A Tampa entrepreneur who sold his company — which later went public — is ready to repeat history with his newest startup.
Ryan Dorrell, who co-founded AgileThought in 2004, stayed with the company after it was acquired in 2019. But roughly a year after the sale, and with the swell of Covid-19, Dorrell left in mid-2020.
“I didn’t have any plans immediately,” Dorrell said in an interview with Tampa Bay Inno. “It was, ‘Let me rest, relax, reset’ and figure out what I wanted to do next.”
He initially began chatting with former colleagues and friends in collegiate athletics departments, including at Florida State University, where he previously ran track. That led to realizing some athletics departments, while having a surplus of fundraising data, have no streamlined way to place it in one spot.
Dorrell started tinkering with the technology as a passion project, but after realizing the greater need, he eventually launched Fan Data Insights in 2021.
“It’s an underserved market,” he said. “There are some really big players and some small niche companies, but we tried to create something very unique that brought data together from all different places.”
Fan Data Insights lets athletic departments gather data that is typically in silos, such as donations and tickets, sales activity platforms and wealth screening platforms. It has contracted with one school in the SEC conference and one in the ACC, with the goal to get roughly five customers by the end of this year and 12 to 20 by the end of next. There is a focus on the top 150 athletic programs in the nation.
The company has grown under the radar in the last year. But with Dorrell’s new hire — a chief revenue officer who brings the company’s workforce up to two full-time employees — he wants to get the word out.
“It’s been challenging to get all the things going with one individual, but it’s been pretty fulfilling to work on what I wanted, with whom I wanted,” he said. “It’s time to put the pedal to the metal and start to grow the business.”
It is post-revenue and bootstrapped, although Dorrell said he is considering adding angel investors to the mix. There’s also the opportunity to expand to similar membership-driven sectors, such as performing arts centers.
It’s a bit of a change from Dorrell’s previous venture at AgileThought, a software development and consulting firm.
“Just going from consulting to SaaS, it’s a pretty big difference of approaching it,” he said. “But having the deep consulting background helps for building a business like this; it’s very much focused on collaborating with customers, so it’s a very consultative approach.”
And like his previous venture, he plans to grow, build and eventually sell his new company in the typical three- to five-year timeline many startups follow.
“I started this as something to keep myself busy and have fun doing it,” he said. “Now that it’s hit the market, I see the real potential. ... We’ve got a very sports-oriented culture here, and with the amount of tech talent we have, I can’t think of a better place than Tampa to build a company like this.”
