you want the audience to know about your venture?
Our entire team consists of former athletes who have spent time coaching and teaching at the high school level. We founded this company as a passion project to solve issues that we experienced on a daily attempting to train our athletes via excel spreadsheets and pen and paper. As we grow, it is extremely important to us to stay connected to the high school coaching and teaching world, so as we have started to build out our team, we look for former athletes or current coaches who understand our customer’s problem on a very personal level. By approaching things in this manner, we believe we can continue to put out the best online training product for the high school market.