💼 It’s a GameChanger (Business Feature #5)

🤔What It Is

GameChanger is an app for youth and non-professional sports teams to track live scores, stats, stream the action, and connect with fans and opponents.

💸The Business

Although the company was acquired by Dick’s Sporting Goods in 2020 , GameChanger is still the #1 rated youth sports app. Originally founded to serve baseball and softball teams, GameChanger has evolved to serve almost all sports:

It’s the infrastructure for a youth sports team and community. The app offers roster management and messaging features that allow coaches and leagues to communicate with parents and athletes, who can use the platform to track stats, highlights, and important data metrics to quantify their game and take it to the next level.

The company’s reach is very impressive. In 2023, the app streamed and scored 2.1 and 6.9 million games respectively. Their clip-generating feature, which allows parents and kids to clip their highlights, led to 110 million clips generated that same year.

💰Revenue Streams (Expected)

• Paid Features – It’s a Freemium model. Some GameChanger features are free (such as live video streaming), others, such as box scores, game alerts, and game highlights, are all paid features. The company offers two different premium options:

  • GameChanger Plus starts at $2.50/month

  • GameChanger Premium starts at $7.50/month

• Streaming Assistance Products – The company sells a streaming kit to make the streaming experience easier for recorders – this appears to be a very small percentage of their revenue.

🔻Potential Expenses (Expected)

• Development costs

  • Includes creating and maintaining tools such as hands-free basketball recording/streaming, spray charts and historical stats for baseball, and roster management/messaging.

• Marketing

• Human Capital

😎 Customer Appeal

• Feel like a Pro – GameChanger allows young athletes to track their stats, watch their highlights, and study the competition just like professional athletes.

• Improve your game – Athletes can use GameChanger’s data and tracking features to find flaws in their game and improve.

• Empowering the teachers – Parents and coaches are able to use the data and information provided by GameChanger to help their athletes improve. It’s also nice when you can show off your kid’s highlights to loved ones 😊

👍The Good Stuff

• Great Freemium Model – A great freemium service provides the required services for free, but has attractive enough ad-ons to generate significant revenue. GameChanger does this. Coaches and managers really need this service for roster management, and they get to use those features for free! Parents and kids want to keep up with stats, highlights, and scores, and they are able to pay for those premium features.

• Future Revenue Stream Expansion – As we noted above, GameChanger is successful with essentially one revenue stream. We see various industries for the company to venture into such as apparel and league management and officiating services.

👎The Downfalls

GameChanger is further ahead than most companies we profile. It would be difficult to say there are any “Downfalls” from a business perspective after the company’s successful exit. However, we added a few critiques on the impact of the application of young athletes and future potential issues:

• Does it ruin the fun? – As a parent, your child’s stats will be quantified for everyone to see. What if they struggle and have poor stats? They could get discouraged and not put in the same effort.

• The Decline of Youth Sports – Read Why Youth Sports in America Are in Decline

🧠 The Op Ed

The successful exit of GameChanger in 2020 lets the record speak for itself – it’s a good business. When Dick’s Sporting Goods bought the app in 2020, it seemed odd to most why a sporting goods store would purchase a tech company. To us, this is a perfect fit for Dick’s. Dick’s can leverage the GameChanger platform to sell sporting goods, uniforms, and apparel directly to their target consumers.

One argument against GameChanger could be made regarding how their app could impact the morale of young athletes. No kid wants to see their poor stats or performance available for their teammates and friends to see. However, GameChanger is not the only comparative environment kids face these days (social media is the most obvious), and there is no way of knowing the impact GameChanger has had on young athletes.

What we do know, though, is that the youth sports landscape is changing. One potential future path for GameChanger to take could be expansion into e-sports, an approximately $2 billion market. Would they be able to compete with a platform like Twitch? We are not sure, but their current standing as the #1 rated youth sports app could allow them to do so.

📚For the Road

• The beginning of GameChanger

• Why Youth Sports in America Are in Decline

• The Rise of E-Sports Has Big Implications for Traditional Sports