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What We've Learned
Sixteen months of operating, in six findings
Why this section exists
We didn’t start with the free model. We arrived at it.
Sixteen months of running this taught us eight things about how families actually behave in a recruiting year. Every one of them changed the product, and together they are the reason the price is coming off — not a thesis we had at the start.
Each finding below is paired with what we did about it. The observations are the easy part; the changes are the company.
Download to first coach message
5 min
Athletes are contacting college coaches inside five minutes of installing the app. Nothing else we learned changed the product as much as understanding how fast that window closes.
Matched schools per offer
100:1
Athletes average one offer for every hundred matched programs they contact. Families who did not know that ratio were quitting after ten messages and concluding they had no options.
Eight findings
What we learned, and what we changed
Outreach
What we learned
Volume is not the problem. Families send messages into a void and have no way to tell which of them landed.
What we changed
We built outreach into the product rather than around it. HOPE drafts, sends, and tracks every message, then reads the response pattern back into the school ranking.
15,000 coach conversations opened
Family Awareness
What we learned
Most families do not understand the recruiting process. The gatekeepers win when everyone is ignorant but them.
What we changed
Education comes before the transaction. Rules, timelines, and eligibility are free and up front, not gated behind an advisory call.
The single strongest argument for the free model
Equity Gap
What we learned
Sports access divides privileged families from everyone else. It is another case of haves and have-nots, decided by a bank account rather than a stopwatch.
What we changed
The pivot to free, and a nonprofit arm underwriting access for low-income families so cost never decides who gets seen.
1,500 scholarships earned to date
User-Friendly
What we learned
Families struggle to adopt new technology for recruiting, and they are adopting it under stress, on a deadline, in the middle of a season.
What we changed
Five minutes from signup to recruitable. Automated weekly reports so nobody has to remember to check. Nothing that requires a training session.
~5 minutes to a recruitable profile
Motivated Decisions
What we learned
Fear drives families in life-changing choices. With no information, they make expensive mistakes at exactly the wrong moment.
What we changed
Replace fear with numbers. Power Score from three years of performance data, Coach Grade for every coach, real roster openings, and fit written per program.
Decisions made on data, not on a campus visit nobody can afford
Speed
What we learned
Momentum decays fast. A family that leaves the app without acting rarely comes back with the same urgency, and the recruiting calendar does not wait for them.
What we changed
We compressed everything between download and first contact. Profile, matching, and a drafted opening message are all ready before a family has time to lose the thread.
Athletes send their first message within 5 minutes of downloading
Conversion Math
What we learned
Recruiting is a numbers game with a knowable ratio, and families were playing it blind — sending a handful of messages and concluding they had no options.
What we changed
We tell families the real ratio up front and build the list to match it, so the target is a hundred well-matched programs rather than the ten they had heard of.
Roughly one offer for every 100 matched schools contacted
Holistic Approach
What we learned
Success needs visibility, education, and family involvement together. Any one of the three on its own does not produce an outcome.
What we changed
Collaborative accounts. Parents and high school coaches share schools, leave notes, and message inside the same app as the athlete.
The whole household recruits, not just the kid
The one that decided the strategy
The gatekeepers win when everyone is ignorant but them.
That sentence is the whole business. An industry whose revenue depends on families not understanding the process has no incentive to explain it — and every incentive to keep the explanation behind a paywall.
Once we understood that, charging families for the explanation started to look like joining the problem. Free is not a growth tactic we picked off a shelf. It is the only position consistent with what we learned.
Read the strategy →