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Strategy
Why free is the moat
Free is the future of online sports recruiting
We are not the biggest player in this space. So we are not going to win it by playing the same game.
The recruiting market is growing at breakneck pace and the companies in it have marketing budgets we could never match. Competing on spend loses. Competing on price — all the way down to zero — is a move they structurally cannot copy.
The gatekeepers win when everyone is ignorant but them.
Sixteen months of operating taught us that, and it is the sharpest version of why this works. An industry whose revenue depends on families not understanding the process cannot afford to explain it for free. We can.
A game that we can win
We are not the biggest player in recruiting, and that space is growing at breakneck pace. Companies with real marketing budgets are already there. Competing on spend is a losing hand.
Rewrite the rules
Everyone in recruiting is fighting over the same shrinking pool of families willing to pay for a recruiting service. Sports has been monetized so heavily that people are pushing back. Free is the opening.
Let them follow
Incumbents cannot match free without dismantling the revenue that funds them. They will have to rebuild their model and catch up to us while we take the market.
Then go wider
High school and college athletes, non-gravity-assisted sports, non-traditional sports, and recreation. The recruiting database is the wedge, not the ceiling.
5.9%
of the base pays us today
Going free costs us less than it looks like it should.
Roughly 1.7K of 29.3K accounts carry the subscription revenue. The other 94% are already here, already engaged, and already worth something to a brand — they are just not worth anything to us yet, because the only business model we have is a seat.
A competitor whose entire P&L is that seat cannot follow us to zero. They would have to rebuild the company first. That is the window, and it is why the round is sized to move fast rather than to extend runway.
Monetization
We hold the real estate
We don’t hate capitalism — we are the consumers too, and everyone is tired of the extraction, the lack of clarity, and paying for the right to play. The way out is to stop selling to the family and start selling access to the attention the family gives us willingly.
Everyone else is a SaaS company
Athlete Narrative operates as one today. This raise moves us off that stream and into the attention space, where the asset is the audience rather than the seat count.
Youth sports is tired
Families have fatigue from the monetization of their kid. Every party in the ecosystem is trying to extract resources from the household. We give resources, tools, and education away in exchange for the attention of those same families.
That is the leverage
Give families what they want for free. Organize the stress. Level the opportunity. Make it worth showing up for. The attention follows.
Brands need the conduit
Brands feel the noise too. Some are already used inside the app and want to stay at scale. Others will be desperate to reach where our audience is. Whatever the need for attention becomes, we own the pipe between brand and family.
Give families what they want for free. Organize the stress. Level the opportunity. Make it worth showing up for. The attention follows, and the brands follow the attention.
The number the pivot has to clear
What a free user has to be worth
Free is only a better business if the attention layer out-earns the subscription it replaces. Here is the bar, in dollars per user per year, at each size of base.
Today
$10.70
per user per year, across 29.3K users, simply to match today’s subscription revenue.
December 2026 target
$3.13
per user per year, across 100K users, simply to match today’s subscription revenue.
August 2027 target
$0.63
per user per year, across 500K users, simply to match today’s subscription revenue.
At one hundred thousand users the attention layer needs roughly three dollars a year per user to stand still, and everything above that is upside on a base that costs nothing to keep. That is a low bar by consumer advertising standards — but it is a bar we have not cleared yet, and the first brand dollar is the milestone this round is underwritten against.
Breakeven figures are arithmetic on the current subscription line, not a forecast. Target brand pricing, sell-side model, and inventory definition are open items — see the diligence question list. Advertising inventory aimed at under-13 users carries regulatory constraints that must be resolved before this is presented as revenue.
Competition
Who we are taking the market from
This is a crowded, well-funded category. Naming it is stronger than avoiding it — the whole thesis depends on what these businesses cannot do.
| Competitor | Backing | How they charge | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|---|
| NCSA | Endeavor / IMG Academy | Multi-tier paid packages sold to families | The scale incumbent and the reference point for what recruiting 'should' cost. Their revenue is the family fee, which is exactly the line free attacks. |
| SportsRecruits | Independent | Club and school subscriptions, plus family plans | Sells through club programs rather than direct to families, so the buyer is the org, not the household. |
| FieldLevel | Independent | Freemium with paid athlete upgrades | The closest thing to a free tier in the category, built around coach-to-coach networking rather than program data. |
| Hudl | Independent (Bain Capital backed) | Team and athlete subscriptions | Owns film, which is the other half of a recruiting profile. A partner as easily as a competitor. |
| Stack Sports / CaptainU | Stack Sports | Bundled into league and club software | Distribution through the registration layer, which is where families already are. |
Competitor ownership and pricing models move. Verify each line against current public information before sending — a stale figure costs more credibility than an omitted one.
Positioning
A serious marketing tool, for serious athletes
Social media is noise
Everyone posts. Almost nobody gets seen by the person who matters.
NIL is noise
It moved the money without fixing who gets found in the first place.
Coaches are noise
A thousand inboxes, no signal on which ones are actually open.
Every athlete has a story to tell, and nowhere lets them tell it without the noise. We aren’t aiming small: high school and college athletes, then non-gravity-assisted sports, non-traditional sports, and recreation. The recruiting database is the wedge, not the ceiling.
The transfer portal is the first expansion, and it is the one that changes what the business is allowed to be.
Roughly 27,000 Division I athletes enter the portal each year and close to a third never land anywhere. They need exactly what we already built — a ranked list, real roster openings, and tracked outreach — inside a fifteen-day window. And because they are eighteen to twenty-two, the compliance ceiling that constrains monetising a high-school base does not apply to them at all.