Tribez. Social Sport App. Find, Connect and Play.

The Tribez app provides venues the platform to reach large audiences for group, social or casual sports play. I connected with Richard Sagar, founder and CEO of Tribez, on LinkedIn, he then reached out halfway across the world to me this week wanting to chat about his Australian sports tech startup and go at raising seed funding. The past 14 months his team of 5 developed a social sports app designed to innovate how everyone interacts with social sport and recreation. The Sports Techie community blog chatted with Sagar over Skype streaming video to learn more about their company, the opportunity and the business plan centered around freemium software for the end user, service models for the clients and a micro-transaction model to make the company money. This sports technology startup has the kind of financial modeling and an already existing user base generating user engagement transactions that wise investors are indeed looking for.

Tribez is ready for launch, they’re currently engaging seed funding investors to see Tribez to market.

If you are interested in learning more about this investment opportunity contact me for an introduction to Mr. Sagar.

Tribez App

Sagar feels there are three pain points his new app deals with.

First, consistent bookings. Second, finding an available venue. Finally, locating players that match your availability.

They designed the app to provide live online venue availability for each member of an organization, be that figure be as large as 80,000 or more and as small as 250 or less members. The app also provides users the opportunity to search for groups, organize social games and at the same time, or alone, book a venue. Several indoor and outdoor venues, for multiple sports are listed on the app for users to find, connect and play.

Features

• Finding people to play with in real-time.

The app has the ability to find and then be able to join people playing social sport in real time.

HOTSPOTS feature displays a live social sport views of available hot spots.

• Organizing a group for social sport.

Users can organize or find an existing social sports group; without charge or commitments.

PLAYER MATCHMAKING feature allows users to create or join existing groups to find social players for organized games.

• Accessing live venue availability, booking and payment.

An online universal solution to find live venue availability, conduct a booking and process payment wthin the app.

Find

Use Tribez technology to search for a venue, court, gym or field for play, practice or training. The app has indexed list of all public outdoor venues and which sports their facilities offer. Tribez shows live venue availability and the option to book and also process payment for court or field reservations.

Connect

Connecting users together is powerful in that this service can be used for participation across multiple sports as a group. An example is pooling together a group of athletes or weekend warriors desiring to play a social game of 3-on-3 hoops, indoor soccer or frisbee football. As mentioned, the key feature of the app is the in-depth matchmaking system designed to place players of similar ages and skill sets with matching teammates ensuring a positive, sport and social experience.

Play

The ultimate goal, for users to get out there and play.

SportsBiz Growth

Data from the AIS, Australian Sports Commission and some good old reversed engineered venue metrics by Tribz Co-Founder, Ben Wong, reveal 11.6 million adults in Australia play sport or do some sort of physical activity 3 or more times a week making it 58% of adults downunder playing sports or involved with physical activity. Because there are between 7,000 and 10,000 sites being used for paid sporting and physical activity generating $18b P.A. Sagar and his team believe in the ‘dominating your back yard’ theory and are underway doing so across Australia. Of the 8 venue management systems in AUS, Tribez integrates with 6.

Next up might be New Zealand, Japan and the USA which are also ripe for expansion. The Kiwis claim 74% of their people participated in sports and recreation during a week. Because 35.2% are paid per visit, entry or to hire, you can start to understand why Tribez feels they can hit the ground running in other markets across the globe. Nearly half the Japanese participated in some kind of sport or activity at least twice weekly. Southeast Asia is indeed a huge market.

As far as sportsbiz in the U.S. goes, with 127.5 million Americans playing sports or conducting some sort of physical activity, Tribez is right in looking at this massive market as the promised land for providing services, earning high user adoption rates and making money.

Big Data

The back end of software is a modern day treasure chest of data to be mined and then used for targeted marketing purposes or sales opportunities. Sagar has an impressive grasp of technology and analytics and because of that understands the value of legally gathering useful formation from a user pool in this day and age of privacy such as gender, age and social sports insights. Geo-location in the app offers even more useful data to collect and analyze. Venues can measure activity levels and frequency on a busy weekend or over summer months for instance in order to optimize efficiency and meet venue usage demands.

The Big Data play as a monetization component for not only Tribz but also sporting bodies that use their app is a smart direction. Sagar spoke of the Sporting Associations, SBL, UBL and ACBA across dozens of sports, as potential users that are a good fit.

The government in Australia is perhaps the largest opportunity at home for Tribez.  This includes the Office of Sport, Sports Australia, Parks and Leisure Australia, Australian Institute of sports and Australian Bureau of Statistics. They are all mandated to promote sport in the state, a condition Tribez fits in well with. The government controlled entities will certainly benefit from the app’s robust data sets.

The private retail sector with likes of Rebel Sports, Rebook, Under Armour and Nike, are all potential big data partners for Tribz.

Collected data can be used to foster SEO and Organic growth as well.

$200K Bootstrap Launch

Over an 8-12 month period, the capital raised will fund business development. Sagar says they need about $75,000 to reach their seed investment goal of $200,000.

Tribez is:

• Pre-revenue, looking to raise Seed
• Finished closed beta with proven traction
• Market ready app (IOS & Android)
• 276 clients pre-launch
• Team of 5

After raising seed money, followed by a Series A round of investment, the future will be even more bright for Tribz to meet consumer demand and expand overseas.

Exit Strategy

Previous similar app exits range from $24.8 million for FitStar renamed to Fitbit Coach, to Runtastic for $239 million by adidas, to MyFitnessPal for $475 million by Under Armour after having 80 million users and 10 years of business.

Based on these exits, Tribez is positioned themselves for a nice ROI for shareholders.

More information: www.tribez.com.au

Sports Techie, Sagar says existing social platforms such as Facebook Groups and WhatsApp Group were not purpose built for social sport. Competing apps also to not address this opportunity.

What sets their product apart from the competition is no booking clashes or in other words, his solution does have much of a lag time when reserving your space. His competitors either have lag time which leads to double bookings and other clashes, or having to go through a human admin for approval which is often not instantaneous and frustrating.

Tribez integrates with existing venue management systems through use of an open API (Rest / JSON). Richard is also equally comfortable with UI/UX technologies as he is with his investment pitch.

The plan is to charge a micro transaction amount per transaction, earning big revenue over time because of the large volume of usage for this data and results driven sports tech app by Tribez.

Again mate, if interested in being this investment as a seed investor, contact me via a social media platform below for an intro to Richard.

See ya later sportstechie in Seattle, Atlanta and around the world!

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