ReachSmart.ai × Athlete Narrative
Getting to the next level
Four stages from where the numbers are today to a term sheet, with three growth channels running alongside the whole way.
The engagement
Every stage closes something that is currently open.
This is not a generic advisory timeline. Each stage below names the specific gaps it retires — the ones an investor would otherwise find first, and the ones already documented in the diligence work.
Financial credibility
A CFO partner who has taken companies through diligence, so the numbers arrive audit-ready rather than being repaired under pressure mid-process.
An investor's read before the investors
The deck has already been analysed from seven investor perspectives with the attack lines mapped and answered. Nothing in the room should be a surprise.
A network that opens doors
Warm introductions to people who write cheques, sequenced by fit rather than by convenience.
Growth that compounds while you raise
Four acquisition channels running in parallel, so the metrics improve during the process instead of standing still.
An asset that outlives the round
An email capture and model refinement pipeline that turns every athlete-to-coach conversation into training data. It is the one piece of this engagement whose value keeps compounding long after the money lands.
The path
Four stages to a term sheet
- 01Weeks 1–4
Financial validation and modeling
Get the numbers to a standard that survives an analyst.
Partnering with Vantage CFO to reconcile the books, settle every metric definition, and build a model that holds up under diligence. Today two workbooks disagree on revenue by 1.64×, attrition is reported against an undefined denominator, and lifetime value is a flat assumption rather than a measurement. None of that survives a first serious investor, and all of it is fixable before anyone sees it.
Vantage CFO · ReachSmart · AN finance
What comes out of it
- Single reconciled revenue definition, both workbooks restated and reissued as one file
- Cash position and full funding history documented, including the $1.85M already raised
- Cohort retention export grouped by month of first payment, replacing the flat $360 LTV
- Clean cap table, fully diluted, pre and post round
- Operating model with assumptions separated from outputs
Open items it closes
- The revenue reconciliation
- Cash balance and pre-November burn
- Cohort curves
- Cap table percentages
- Five open metric definitions
- What a coach conversation counts
- 02Weeks 3–6
Deck and investor pack dialed in
One narrative, one set of numbers, one ask.
Ben and the AN team work the deck, the strategy, and the use of funds until every claim is evidenced and every number ties to the model from stage one. This is also where the valuation question gets settled, because the entry price determines which investors will ever take the meeting — and running an institutional process at a price institutions cannot underwrite wastes the months before the round opens.
Ben · Matt · Andrew · AN leadership
What comes out of it
- Deck rebuilt against the validated model, every figure traceable to a source
- Valuation and instrument settled, target investor list built to match
- Use of funds broken out by channel, including the paid acquisition split
- Subscriber targets rebased to the actual raise rather than the $7.5M plan
- Case studies and reviews collected from coaches, athletes, and parents
Open items it closes
- The valuation decision
- Restated subscriber targets
- Missing coach, athlete, and parent voices
- Paid media allocation
- 03Weeks 6–9
Pitch refinement and consulting
Get it torn apart by people with no reason to be kind.
Connecting AN with ReachSmart's network of operators, founders, and investors whose job in the room is to poke holes. Every objection found here is one that does not surface for the first time in front of someone writing a cheque. The seven-reader analysis already maps what each investor type will attack; this is where those attacks get rehearsed against real people.
Ben's network · AN leadership
What comes out of it
- Live pitch run against operators, founders, and active investors
- Objection log with a prepared answer for every attack line
- Q&A drilled until the hard questions are boring to answer
- Data room assembled and tested by someone hostile to it
Open items it closes
- Untested pitch narrative
- Unrehearsed objection handling
- Data room gaps
- 04Week 9 onward
Pitching and introductions
Warm intros into a list built for the price being asked.
Direct introductions to Mark, Lionel, and others in the ReachSmart network, sequenced so the earliest meetings are the ones most likely to convert into a lead. A warm introduction from someone who has already seen the deck and stayed interested is worth more than fifty cold approaches, and it is the part of this process that cannot be bought.
Ben · ReachSmart network · AN leadership
What comes out of it
- Sequenced introduction plan, strongest-fit investors first
- Warm intros to Mark, Lionel, and the wider network
- Follow-up and diligence support through to term sheet
- Feedback captured from every pass and fed back into the pitch
Open items it closes
- Cold outreach as the primary channel
- No named lead
Adjacent partnership
Four acquisition channels, plus one build
Before, during, or after the raise — but the argument for during is much stronger than the argument for after.
Personal pitch
Email campaigns
Athletic directors and coaches. Sell the vision, onboard schools.
Sequenced outreach, run continuously
- Direct to athletic directors and head coaches, not to families
- Sell the vision rather than the feature list — this audience buys a mission
- Objective is onboarding whole schools and programmes, not individual signups
- Every school onboarded arrives with a roster attached at close to zero acquisition cost
This is the club and school licensing motion from the monetisation work, run as a founder-led channel first. It is the only one of the four that delivers users and contracted revenue at the same time, and the one that makes a base measured in millions arithmetically possible.
Owned channels
Organic social
Monthly contest giving away spotlight and free app access.
Winner announced monthly
- Athletes enter by posting their story and tagging Athlete Narrative
- Winner receives a featured spotlight and free platform access
- Every entry is user-generated content the brand can reuse
- Monthly cadence gives the channel a reason to be watched rather than scrolled past
Contests involving minors need clear published rules, parental consent for anyone under 18, and a check against each platform's promotion policy.
SEO
Organic web
AI-generated content targeted at parents, published weekly.
Weekly, sitemap updated each time
- Parent-intent search terms: eligibility rules, timelines, cost, what to do when
- Weekly publishing cadence with the sitemap resubmitted so pages index quickly
- Every article ends in the product rather than a newsletter signup
- Compounding channel — costs nothing per visitor once the page ranks
Parents are both the searching party and the paying party. Cheapest acquisition channel available and the slowest to start, which is why it begins now rather than after the raise.
Meta and TikTok
Paid social
Target high school athletes. Sell the ease, not the feature list.
Always on, weighted away from Q4
- Audience: high school athletes, with parent lookalikes as a second set
- Creative: BIA 'Go' as the backdrop, fast cuts, the product doing the work
- Message: how easy it is — profile in minutes, first coach message in five
- Line: Athlete Narrative — Get Picked Up
Commercial music in paid advertising needs a sync licence; the platform music libraries do not cover paid ad usage. Worth clearing before the creative is built rather than after.
Engineering · ReachSmart build
Email integration and model refinement
Capture the full conversation between athletes and coaches, label the outcomes, and feed both back into the model that writes the outreach.
The deck already claims 150,000 outbound messages and 15,000 coach replies as a proprietary asset. Right now that asset is a pair of counters. The conversations themselves — the language that earned a reply, the objections that killed one, the timing that worked for a Division II softball coach in January — are the part a competitor genuinely cannot buy, and they are currently being thrown away.
- 01
Capture
Send and receive through the platform rather than around it. OAuth connection to Gmail and Outlook for athletes who prefer their own address, or a platform-relayed alias so replies land back inside the system either way. The failure mode to design against is an athlete copying a draft into personal email — at that point the send, the reply, and the outcome all disappear.
Full threads stored against athlete, program, position, and date
- 02
Structure
Parse each thread into events: opened, replied, positive, deferred, declined, went quiet. Extract the objection where there is one, and the ask where there is one. This is the layer that turns unstructured email into rows a model can learn from.
Labelled event stream, one row per exchange
- 03
Attribute
Join the thread history to the outcome already recorded at commitment. An offer with a full contact trail behind it is a complete training example: this athlete profile, this program, this sequence of messages, this result.
Closed-loop athlete-to-outcome records
- 04
Refine
Test generated drafts against each other continuously — subject lines, opening lines, length, what gets mentioned first. Retrain on the labelled corpus on a fixed cadence rather than when someone remembers to. Every improvement compounds because it applies to every athlete on the platform at once.
Measurable lift in reply rate, cycle over cycle
The number that proves it is working
Not model accuracy in the abstract — contacts needed per offer. 100:1 is today's baseline. If sixteen months of captured conversation cannot move that ratio, the pipeline is not learning and we should know early rather than late. Reply rate by sport, position, and division is the leading indicator; contacts per offer is the result.
What has to be handled properly
Coaches have not consented to being analysed
An athlete can consent to their own outreach being processed. The coach replying has not agreed to anything. Aggregate and de-identify at the model layer, keep individual replies visible only to the athlete they were sent to, and never surface one coach's language to another athlete as a quote.
The content belongs to minors
Email between a fifteen-year-old and an adult coach is about as sensitive as platform data gets. Parental consent for capture, a stated retention period, deletion on request, and a clear answer on what happens to the corpus at eighteen. This needs counsel before a single thread is stored, not after.
Deliverability is the silent killer
Volume sending on behalf of thousands of athletes will hit spam filtering unless authentication, warm-up, and per-domain rate limiting are handled properly from the start. A platform that quietly stops reaching inboxes looks identical to a platform whose matching got worse.
Why the marketing runs alongside the raise, not after it
An investor discounts a growth plan and prices a growth curve. Every week these channels run during the process is another week of evidence that acquisition cost is falling — which is the single assumption the entire funding case rests on. Waiting until the money lands means walking into the room in month four with the same numbers you had in month one.
Sequencing
Stages one and two overlap deliberately.
The deck cannot be finished before the model is, but waiting for a complete model to start on the narrative wastes three weeks. Stage two begins as soon as the revenue definition is settled, which is the only input the deck genuinely depends on.
The four growth channels start in week one regardless. They are the only part of this plan that produces evidence rather than documents, and they need the runway. Email outreach to athletic directors in particular has a long lead time — school budget cycles are seasonal, and a conversation started in week one is a signature in the spring.
The email capture pipeline is the exception to all of the above. It is the only workstream here whose value outlives the raise entirely, and every week it is not running is a week of conversations thrown away that could have been training data. It should start first and it should not stop.
The one decision that gates everything
The valuation question sits inside stage two, and it determines which investors stage four can even approach. At the current price the round self-selects toward angels, family offices, and strategics rather than institutional venture. That may well be the right call — but it should be a decision made in week three, not something discovered in week twelve.
Everything else on this page is execution. That is a choice.
Ben Ijah
ReachSmart.ai
Prepared by ReachSmart.ai for the Athlete Narrative leadership team. Timings are indicative and assume the financial validation in stage one starts promptly.