The problem:
Inner city, suburbs, streets, or the casual pickup sports player had no universal system to plan and organize pickup matches. Rather it be intramural leagues, casual players, or just the neighborhood kids getting together. There was no way for athletes of all ages to meet and receive live up to date updates on where and when they are going to meet up to ball.
The solution: Coast 2 Coast
Coast 2 Coast(C2C) lets athletes of any sport locate ANY pickup game in your city, challenge each other to pick up games, and reward the winner w/credits that can be redeemed on your favorite brands. (NIKE, JORDAN, ADIDAS & MORE) You'll be ranked by skill level and top players in your city will be featured on that app
You start off w/50 free credits and can only earn more by challenging & defeating other players in your city and putting in hard work on the court or field.
CREDITS ARE EARNED NOT BOUGHT
Sports included are Basketball, Football, & Soccer
THIS IS COAST 2 COAST
BUT...
That's not all. When you call them out you set a "bounty" you put up a certain amount of credits. Winner takes all.
Credits are used to redeem gear. 250 credits= 20$ on Nike.com 220 credits= Free burrito at Chipotle 275 credits= 25$ on any purchase on Jordan.com Etc...
For the first time EVER there is an app for athletes
Coming Soon APRIL 2018 So lets recap. Play your favorite sports which you already do, the more you play the more you earn, Get FREE gear which you earned by using the app. WIN✔WIN
So when I came here w/ this app idea by many of you I was asked what have I done on my own to get the ball rolling.
I explained that for 6 months I built a 12,000 potential user target list by going to all of tHE universities in Florida. Miami, UF, UNF, UCF FIU, FAU, FSU. Then some of the smaller colleges such as FCCJ, Valencia, First Coast, do on and so forth. In doing this I built a user base of potential users who said they would download the app in a heartbeat and use it every day. I broke these users down into two groups.
Recreational athletes: These are the users that I found around college, who when I asked if they play pickup basketball, football, or soccer, they responded w/ “Yes sometimes” or “I try to play when I can". I found these users through the school, rec hall, cafeteria, on the school courtyard so on and so forth.
Serious Athletes: These are the athletes that I found on the court, on the field, most of the time in the middle of their DAILY commute to the court or the field. These were the athletes that were former collegiate athletes, current collegiate athletes, or people that constantly join your local YMCA league, college intramural leagues, etc.
These two categories broken down came to these numbers:
Serious athletes - 9,446
Recreational athletes - 2,554
It was clear the interest was there but I needed more. I needed the app built! So I started looking for investors, VC's, Angel investors, any type of funding to get this off the ground. I gotta tell you I ran across a lot of characters. From crooks, to people who literally seemed to get a kick out of wasting your time, to serious investors who informed me that I didn't have enough to go on.
Finally I ran across a few students who were interested in taking up this project. One in person about 30 minutes from me and the other 2 in a few states over. They really believed in the project and we set up a slack account and held Skype meetings regularly Monday & Wednesday night's at 9. They weren't being paid as we are all college students with no money but I understood that they had bills.
Currently I'm training for the NFL and I bartend part-time at cheesecake factory and olive garden. I picked up a few doubles and put all the money I made from my second shift into an account. Just this past Wed I asked them all for their PayPal accounts and they responded w/ they agreed to get future compensation once we launch. I said yes I'm just setting up payroll. Little do they know that over the past 2 months I saved enough that I have 3,000$. Not much but enough that I can drop 1,000$ in each of their accounts.
So the app is currently being built w/ three features mentioned
The ability to locate and find any pickup game in whatever city your in. Whether that be basketball, football or soccer. You will be able to find a pickup game in your city in your sport
The ability to challenge other users. So if you have the app, I have the app, I can actually click on your profile and challenge you to a game AND put up a bounty. So if we both have 50 credits I'll be able to put my 50 against your 50 winner takes all
The ability to record your match or game on the app and directly upload them to the big 4. Snapchat Facebook Instagram Myspace….ha could you imagine? Twitter.
Revenue model:
Subscription based: Let me be clear and forthright a lot of investors will not want to hear this.
COAST 2 COAST WILL ALWAYS BE FREE.
I refuse to tell a kid in the hood who's really excited about the chance to earn money playing his favorite sports, that he has to convince his mom to shell out 1.99 for an “stupid app" I'll tell you right now 90% of Mothers and Fathers in the hood working to keep a roof over kids head will sneer at paying ANY money for an app. They will tell them to go on the app store and browse the millions of free apps and stop bothering them with their nonsense.
Instead we will charge schools, colleges, intramural leagues, and small sports team to run their team through C2C.
Freemium: We will offer the initial launch figures that I previously mentioned. Then we will continue to add features until there are around 6-8 mainline features that everyone enjoys. Then we will charge to expand your player profile.
A small example of this would be the free version allows you to call out and challenge anyone in any sport taking their credits and redeeming those for gear. The paid version will have a daily task list added. (Ex. “Hey! We notice that you usually play football at these locations Huffman Park and Liberty Park. Play any sport at any location that aren't these to parks and earn an extra 10 credits for every Game won, x2 Credits for every point score, x2 for every opposing user you call out and win!)
By providing task to do kids with access to bikes can easily travel to different parks outside of their comfort zone and in turn introduce new users to the app who might have never even heard of the app. FREE MARKETING.
Merchandise: Out of all the backlash I received one of the more common themes was “why would anyone care? Why wouldn't people just use a Facebook group?”. This I will admit was one of the most frustrating questions I ran into because of the content of the questions. Alot of people just couldn't see the vision. Alot of that has to deal with the age gap. I'm 24 I've been around sports all of my life. I know the problems, challenges, and speed bumps athletes face all day every day. But I expected everyone to be in the same realm of thinking. I quickly found out that wasn't the case. In was scoffed at, scorned, and talked down to because people thought the app was pointless
I have thick skin a product of being raised by two Marines, but even that bothered me to be honest. How could I convince a middle aged man who hasn't played pickup sports years that there was a strong user base and that athletes have been calling for an app like this for years? I had an email user base, I had a Facebook group 8.0K strong, I had a Facebook page with 3000+ likes and a brand new Instagram page less then a month old with 2,000 followers not bought.
It still wasn't enough.
So what I did was come up w/ a plan to show any investors that people cared about this product and would supports. I designed one of a kind special edition hoodies that would be the official branding of the Coast 2 Coast app. After copywriting and trademarking the logo and design I ordered 16 hoodies w/ the ability to put your city under the logo to make it your own
I came up with 3 colors initially.
Frostbite (limited)
Quicksand Grey
Black Ice
I placed an order for
1 frostbite
8 Quicksand Grey
8 Black Ice.
Kind of nervous about it but I put out the hoodies on Instagram and Facebook prayin for the best….
I sold out in 30 minutes.
Included in the second comment of this post is a link sharing album to my Google drive account w/ pictured of the hoodies.
Also you will see me conversing with NFL RB Fred Taylor who I reached out to about the app.
The response was unreal and I was beyond grateful and excited where we could go from here. We are launching late March early April w/ no money no investor help nothing. We did it on our own. Unfortunately we can only launch on android because of the lack of funding. However using the momentum if the hoodies I reached out and initiated contact w/ Hall of Fame NFL runningback Fred Taylor. Current CFL Linebacker Terrance Plummer. And I began to explain the app and secure them for possible future potential investments.
I say all this to say this.
At this point how do I go about finding a serious investor
Is my market validation enough?
Will a serious investor wait until we launch to consider funding us?
How much should we ask for? (In terms of budget, marketing, employee salaries.) But what else? Unforeseen cost? Delays? Glitches? Overhead?
The fact that I'm already selling hoodies is a good thing right? The hoodies are selling for 50$+10 for shipping. My seamstress makes them for 18$ the materials are about 12$ profit of about 17$ per hoodie.
As an investor what else would you want to know about the project from me?
MY FINAL QUESTION. All members if my team has signed NDAs the standard NDA nothing special. So all three of my app developers signed the NDAS no problem no questions asked. My question is do I need to have them sign any additional documents to protect myself? I'm not Mark what's his name. This isn't going to be a Facebook situation.
https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=1R5-VH60RJKDwJHamOE66tts46lQm8RDv
Thanks for all the feedback
Submitted January 20, 2018 at 01:50AM by taylor2121 http://ift.tt/2Dq5vEK
