In 2017, when Jake Gilikin set out to prove that Auburn University was the true No. 1 ranked team in the nation in spite of two early-season losses, he was met with ads, dropdown menus and limited sets of information.
During his research, Gilikin realized there was no app or website where SEC football fans could find specific statistics and data on their favorite teams in a readily available format; so, he started his own.
Ranked College Sports allows SEC college sports fans to search for, and easily find, information on their favorite teams both during- and post-season. Though it started as a platform for SEC football teams, Ranked now also features stats on men’s college basketball as well, with more SEC sports to be added according to user demand.
“I really wanted to go into football because all other sports apps go an inch deep and mile wide, meaning they have all of the sports but when you look at the details of the matchups and competitions, you can’t really tell who’s better and nothing is context specific,” Gilikin said.
Gilikin, who also works as a programmer and software engineer with Fancards, a provider of collegiately licensed prepaid products, founded Ranked in 2018 but has only been a full-time founder for the last year. Though it’s been a tumultuous journey, he said, he’d rather be doing this than working a conventional office job.
“Driving down the Broadway of a nine to five becomes agonizing if you have that entrepreneurial spirit; it can be more draining than the lack of sleep or stress of funding.” Gilikin said. “I’ve had that forever, and this is a super common theme with startup founders and business owners.”
Since becoming a full-time founder, Gilikin has focused on growing Ranked and making the product more scalable for the future.
“We want to show better growth than what we have the last two years in order to solicit investors and have a better foundation to move forward on,” he said.
The Ranked app has been available for iOS devices since 2019 and for Android devices since 2022. Gilikin recently added a new feature to the website, which has only been up for about a year, that allows users like content creators and sports writers to embed data and statistics directly from the website into their content instead of logging it manually.
According to Gilikin, no other sports platform has a feature like this, which he hopes sets Ranked apart.
“The only way to grow if you’re a technical guy like me is to leverage existing audiences, so I figured the best way to do that was provide value to content creators with those embeds,” he said. “It’s a really easily accessible and simple way to get that data in a highly consumable way.”
Gilikin currently works from home but hopes to eventually open an office as the app becomes more established in the SEC college sports ecosystem.
“We’re really pushing for growth, and I think it scratches the itch for a lot of sports fans regionally, specifically to Birmingham because most people here are Auburn or Alabama people,” he said. “I think staying local to Birmingham and owning this market is a really big opportunity.”
