A GLASGOW start-up which launched a phone app to match up five-a-side football players has been valued at £2.5 million following a six-figure equity investment.
Find a Player, which now facilities participation in more than 100 sports, has been backed by Manchester-based property and technology investor Michael Sacks.
The company’s founder, Jim Law said his ambition was for Find a Player to “do for sports networking what Facebook has done for social networking”.
“It’s about bringing the user experience [of organising sport] up to date with the likes of Uber and Just East,” he said. “It’s a couple of taps on your phone to find what you need, whether it’s players or facilities. We’re really interested in pushing sport participation levels, just getting people off the couch and make it easier for them to find things locally to do,” said Mr Law.
Mr Sacks has invested £100,000 for a four per cent stake and is willing to double that to help Find a Player reach its £200,000 target, if seed investors choose not to take-up pre-emptive rights.
The company is currently in discussions with those early investors. “We have £100,000 in the door and it’ll either be another £100,000 from Michael or the seeders follow-on round,” said Mr Law.
These funds will be used on development and marketing to acquire users.
Former BetFair chief financial officer and FanDuel chairman Owen O’Donnell joined the firm as chairman, while Steve Oliver, founder of MusicMagpie has a non-executive role. Mr Sacks will assist with business development. Mr Law said he was a “very capable guy” who was interested in investing in firms with “huge global potential”.
For now, the focus is the UK market. “We could be in other countries tomorrow, but the reality is to launch worldwide we need a massive marketing budget,” said Mr Law. “The app doesn’t have any value if it doesn’t have any users.”
Any enquires from overseas are able to register interest, which Mr Law said would give the company a head start in reaching critical mass.
Mr Law had the idea for the business after failing to find a reliable five-a-side game. “It just seemed to be that people were spamming their mates on Facebook and sending out blanket texts saying they’re two guys short for five-a-sides. Anyone who plays sport understands the issue.”
After support from Entrepreneurial Spark, Find a Player last year raised £150,000 through a crowdfunding campaign on Seedrs, hitting the£110,000 target in just two days.
The company has facilitated more than 75,000 games across more than 140 different sports, and is working closely with sports governing bodies, universities and commerical businesses to expand its user base.
“We’re at the stage where we’re happy with the product. We’re now keen to get it out there as widely as possible,” he said.
The company is not yet revenue-generating, but Mr Law said this will come from processing booking payments to sports facilities; and from harnessing the data that the company gathers from its users.
“Growing the platform and user numbers is not cheap, and you don’t want to start pushing revenue too early. What we’re focused on is giving the users a really good experience and then once the core foundations are in place we can start monetising it.
“The data we’re generating is very valuable in itself,” he added. “Effectively we can tailor offers specifically to people based on what sports they play, how often, how good they are, where they play. There are a lot of good metrics we can use and that is valuable to big brands.”
Brands use such data to target users with special offers. Illustrating the potential in this strategy, Mr Law highlighted sports equipment group Under Armour’s $475m acquisition of nutrition-tracking platform MyFitnessPal MyFitnessPal app in 2015.
“If we can show [big brands] that we are a valuable tool that people are highly engaged with, that is when these big organisations become engaged and start looking at acquisition,” he said.
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