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. Feel free to contact us if you know of a startup that should be considered for this series.
Company name: TennisKeeper
CEO: Christina Lau
Headquarters: Toronto, Canada
1. What is your elevator pitch?
TennisKeeper is on a mission to help tennis players stay motivated and maximize their enjoyment of the sport. We want to make every tennis day amazing and memorable.
2. Problem & Solution
I created TennisKeeper app because I couldn’t find any tennis app that would let me track my tennis activities such as the matches I played or the lessons I took. There are many running apps for runners (e.g. Runkeeper), workout apps for the fitness enthusiast (e.g. 7 Minute workout), and diet apps (e.g. MyFitnessPal) for those that want to maintain a healthy diet, but there isn’t anything for tracking and monitoring tennis workouts and progress.
TennisKeeper lets you track 5 kinds of tennis activities: singles matches, doubles matches, hitting practices, tennis lessons, and cross training. If you are playing a match, record your opponent’s information and the scores of each set. Analyze every set and log how you feel and how you play. If you are taking a lesson, record the techniques, strategies and insights learned. Adding your own notes or pictures to each activity make every outing memorable.
As you become better in tennis and start to compete in leagues or ladder games, you will hear people say that you should develop a game plan against your opponents. But today’s approach is still using ad-hoc notes or paper.
TennisKeeper solves this by providing easy to use templates so that you can quickly enter your opponents game style, strength, weakness and even their line calls tendency. You can do it right after your match at the tennis court when your memory is still fresh. Next time you meet them on the court again, their tennis profile will be right at your fingertips. If you are playing on a tennis league, you can share the player’s profile you competed against with your team so that they know what to expect when they have to play the same people in the future.
After logging the events, you can visualize your progress and see how you are improving overtime. For example, you can select any opponent and get your lifetime singles and doubles head to head match stats against them. You can obtain weekly tennis match win, loss stats grouped by matches, sets and games. Or your calories burned based on the tennis activity (e.g. a singles match will burn more calories than a doubles match). These are just some examples, with more to come in the future as we integrate with the health kit frameworks.
3. Market – your target market and the overall market
This app is for the tennis players. According to the research by the Tennis Industry Association, in 2015, there are 17.96 million tennis players. Tennis is the only traditional participation sport to see an increase in overall participation over the last eight years, increasing 6% since 2007.
4. Business Model – how do you make money?
Initially by selling the free app with a pro edition upgrade with advanced metrics. Overtime I hope to gain traction with the tennis community and attract companies that sell tennis products to integrate to my platform. For example, we will track tennis strings and tennis shoes usage, so players will know how many hours they played with their shoes and strings. They can be notified when it is time to replace them and be directed to the appropriate gear stores.
5. Management Team – with titles
Christina Lau: Owner and Developer
Christina Lau is an independent app developer and tennis player based in Toronto. She wants to leverage her skills and passion in software development and tennis to bring new innovation to the tennis industry.
6. What else do you want the audience to know about your venture?
Please contact me via email: tenniskeeper@gmail.com or Twitter @tennis_keeper to say hi or to provide any kind of feedback. I will love to hear what you like, what you don’t like, and what additional features you may like to see added.