Find a Player

Idea

Introduction

Find a Player is a smartphone app that makes it easier for people to find and play sports.

Our app covers over 140 different sports and has 2 core functions.

1. Acts as a hub between players and games on a local basis.
2. Automates and simplifies game organisation process.

We allow our users to set up activities using the app and invite their friends straight from their phone contacts. Thereafter, if they’re still short of numbers, we help them connect with local people on our system who are looking to do the same thing.

Conversely, people who have just moved to a new area or simply want to get involved in more sport can search, find and join local activities that need more participants.

Our app automates the entire invitation and organisation process, providing full in-app communication, chat and allowing gaps in games to be filled quickly and easily by local, available players.

In addition to simplifying game administration and recruitment, we will also provide lots of additional functionality such as peer to peer player feedback, league tables and awards to encourage use of the app.

Intended impact

The idea for Find a Player arose from years of seeing desperate emails, texts and Facebook messages from game organisers needing players to fill their football games. The founder, Jim Law, is an avid sportsman and was always on the lookout for new games however the ones he was being offered were always at the wrong times. Jim realised that since players (such as himself) are always looking for games, and games are always looking for players there must be a much more efficient way to connect the two groups, not just for football but for lots of different sports, and that's how Find a Player was born.

This idea is backed up by research we have undertaken in combination with existing statistics available.

• 82% of people who organise games have struggled to find people to play with.
• 88% of people polled would be happy to play sports with someone they didn’t know (while only 1.7% of people currently do so).
• 78% of people said they would do more sport if they could easily find something to get involved with locally.
• 45% of people who do not exercise regularly ‘just never get around to it’.

With around 15m people taking part in sporting activity weekly in the UK alone, we believe that these statistics show there’s a massive opportunity available to us once we start to connect sports games and players around the world.

The overall impact we’re aiming for is, quite simply, to make it easier for people to organise and play sports.

Substantial accomplishments to date

Completion of first version of the App for Android and IOS. Over 3500 downloads received to date from a small marketing campaign.

Winner of Edinburgh Apps competition to provide a custom built technology solution to Edinburgh City Council. The brief was to provide a product which would increase engagement within the local community, reduce inactivity and promote the use of their sports facilities. Contract talks are ongoing.

Approval from RBS to promote App to Edinburgh based staff.

Advanced discussions with Strathclyde University to trial system amongst their students.

Discussions ongoing with several local authorities/sports trusts.

Approval from Student Sports Scotland to promote the system out to their student base.

Attracted 3 highly experienced and connected advisers into our team.

Finalists in the Scottish EDGE Jun 2014.

Monetisation strategy

We have 3 main monetisation routes, they can be broken down as follows.

- Advertising -

We feel we have a multitude of ways that we can bring advertising money in, as the data we'll be collecting from users (social sports participation) is currently hard to access. The main advertising revenues will be as follows:

1. In app – Delivering pay per click ads at certain usage points.
2. Category Sponsorship – Whenever a user creates a game there will be a game/category header which we will be shown to all the players in the game.This header will be available for relevant companies to sponsor.
3. Promotions – Using the in app communication system we will be able to deliver targeted marketing messages direct to our users. We will be able to offer very precise targeting as our app will collect information on what sports our user’s play, how often they play them, how good they are, age, location, sex etc. This is very valuable information to sports marketers.
4. Store Links – Similar to above but we would link through to retailer’s online stores where we would receive a cut of sales or an introduction fee.

-Premium Features-

Using a standard freemium model we would deliver most basic functionality to users free (in order to allow quick scale of user base) and then, after we have identified some user pain points within the app, tailor chargeable premium upgrades to address them.

- Licensing -

Sports venues struggle to keep their pitches and courts filled, especially during traditional working hours.

We plan to license our userbase to these facilities in order to help them fill the gaps in their bookings. This will let them generate significant revenue from pitches and courts which were previously lying empty for a minimal outlay. This model provides a strong recurring revenue for ourselves and also gives us a secondary benefit of helping to populate lots of content onto our system.

As an example a 5 a side centre could create 2 extra games at £50 per day, bringing in c.£3000 per month for an outlay of £50.

Use of proceeds

Initially 40% of the funds will be used to continue development of the app and build a new web based administration system which will be utilised by sports centres and clubs. Additional funds will be allocated to development in 3 monthly sprints once we have assessed live user metrics and identified the most productive areas for development.

Around £20k will be used for staff salaries.

The remainder of the money raised will be used (in conjunction with other revenue generated by the app) on marketing, principally heavily targeted social media advertising.