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: Mobstats.com
CEO: Kevin Sexton
Headquarters: United Kingdom & Ireland
1. What is your elevator pitch? 140 characters, please.
Mobstats engages fans not at the game*. Our plugin sits in your team app & powers live chat + real-time fanalytics.
*Stadium fans are welcome
2. Problem & Solution
Imagine this scenario:
My team is playing a game this weekend but I cannot be at the stadium to cheer them on. Not all games are broadcast and even when they are I am left feeling very disconnected.
So I turn to social media …and what a mess that is. A 1-way broadcast with no real sense of community for the hundreds of thousands fans who – like me – are stuck back home.
Once-upon-a-time we put up with this. Why? There was simply no alternative.
Luckily that day is over. Mobstats is an answer to this painfully bad fan experience.
We are a micro-social network controlled by your team. A live chat zone that explodes around your game just before kick-off, drawing thousands of fans together to interact and cheer in a single, clean, focussed smartphone screen.
We sit within your existing team app. (For teams without their own we exist as your surrogate app – fully branded in your home colours.)
Unlike embedding Twitter into your team app (akin to flushing revenue potential down the drain) Mobstats give you control of your own social channel where you decide what sponsored messages get ‘promoted’.
We do not want fans to ditch their other networks of choice (hangouts, whatsapp, snapchat, instagram, facebook, twitter etc.): they simply share tons of user-generated content from Mobstats out through those …in-turn drawing thousands more fans back into your team’s virtual fanzone.
The economic impact of this is obvious: now your team controls the space where thousands of conversations are occurring: your own micro social network. That opens new opportunities for sponsors who want to reach into your community.
At last you can challenge the big social networks who have been capitalising on your ability to draw huge audiences.
We are a plucky startup from the United Kingdom with our development team based in Dublin’s Digital Hub, home to thousands of European startups and the European base for global tech giants like Google, Apple, Twitter, Facebook, Airbnb, Linkedin …Uber is just down the road.
We have built incredibly robust technology that has been powering live fan chat (and stats tracking) for over 18 months. We are already on the 3rd generation of our mobile app, used by thousands of supporters and have gathered hundreds of thousands of data-points on fan behaviour for clubs and sponsors across Europe.
We are now making a big push into US sports.
Mobstats have all the fan behaviour data to prove just how sticky our fan engagement experience is: churn rates are low:
- 600% better time engagement
- 65% of users return for multiple games every month
- 170% fan growth month on month
- in-game audience numbers explode as play progresses
- data suggests fans are more inclined to attend stadium having been on Mobstats for more than 8 weeks
Our data is robust, remaining consistent and reliable over each 12 month period.
How does it all look? Mobstats keeps its branding low-key: it can either sit within your existing team app (as a white-labelled module) or as a surrogate branded in your team colours if you do not already have a team/stadium app.
We are the Apple of sports fan experience design: obsessive about performance speed and user experience. We are open, accessible, love to collaborate with other awesome teams to build massive communities. We are a bunch of crazy people who want to partner with your team and show you how to make even more money than you do already.
3. Market – your target market and the overall market
Our major focus is on European football clubs (estimated 3.5 billion fans) – in the USA we are pursuing sports such as basketball, baseball, hockey, American football and college sports.
Initially we are tackling a segment of the market which is today worth over $25 billion per annum and expanding a rate of 7 percent CAGR. (This sits within a broader sports events market (made up of tickets, media rights, sponsorship) that has grown steadily from $58.4 billion in 2009 to $76.1 billion in 2013.)
The sports market has grown faster than GDP in nearly every country and many times more in major markets such as the United States (x1.6 GDP), Brazil (x1.8), the UK (x3.9), and France (x3.1). In China it is growing x1.1 times faster than GDP.
4. Business Model
A monthly SaaS subscription model based on active fans.
Charges:
- $500 per month/10,000 active weekly users
- $50 per month/1,000 active weekly users
- free under 500 active weekly users
Features:.
- unlimited number of teams
- no licence fee
- 14-day free trial
- 1-month rolling contract
- cancel at 30 days notice
- tailored to reflect your team branding
- push notification feature
- option to send sponsor messages to your fanbase
- choice of weekly or monthly analytics
Support:
- unlimited number of updates per year
- new features pushed out as standard
- user engagement analytics
- live-chat support globally
Power users:
- option to white-label
- subject to annual licence fee
- popular with customers over 500,000 users (weekly active)
5. Management Team – with titles
Kevin Sexton – Founder & CEO
David Gibson – CTO
Geoff Wilson – Marketing
Nadia Sversda – UX
Aloisio dos Santos Ribiero – Server Side
Alan Perius – Support & Security
Semiramis Jensen – Mobile
Rajan Kushal – Leagues
Talita Silva Lima – Cloud
Our Advisory Board brings executive level expertise from global sports strategy, sport sponsorship (Carol), investment (Gary) and International competition (Dave).
6. What else do you want the audience to know about your venture?
Our vision is to improve the financial sustainability of sport at levels right down to grassroots by releasing untapped value.
We are making a big push into US sports (American football, baseball, hockey, basketball and college sports) and seeking sales partners & investors with domain experience to grow Mobstats in the North American market on a state-by-state basis.
We are very happy to talk directly with sports sponsors and their agents.
Bonus Questions:
If you were stuck on a desert island with any three athletes, who would they be and why?
Muhammad Ali – to keep us inspired
Sir Alex Ferguson – to keep us united
Bear Grylls (though not a 3rd athlete) – to keep us alive
If you were to invite any CEO to dinner who would it be and why?
Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO of Social Capital.
Why?
Because he is a visionary who genuinely wants to make an impact on the world and would appreciate Mobstats ultimate vision which is to make local sports communities worldwide sustainable.
He is also incredibly peeved about the state of startup investing today and just happens to own his own fund called Social+Capital Partnership (which has $600 million in total assets as of 2015). The fund specialises in software startups (providing seed funding, venture capital and private equity) was praised by Peter Thiel, who invested in it and expressed enthusiasm for Palihapitiya’s approach.
Social+Capital has a track record in messaging type investments: it invested in Yammer (sold to Microsoft for $1.2 billion) and in 2014, the firm was a leading investor in a $42.75M funding round for Slack Technologies.