As youth soccer coaches, Jason Keller and Taylor Ohlsen searched for a way to motivate the five and six-year-old players on their team to practice their skills at home.
They started small, challenging them to learn how to juggle. By the next practice, they were expected to complete two juggles.
“Getting a young kid to learn something in today’s age is not very easy, unless you use technology,” Keller said.
Keller and Ohlsen began adding incentives to motivate the players. As more players learned to juggle and were rewarded, the rest of the team became motivated to pick up the skill.
Keller said he saw the benefits of micro-challenge learning and realized there was a digital opportunity in it. Kids were more likely to complete small physical activities when they were rewarded and recognized.
Keller and Ohlsen began building TopYa, a learning and engagement platform that teaches kids to be passionate about sports and physical activity using video challenges on a mobile app.
Now, nearly three years later, the company is serving three primary markets and impacting children in a number of sports worldwide. TopYa is used by large organizations like British Gymnastics, the governing body for the U.K.’s gymnastics program, to push out challenges to aspiring gymnasts.
TopYa has also developed the National Active Championship, a year-long contest designed to motivate children to become physically active during their free time after school. Children across India, the U.K. and the U.S. compete in athletic challenges and are ranked against other children their age based on the videos they submit. Top qualifiers receive prizes and rewards.
Local teams like Keller’s original soccer club can also use the app. Coaches can push out challenges and ‘homework-style’ activities to members of the team through TopYa. Individual families can use TopYa to help their children develop their athletic skills and passion for physical activity.
TopYa generates revenue through subscriptions that range in price based on organization use.
During his previous work at WellTok, Keller said it became clear that changing unhealthy habits in adults was a difficult task. He designed TopYa to head off those issues before they begin.
“If we could get to the youth of the world first, teach and inspire them to love sport and physical activity, maybe they won’t have to be that unhealthy adult,” he said.
What started as a platform designed to help youth soccer players learn to juggle has evolved into so much more. Keller said any company or organization that teaches children has a use for TopYa’s platform.
The company’s primary headquarters are in Denver, but employees also sit in the U.K. and India. The company raised an equity round in October, but declined to disclose the amount. Topya serves over 1,000 organizations and more than a million users worldwide, Keller said.
As they continue to grow, Keller said TopYa will look at opportunities to expand its platform and introduce additional competitions to reach a broader audience.
