A recent Velocity Accelerator graduate is taking its next steps toward growth, and the company sees a strong future in Birmingham.
Sportsy, which also received follow-on grant funding from the Velocity Accelerator program, is a creator-driven training platform for soccer that partners with trainers and provides them with tools to create, deliver and monetize training experiences at scale. The app provides access to the same drills and programs that professional soccer teams use to practice as well as interactive instructional videos, training plans and challenges.
Though co-founder Stefan Vaziri grew up in Birmingham, Sportsy got its start in California and was based in Washington, D.C. for some time before relocating to Birmingham.
"It really came down to just cost -- cost of living and cost of running the business," Vaziri said. "It was height of the pandemic when we made the decision to relocate back here (in 2020)."
Vaziri said the team also considered the city's vibrant tech startup scene when deciding to relocate.
"As Birmingham is kind of moving in the right direction, it's becoming an option and people are considering it, where before they may have looked at Atlanta or Nashville," Vaziri said.
Though cost of living was the initial draw, Sportsy quickly made strong connections within the city's startup scene.
"Prior to getting into Velocity and going through that experience, I was in a pretty different place in terms of my outlook on Birmingham, but after going through Velocity, and it really opened my eyes, but also opened a lot of doors for us," Vaziri said. "Here in Birmingham, we developed relationships with a bunch of people who grow our network here, and really just got plugged into the tech startup scene which was somewhat surprising in terms of how much activity and energy and awesome people there are here."
Now, Sportsy, currently located at Innovation Depot, has no plans of leaving Birmingham.
Vaziri, a former Division I and semi-pro soccer player, found a lack of resources and opportunities growing up in the city when it came to the sport, and he hopes Sportsy can bring options to others in the Southeast in the same situation.
"Soccer is obviously not the biggest sport here," Vaziri said. "When you start getting into the Southeast or outside of the big metropolitan areas around the country, there really just aren't many resources available, whether that's quality coaches or competition to play against. ... As soon as I had any opportunity to get into the product or tech space, this was something I've dreamed about and a lot of that is driven by personal experience growing up with limited resources and opportunities."
Sportsy was founded in December 2018, and became full time in 2020 when the founders realized the newfound benefits of a remote training product in a world where virtual options were increasing in popularity due to Covid-19.
"We ultimately decided to go all in on it once the pandemic came because our product is positioned very well to excel in that environment," Vaziri said.
Now, Sportsy has produced around 100 soccer training videos.
Historically, it has focused on the individual player. Now, Sportsy is honing in on the coach-to-player relationship and working on ways to integrate with organizations that host multiple teams, including annual license options.
It is also working on expanding partnerships with third party content creators. It currently has five partners who have created about 30 training plans.
"There's hundreds, if not thousands of individuals just for the sport of soccer, who are producing pretty high-quality training content and publishing it all over social media," Vaziri said. "What we're doing is going to those content creators and saying, 'Hey, you're already engaging in this behavior, and we can really help you maximize the value of that content by bringing it onto our platform and kind of repackaging it into our training plan format and then monetizing it directly on our platform,'
"That's either selling individual training sessions, or we also support subscription models at the partner level or trainer level, which is, if you're familiar with like how Patreon works, we're taking a very similar approach to the kind of subscription model where the creator gets to set their price and terms and really has a lot of control."
Sportsy's next steps involve preparing to raise a seed round of funding and, eventually, adding additional sports to the platform, including basketball and lacrosse.
