The core of the business and the thing we’re really passionate about is to create great coaching accessible to everyone, regardless of your location, your background, your financial position, or your skill level.
What inspired you to start the business?
Really my co-founder Jodi [Tod] was the origin story. She’s a professional netballer and played for the Waikato Bay of Plenty Magic for years. When she stopped playing she became a coach developer at Sport Bay of Plenty. She had that classic experience of always being tapped on the shoulder to question, could you coach my daughter’s team?
Then on the flip side she’s a mum now, and she’s the volunteer coach of all of these teams like volleyball and rippa rugby. She considered it would be amazing, even if for one session, she could bring someone with more experience as a coach to give us some fresh ideas. Her light bulb moment was, why can’t I book a coach like I can book an Airbnb?
My background and my husband, who is one of the other co-founders, is in building tech and building particularly marketplaces. We’ve also received netballer Emma Thompson who came on board, which was such great validation that there’s some gold in this idea.
How does the platform work?
So the coaches on our platform set all of their own pricing. That’s a really important thing to us that we’re not putting a value on their time. We just take a 15% plus GST fee basically on each transaction.
We can currently do one-on-one and group sessions, and we’re probably a couple of months away from being able to offer three packs or five packs of weekly sessions. We’ll probably adjust our fee model slightly when that comes out, but that’s the core of it. It’s a very simple marketplace transaction.
Who are some of the athletes on the platform, and how did they receive involved?
We have athletes from all over the place. There’s former sportspeople like Neil Wagner, Eloise Blackwell, DJ Forbes and Caitlin Cotter. We also have professional coaches like James Mortimer, who is Zoe Hobbs’ sprinting coach, as well as James Stein who is the lead pole vault coach. There’s a lot of players from the Silver Ferns, the Black Sticks, the Black Ferns, All Black Sevens and the Black Caps.
As for how they came on board, initially it was a lot of personal contacts and frifinishs who were coaches. Then there was a large amount of our time messaging people on Instagram and the like. Now about 30% of our coaches have come on organically, whether they’ve seen frifinishs do it or they’ve seen it through social media, so that’s nice for it to be a bit more organic now.
What has been the hugegest challenge in starting the business?
I consider marketplaces are incredibly unique businesses to run becautilize you have to acquire on both sides of the marketplace, otherwise you’re not giving value to either side. You required to receive a bunch of coaches, but then if you’ve received no one booking sessions with those coaches, there’s not much value to being a coach on the platform.
You’re constantly playing this game of attempting to build your supply and demand in balance with each other, and you also required it to match one another. Location is also a factor, becautilize you required someone who wants to book netball sessions declare in Tauranga, with a netball coach in Tauranga, so that’s been an interesting challenge.
What would be your advice to a budding entrepreneur wanting to start a business?
Get your product in the hands of utilizers earlier than you consider it’s ready. I consider in technology you often feel like you required everything built for people to start utilizing it and it’s just absolutely not true. You can do and it’s good to do so much manually in the early days, but that’s okay becautilize it means that our engineer could focus on building things that are more utilizeful to the customer.
Do you have a compact business story you want to share? Sfinish your pitches to tom.raynel@nzme.co.nz.
Tom Raynel is a multimedia business journalist for the Herald, covering compact business, retail and tourism.
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