All right, welcome to the first episode of the Buying Sandlot podcast. I am Kyle Scott, founder and editor of Buying Sandlot where we cover the business of youth sports. Today I talk to Tony Caudill, co founder of Doozy, a text first payments and communication platform for youth sports clubs and tournaments. Tony is a two time payment startup founder and began working on Doozy when he saw a clear need for a better payment solution in the youth sports ecosystem. And in this episode Tony and I discuss the overall opportunity surrounding youth sports events, why simplicity is key in youth sports tech, how community text based communication can enhance the tournament experience, the overall trajectory of the industry and what Dick's sporting goods investment in unrivaled sports means for everyone involved. Onto the interview. All right, want to welcome on Tony Caudill, co founder of Doozy, a text first payments and communication platform for, for youth sports clubs and tournaments who's also very active on LinkedIn. And I enjoy your stuff, Tony. Tony, thanks for joining me on the inaugural Buying Sandlot podcast, man.

I'm honored to be the first. Thanks for having me, Kyle.

You know you have such interesting posts on LinkedIn. There's a lot of people building products and services who are, you know, it's always very self promotional but you have some actual insight and lots of engagement with what you put out there. And we've talked before so I thought you'd make a great first guest.

Yeah, thanks. Yeah, the, the, the LinkedIn world is new for me. It's also super uncomfortable for me. Hey, as we've talked about, this is my second software and payments company and with my first company I held my cards like really tight to my chest. I felt like we were holding all these magical secrets that we couldn't talk about out loud and basically taking a completely opposite. I've done a 180 on that where it's like no, we didn't have any wild secrets that we were protecting and like actually the stuff that we were doing was like really cool that people would have found interesting. Why aren't you talking more about those things and sharing those things? And so that's, that's what I've tried to do with Uzi is I just talk a lot about just building in public and sharing the good, the bad, the ugly. And you know, as I said in the beginning, like it's super uncomfortable for me. That's not my natural state is to kind of overshare publicly like that. But we've got a lot of really good feedback. It's, it's, it's helped with a lot of different connections, which we can probably get into some of those later. But yeah, it's. It's been really fun and it's how I meet fun people like you.

So, yeah, I think there's a lot to be said for that building in public thing. And especially early on, attaching a face to a brand of any size, I think, you know, pays dividends. So why don't you go into a little bit of your background, explain what doozy is and kind of how you got here. Let's start there.

Yeah, that sounds good. The quick backstory is on me. Is 13 years at Accenture helping, you know, Fortune 100 companies get into mobile. That sounds obvious now. It was not then, but spent 13 years doing that, traveling all over the US and loved my experience at Accenture. I always say I wouldn't be standing here today had it not been for that experience, but left there in 2013. My wife and I had been attending a church here in Kansas City and it was a large, you know, they had a thousand people walking through their doors every Sunday. And we just kind of found ourselves getting more and more frustrated with how hard it was for us to stay involved there. Like, if we wanted to volunteer, they would have a table set up in the foyer where we had to go physically sign up on a registration form. If we wanted to make a donation, we had to log into some weird system and make the donation. If we wanted to join a small group, there was a whole other system we had to log into. And then the church would also be sending us out communications if, like there was an urgent need at the church. But often they would have like an out of date email address for me that would go to my old Hotmail that I never check anymore, right. So they would send all these communications that we would never get on time. And so I went to one of the pastors on staff there and was like, hey man, you've got a thousand people walking through your doors every Sunday there. A lot of them are 30, 40 something year olds. I think they would be more involved here, but you're just sort of missing the mark on communications and you know, you need to be doing everything through people's cell phones now. That's how we all do things. And Again, this is 2012, 2013. So sounds obvious now, but didn't necessarily then. And he said, yeah, I totally get it. I agree with you. We don't do mobile here, man. We have no idea how to do that. And I said, well, I do. If I Build something. Would you guys use it? And he said yes. So very long story short, we ended up building the Vineyard Church mobile app. And the goal of the mobile app was to be the one stop shop for the members of the church. So if I wanted to make a donation, I go to the app. If they need to send me a message, they send me a push message. We started there, grew it to like around 100, 200 churches. Ended up doing a seed round in 2015, used that money just to hit the accelerator, grow as fast as we could and then we sold the company in 2018. Around that time, around 2018, we had grown to around 6,000 churches, schools and nonprofits. We had processed $600 million of donations through our platform. It was my first company. I did not grow up in an entrepreneurial. My dad is an electrician at a combine factory here in Kansas City. My mom worked at the school district. Like we just learned so much in a short amount of time and it was just a really awesome experience. So sold it in 2018. Had a bit of an earn out period, so we did that. And then kind of during that period, I have a 12 year old son who is all things sports all the time. He's on a competitive baseball team, soccer team, basketball team. Like we just, we live at, at the fields and the courts. And what's funny about that is I always jokingly say, like I actually have zero athletic ability. And so it's just sort of the, the universe has been humbling me over the past 12 years and, and I always say I've thrown more balls in the past 12 years than I did all of my previous years combined. But it's been, been a, been a humbling and also fun, fun journey for us. But kind of the further he got into his youth sports journey, the more I just realized that payments in youth sports are a mess. It's write a check to the club for this Venmo coach for that cash at the gate. And it was just starting to drive my wife and I a little bit crazy because we would start getting nasty grams from the club owner saying, hey, you guys are late on a payment or you missed paying us for something. And I thought she paid it and she thought I paid it. And so it was just like. And so I ended up going to the guys that own his baseball club here in KC and said, hey guys, this is a mess. And they basically laughed at me and said, yeah, if you think it's a mess for you, you should see what it's like for us. And then they pull out the spreadsheet and they're like, this is how we're trying to track all of this stuff today, right? And keep in mind, this is a baseball club that's got 35 teams on it. You know, 12 to 14 players per team. Like there's real payments happening here and they're trying to manually track it. It's all coming from different directions. And the reality is, like, they're not business guys, right? Like, they love baseball, they're baseball guys and they're great at baseball. They don't want to be spending their time being a bill collector. And so story repeats itself. I said, wait a second, I know something about this. I know software, I know payments. And so I said, if I build something, will you use it? And they said, yes. So. So we did. So we spent sort of the first half of the year building our first cut of the platform. Second half of the year getting all of their 35 teams on it, using it, learning from it, what's working, what's not, making adjustments as we went. And that's really how Doozy started was on the club side of things. The goal was to put payments on autopilot so that the club's not chasing them down. It's less frustrating for the parents and just really make it as simple as possible for everybody.

So it sounds like it's funny. Someone I talked to last week likened youth sports to religion in some way. It's that in a lot of cases you have these big governing bodies, right? But they have all these tentacles. Everything is so fragmented. And your example, the parallels between your church example and how you grew your last company and this one are. Or obvious. You kind of could see what's happening at the ground level. And then, hey, if we could do this here, we could replicate this across thousands, tens of thousands of teams, clubs, leagues, tournaments, you know, the same way you will with churches. And feels like so many good businesses are born. The best businesses I think are born out of. Here's a problem. I can solve your problem. I mean, it sounds simple, but so many people try to accomplish, you know, try to make things complicated. And I know what you guys do. So talk a little bit specifically about what Doozy maybe originally did right out of the box, where it's grown to in a short amount of time now. Cause I know you guys do have a big focus on simplicity, text based communication, trying to meet people where they are rather than forcing them into yet another ecosystem they don't want to be a part of. And then Maybe talk about how you guys are different from some of those existing ecosystems, the bigger players.

Yeah, you know, how we grew was really organic, actually. We'll tie this back to LinkedIn here in a second. But, yes, we started on sort of the club side, and really that was our focus out of the gate was like, we think there's a huge opportunity here. And as we had the first club up and running, we started talking to other local clubs here in Kansas City, getting really good signals and feedback. But we kind of wanted to get that first club through a full cycle just to see again what we got right, what we got wrong. So, kind of through that process, I got introduced to Kansas City to Casey Sports, which is the USSSA affiliate for Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, and the founder of that happens to be here in Kansas City. So I reached out to him on LinkedIn, just completely cold and kind of told him the story, what we were up to. Took a couple times for him to. For him to respond, because I was just some guy reaching out to him. But next thing I know, I was having beers with him at a local restaurant here in Kansas City, walking him through what we're doing, and he said, yeah, this. This makes total sense, and I can help introduce you to more clubs throughout the Midwest. And I was like, that's great. That's what I'm needing. And he said, you know, while I got you, can I tell you about another problem that we're having? I was like, of course. I love problems. And he said, the gate. He's like, they had stopped taking gate fees during COVID and they instead were charging the club for the gate fee. Well, the clubs don't like that because most of them were just eating that cost. The theory is they were going to pass it on, but again, when you're running out of spreadsheets, it's just not really what you do. Like, that just doesn't always happen. Right. So the club didn't do that just.

Because they didn't want cash changing hands in 2020.

Yeah. It was largely a Covid function.

Okay. Okay.

Like, once things kind of came back, it's just how it went.

Yeah.

So, yeah. So the. So the club was complaining about it. Who's ultimately their customer? Right. The tournament operators. Their customers. Clubs. So clubs don't like it. Tournament operator doesn't like it because he knew he wasn't charging the club enough for it. And so he's like, we. We are going to reintroduce gate fees into the mix this spring. He's like, but this is our chance to do something different, right? Like we don't want to do cash, we don't want to do card. Like, if we're going to go back to gate fees, this is our chance to kind of do something fun. And I was like, hey, I, I get it. I've been through your gates many times, right? And I never have cash on me. We actually just went to a tournament out of town a couple weekends ago and they were cash and check. That's the first time I've ever had a. Had a gate tell me I could write a check, which we didn't have either. And so I'm out of town, I get to go find an atm and it's just like, oh my goodness. So, so anyway, so we talked to him about gate. I was like, yeah, I mean this, this is great. Like one, I'm, I love the space. Two is we already have a lot of the infrastructure in place. We have the payments infrastructure in place. We have the texting infrastructure in place. We can put a lightweight ticketing experience on top of that. That's the easiest part of those three parts. And so we did that and sort of January, February, we built that lightweight text ticketing interface and then we went live with our first tournaments here in Kansas City in March of this year. And it's going exceptionally well. I mean, really, the way I describe it is I go to a lot of Royals games. I'm a huge Royals fan. But we go to other MLB stadiums. Stadiums as well. Now when you go to an MLB stadium, you've got your ticket on your phone, right? You walk up, you scan it, and on, on you go. Everyone's pre purchased it doesn't it speed things. Speeds things up. And that's exactly what we're trying to do with youth sports. It's, let's not make a line at the gate. Let's not have frustrated parents, because I am one of those parents. And we're always running late. I got my wagon in tow. Somebody's already frustrated. It's like the last thing we need is more frustration when we hit the gate. I just want to be able to show my ticket and, you know, get on, on in from there. So we started doing that the spring and have been doing it throughout the spring. We're just now actually getting into like in Kansas City. Like right now is when things really dial up. We've got a couple big tournaments this weekend. We have our biggest over Memorial Day next weekend that we're really excited about. So it's going really well. So today, kind of you fast forward to today where we're one platform with two products. We have our club, the club side where we can put club dues and fees on Autopilot. And then we have the tournament side, which is. I like to refer to it as tournament experience, which I'm sure we'll get into more that later. But it's not just about ticketing. Is just. Is just sort of the tactical solution kind of means to an end that we're trying to get to, which is just a better overall tournament experience.

As a real quick aside, what is, what's that like now that you're operating at some scale, how stressful was that? Those first couple of tournaments where you're like this, this needs to go well. This needs to work. Were you on site for those? Were you sweating? We were, yeah. Okay.

Yes, I was sweating and yes I was on site and yes, it was 40 degrees. So it's a little weird that I was sweating, but yes, I was sweating. Yeah. Yeah. Joe, my co founder and I joke. Both of the companies we founded have really stressful weekends. Right. Like our first company, we processed payments for churches. Guess when most of those payments happen? Sunday morning from like 9 till 18 or 9am to 1pm Right. So I. We could do a whole podcast on funny stories about. And that was before like auto scaling was a thing with your servers. And so we just had a dedicated number of servers. And Sunday morning Joe and I would be watching the bandwidth on those servers just climb and climb and climb and we would be on a bridge and I'm just sweating Sunday mornings. Like it was horrible for years before sort of auto scaling with servers became a thing. And so we finally got through that where we were able to eventually hire an infrastructure team team that kind of took care of all that stuff. And they were way smarter than we were. But it's funny now that our second company that we've started, guess when we do a lot of payment volume, so it's like, man, if we do a third at some point, can we, can we please find something that is not over the weekends?

Because I would stay away from. You'll go on Tuesday. That's it. Yeah, yeah, that's right.

That's right. Yeah.

So I find that so interesting. Were there other, you know, maybe talk about the competitive landscape? I imagine there were some attempts in pockets of the country to have some sort of mobile or digital or prepay solution. I know maybe outside of sports, I see a lot of like local events. Like think about things like Farmers markets or small concerts or comedians. I see a lot of eventbrite like you. You see people kind of repurposing things that aren't. That aren't exactly a fit for, for that type of event. But it's close enough. It might throw off a QR code. Talk about, like, what else was out there at that point other than just, you know, cash changing hands? And today, like, who would you kind of consider a competitor today?

Yeah, I mean, our biggest competitors today are Cat is cash, right? That's competitor number one. Competitor number two is just your vanilla card reader, right? Just grab the card, slap it down, you get a, you get a bracelet that you put on, and on you go. Those are our biggest competitors. The third bucket. It is exactly what you said, like the event rights of the world. And there definitely are online ticketing platforms out there. We do not pretend that we're doing something wildly innovative that no one else is doing. That's not the case. But what is the case is we know youth sports really well because we're living it every day. And so we're not trying to build a vanilla solution. We are building something that's built for youth sports. So. So a couple of examples where this matters. One is coaches passes. So historically, if you're a coach, the way this works is the person at the gate probably has a clipboard with maybe a sheet printed out with all the different coaches. Coach comes wheeling up. His, his or her hands are full as well. They're trying to get to the field to get warm up started. They're the gate agent's looking through this piece of paper now, what was your last name again? Trying to check them off like it's, it's just a mess, right? So now with Doozy, the tournament operator goes in on Tuesday or Wednesday, the week before, the few days before the tournament starts, puts in all the coaches. Coach gets a text sent to their phone that says, hey, coach, we're excited to see you this weekend. Here's your three passes for the weekend. So now he's got three tickets on his phone. He can keep his own, his or her own ticket on, on, on his phone. And, and then he can forward the other two tickets to his assistant coaches. And so that way, Friday night, Saturday morning, whatever it is, he's wheeling in there, trying to get to warmups as quick as he can. He. He just pulls out his phone, he's got his coaches pass, and on, on he goes, right? So we've made it really easy for coach. We've also made it better for the, the tournament operator because now they know like how many coaches are coming and going and just the data that this is spitting off is wild as well. So kind of, you know, better for everybody. So like that's one good example of like those one size fits all ticketing platforms. They're not doing that kind of stuff because they don't think about coaches and they don't think about. One of my other favorite things that we do is like the tournament welcome text. So the moment as a parent, you walk up, you get your ticket scanned, three minutes later you audit, you get an automated text sent to your phone that says, hey Kyle, welcome to the summer Bash tournament. Here's a link to the bracket. Here's a link, here's facility. You as a parent, like everything you need right on your phone. Because I'm always that parent that like I can never find the bracket. Right. And the number of times I have to go to my wife and be like now who's playing who? And again she's starting to get annoyed at me because I keep asking questions and now, now I walk in and I get the link to the bracket sent to me, you know, so it's little details like that where we're just doing things that are so hyper youth sports focused that most of these other vanilla one size fit all ticketing platforms just, they're just not going to do.

Yeah. So you know, it feels like in general then, you know, ticketing in some ways just a ticket portion is a bit of a commodity. But being able to tailor it to a specific use case, even if you're, I imagine you guys are much more than 10 or 15% better. But even if you're just 10% better, then the venue is like, well this is a no brainer because it helps me accomplish X, Y or Z. And that's right. It's better than the other thing I know for. Go ahead.

Well, yeah, and that's why I kind of alluded to this earlier. It's why like ticketing for us is just a means to an end. Really what we're trying to solve is the tournament experience. Right. But that begins at the gate. And so you know, we're really encouraging like our operators, like let's push as many pre purchase of the tickets as we can. Right. Because that's the easiest path for everybody. Saturday morning, you've already bought your ticket, you show up, it gets scanned and you're on your way. So we heavily push pre purchase. Will we get 100% pre purchase for a tournament. No, it'll never be 100% because you're always going to have grandma and grandpa that shows up that just didn't get the link and they didn't do it right. And that's okay. We've got an on site experience too. We've made that really easy. But we want to encourage as much pre purchase and I think we can get that number to 70, 80% pre purchase.

Like I saw you posted, you around 50, right?

Around 50 right now it's pretty good. And honestly, if I'm being really transparent, like we are encouraging it, but there's so many more things that we could be doing to, to push it even more, which is why I say I think we can get it to like 70 to 80. The 50 was just sort of organic layup if I'm being honest. Like it just sort of happened. But yeah, so it's, it's the ticketing, it's the communications, it's the again. I was at a tournament a couple weekends ago and we had a storm roll through and they had to delay everything. And the way this tournament operator handled it was two things happened when the storm came through, which we all knew was coming because we all have the app on our phone and saw the storm rolling this way. But 30 minutes before our game was supposed to start, they came over the loudspeaker at the facility and said, hey, everyone needs to leave the facility, go sit in your cars. Well that's cool. If you're within earshot of the loudspeaker. My mom and dad who were on their way to the tournament weren't within earshot of the. Right. So now we're relying on me communicating with them. But that was one and then two was we got a message basically saying, hey, and if you want to stay up to date, call our hotline to get like a latest update on the weather situation. And I'm like, call. We're calling hotlines. What? So, so we're trying to flip that on its head where it's like one of the reasons we want to own that ticketing experience is because now we have a valid mobile number for everyone that's bought a ticket and walked through that gate. And that valid mobile number is super powerful when it comes to things like communicating weather. Hey, send out a text. We're delaying everything for 30 minutes. We'll text you in 30 more minutes to give you, to give you an update or hey, we've got a really big sponsor on site today. If you go show them this, this text, you get 20% off of Bruce Bolt gloves or whatever the case is. Right. Like that'll save. Yes.

We do money on Bruce Bulk gloves too.

It will, yes. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So. So, yes, it's ticketing, but it is so much more than ticketing. Right. Like, we want to own that entry point because that's going to open up and already is opening up all sorts of doors for us.

So, you guys, I know a big focus for you is the simplicity. And you said you're not trying to be everything to everyone all at once and create some super complex system trying to solve these specific needs and add value where there's not a lot of value. I don't believe you guys have an app. You're text based.

Right.

And do you ever go the app route or do you say, you know, for the reasons you just described, hey, we got the number. This is the most efficient form of communication and people don't love having to get put into another app system.

I won't say we'll never do an app. I will go into app if we have to at some point. Kicking and screaming if we do. For a couple reasons. One, as a youth sports parent and a kid who plays multiple sports, I'm done. I don't need another sports related app on my phone where I get messages and I miss the message and like, I'm out. I don't need any more. The pattern's full. So that there's sort of a selfish thing going on there.

It's, it's. That's like me in parking apps, by the way, outside of the sports apps, like, you go somewhere, you're like, I got like six of these. I got. They have my credit card. I really wish I'd have downloaded another one right now.

That's a great analogy. Yep, yep. Yeah. So there's that and, and two, there's some serious ptsd, I think, from our first company. Our first company was a mobile app company, right? So at one point, I mean, we had thousands of branded mobile apps in the App Store. And keeping up with that, again, I can tell you all sorts of horror stories about how hard and ugly that was because Apple's constant, constantly releasing updates. At one point several years ago, they decided people couldn't submit apps on behalf of another company. I literally thought our company had died that day. Like, we were just. They had a choke hold on our business that I hated. It literally kept me up at night at times. Right. Because like, they could just decide, yeah, we're not going to Allow this app anymore and then they would. Right. And so, yeah, so those are for those couple of reasons I've learned to never say never. You never know what may happen. But we are doing everything we can to stay away from apps. And just the simplicity of text, man, it's, it's just, it's so much better now. The delivery deliverability is so much higher than it used to be and it's, it's just what it's. Youth sports runs on text and so like why, why are we not doing all these things through text when we can? And so we are.

And so how much those messages does the facility or the club, they have control to push them out? Do they have to do it in conjunction with you? It's on them. Right?

Yeah. There's a admin interface to all of this. So the club tournament operators have a different admin experience than parents do. But yeah, they can send out, they.

Have control of it and you guys actually allow them to brand it too. It's not just, it's not coming from you guys where it's like, who the heck is this? It's actually coming from that organization or location.

That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This was another one where like I was just wrong on this. I mean with our. People used to say the word branding to me and I would kind of roll my eyes and laugh a little bit and do my best and I have a horrible poker face. I wasn't very good at it, but I tried. I was very wrong about that. Like brand really, really matters. And especially in youth sports, like there's, there's some loyalty to that brand. Like my son, he plays for Prodigy Baseball Academy. He's really proud of that. Right. And that brand means something to him and it certainly means something to the operators. And so yeah, everything we do, we try to lead with their brand. Even down to the tournament operators, like our ticketing. When you get your ticket text to your phone, it says KC Sports. It's their brand. Yeah. So you know, doozy is sprinkled through it. We love to have fun with our brand. Like the name is just kind of funny, like by design. Like we want it to be light hearted and we like to have fun with it. So I also love our brand. But yeah, when it comes to the parent experience, we try to lead with the club or the, or the tournament operator. Because it means something.

Yeah, no, it makes total sense. I mean, I've signed my kids, even myself up for some activities like tennis or something. And you'll get thrown into these, these other platforms, even the local baseball facility here, do batting practice at one of the EL1 facilities. And I got thrown into a God knows what app that wasn't, wasn't their brand. It was terrible experience. And I was like, am I even still registering at EL1 now? Right. Where am I? And just that, that disconnect is, is jarring for some people. Never mind that. I think a lot of these wind up looking like these kind of scary enterprise apps versus, you know, both your branding for Doozy and then obviously the local organization is a little bit more, it feels a little bit more consumer friendly. Right. Like you guys.

Yep.

You guys, you know, I just see from your logo and it's softer colors, like a little bit more modern looking that matters, especially in the mobile world.

That's right.

So you guys have this thing for clubs, you have it for tournaments. All the while you're collecting lots and lots of phone numbers of youth sports. Parents talk about the importance that, you know, I say the responsibility that comes with having that data probably first and foremost. And then what else can you do with it? You know, there's a lot of things you can do with data that's helpful to people and it's not just a prying, you know, preying on that data. So talk about how you guys handle it and what you can do with it.

Yeah, it's a sensitive topic because as a parent myself, what we are not going to become is a spam engine. Right. And the moment we're perceived as a spam engine, it's over. And so like one, just selfishly, I don't want that as a parent, and two, just from a business perspective, we can't allow that to happen. So it is a, it is something we take very serious from both a security perspective and also just from a usage perspective of being smart and responsible with the data that we have. That said, it is wildly powerful, the data that we have. There are a lot of people that we already have reaching out to us saying, wait a second, you're telling me you have a mobile, a valid mobile number that you've delivered a text to for, you know, 3,000 people that are going to this tournament and this place at this day, at this time, you can tell me who all of those people are. We can, that's, that's pretty powerful. Right. From a, from a sponsor activation, like whatever terms you want to say there. And we're trying to do really cool things with it. Right. Like be really intentional with it. So a good example is, let's say a tournament operator has a partnership with Whataburger. For example, let's say if that were a thing and a rain delay is a happening. So now tournament operator can go in, type up a text and say, hey, weather's coming through. We're going to delay for an hour. By the way, it's lunchtime. If you're hungry, there's a Whataburger a mile and a half from where you're standing right now. If you show them this text, they'll give you a free cheeseburger. Right? Silly example, but like kind of awesome.

That would work. Believe me. That would works.

Yeah. And so there's things like that that we're excited to experiment with. There's things like on site vendors. I was again at a tournament recently and they had, man, I think there was like four or five different trailers set up with different vendors selling things inside the trailers that you could buy. So you know, like, it's just really cool. I mean if you think about a, a perfect game, for example, who just signed a deal with, with, with Bruce Bolt. And so imagine going to a perfect game tournament. They know you're there, they've got Bruce Bolt stand set up and they can send out a text. Like everyone has downtime between these games. Like you've got an amazingly captivated like minded audience and you've got a valid mobile number for everyone that's actually there. Being able to send a text message to them saying hey guys, Bruce Waltz here this week, go show this. You get 20% off of your order. Like that's pretty freaking cool. And you can't do anything like that today. So that's the stuff that as you can tell, I get nerded out over real quick.

You know, I, I do too. And as you're saying, you know what I'm building with buying sandlot here, we're, we're getting, I'm seeing the emails, you know, same as you. I could see the emails who are coming in and who's signing up and I'm seeing truly some of the most, you know, interesting and influential people in the space. And I, I could see they're opening the emails and they're clicking them and I've had people reach out and say, hey, I have a facility, I'd love to get in touch with investors. I'm an investor, I'm, I'm interested in this region and I'm like, I'm having the same thoughts in my head is like, okay, you got this, this data, how do you use it? In a way that is, you know, beneficial to everybody. Right. And using it in the right way. But there's, there's a genuine service that having this data you can perform by putting people together. In your case, maybe it's sponsors and event operators with their customers. In my case, it's, you know, I got, I got this network that's building here and a lot of people can benefit. How do you do that in the right way? That it's additive and there is a balance to be had there, but it's, it's valuable stuff.

I agree. And I think it's, I don't mind getting those kind of messages when it's very intentional and like, there's clear value add. Where people start getting frustrated and irritated is when, when you just become a spam machine. Right. And again, we're, we're just, we're not gonna do that. I know you won't either. But it's like if you, if you can find ways to use that data in a really responsible and intentional way, it's, it's amazing. Like, who doesn't want a message that's knows where I'm at? It's speaking to my location, it's speaking to my schedule, it's speaking to the things that I like. Like, it's a noisy world. Getting people's attention is so difficult. But if you can do those things, then people will listen.

Yeah. Where do the larger apps, the team snaps, the game changers, do they play into this world at all? Do they mostly not concern themselves as much with payments in this manner?

They do, they do play in the space and I personally use all of those apps. I'm the game changer dad for my son's team. I use Team Snap, all the things. So all good competition is, is a good thing, I believe. And so, yeah, we do certainly run into them. You know, where we are focused and you hit the nail on the head is simplicity. Right? Like, yes, they do payments, they do a lot of other things. And if, if you're needing to solve payments, we are going, we are surgically solving that and we are going to be the best at it. And we're not trying to be a scheduling tool. There's a million other websites. Like, we're not trying to do that and they do some of those things. And so, yeah, we're being really intentional about what we're trying to solve. And we want to be the best at that thing and not try to be all things to all people. We, we kind of learned that the hard way. With our first company, like, we. Our platform just continued to like, bloat, you know, and before I knew it, we were doing a lot of things, but none of them like, really, really well. Like, we would kind of scratch the surface on. On a lot, but I never felt like we just nailed anything with our. In our first company. And I don't want to do that with Doozy. It's like I. We're a team of two right now and we're moving at warp speed. But, like, even if I wanted to solve everything, I can't. So let's go solve one or two things really well and be the best at that. And then we'll let the cards fall however they fall from there. But yeah, it's. It's all good. We certainly run into clubs that are using Team Snap for their payments and if they're happy. Cool, man. That's. I don't believe we're in a, you know, winner take all situations. The. The youth sports market is enormous. There's more than enough fish for many of us to win. So all good.

Yeah, it's a good way of looking at it. Is this a fair example for you guys? Like, I would. As you're describing your service, I think a lot of like what stripe does for like maybe E commerce, right? Like everyone eventually patches in to them and they're not maybe public facing. Some people are aware of the brand, but they're powering so much of the. The E commerce infrastructure, among other things. Like, is that a good sort of analogy for what you guys aim to be kind of the sports event and club world?

I think it's good. I would, I would actually say we are more like Toast. Like in the restaurant world, it seems like you're probably familiar, but like toast is a platform that a restaurant buys and it powers really kind of like the restaurant experience. Everything from what the operator, the restaurant owner sees from a reporting perspective to the server is using a toast interface. When they walk up to your table and you give them your order, they're putting in the order. The line cooks are seeing that through a toast interface. When you check out and you're paying, you're likely paying through a toast interface. You may or may not know that, but like, you probably are. And so I tend to compare us to more of a toast than I would a stripe. Like stripe is one of the functions that we have do payments. We don't use stripe, but you get the idea. But like, we were more like toast where we were trying to control the experience, which happens to also include payments.

Yeah, like the Opera. Almost the Opera. They're like the operating system for restaurants. In some ways. You guys are.

Yeah, that's a great way to say it. Yeah, yeah.

And Stripe. And if. Expand on my E Commerce example, Stripe is basically powering Shopify.

Right?

Shopify is providing the os. So maybe you're. You're a stack a little bit higher in the stack. That's.

Yep.

That's great.

That's right.

So where do you. Where do you guys go from here? You know, talk about got your little. Little. It's a lot of people. You got your pocket there in. In KC In Missouri. You know, where. Where goes next and how do you kind of expand in a way that allows you to. Guys. And continue to be the best and without like, you know, getting ahead of your skis? Because I imagine once people kind of use it, there's like a lot of demand and you can kind of quickly get over. Overwhelm yourselves.

Yeah, definitely. Yeah. And we're trying to. We're bootstrapped, right? I think I've said that a couple times at this point. But, but, but all joking said, like, I'm really proud of that. I mean, we, we. So my co founder joined me in January. I had been working on it last year to sort of get that early pilot up and running. We're literally. We're two guys, right? And we. We effectively both went full time in January of this year. So we're five and a half months in and we're having a lot of fun. It's a space that we care about deeply because we've both got kids deeply involved in it, and we, we just know what we're doing because we've done it before. So it's all those things kind of coming together. Joe and I were having lunch yesterday. It's like, man, I'm. I'm just like, genuinely, like, grateful because it is just. It's really fun right now. That doesn't mean it's not stressful. It is. It's really stressful. We, in fact, we paid ourselves for the first time today, which was super exciting. Yeah. That's good, right? Yeah, pretty. Pretty fun given that we started, you know, from. From zero. I take a lot of pride in that. But yeah, I mean, as far as, like, kind of what do we do from here? And. And we talk a lot about that. You know, I think while I love the club side, I think it's. It's fun. The side that I just, like, find myself getting more and more energized about is the tournament side of it just because I just think there's so much opportunity and I spend so much of my personal time at tournaments. Like I'm just kind of on a mission to be like, man, this tournament experience hasn't changed in many, many years. They're still doing the things that they've been doing for a long time. And expectations are changing. There's big investment dollars coming in. Right. And parents expectations are changing and I just think we can have a lot of fun with that tournament experience. And technology is obviously going to play a key role in that and so I love it. I think my dream state is we find, we continue finding tournament operators and we say, here's how you're doing this today. Here's what it could look like. Here's a few examples of how we're actually executing this today. Get on the train, like let's, let's go have some fun together. So yeah, I mean I, I would love to sort of get to a point where maybe we lead with the tournament side and inherently if we get the tournament side right, we get introduced to clubs because clubs are the ones that are going to those tournaments. And then as a secondary play we say, hey, you, you just, you interacted with Doozy through your ticketing. That was cool. That was easy, wasn't it? Did you know, we can do the same thing for your club but really lead with that, with that tournament side. So yeah, we're actively talking to some key players out there that could, you know, it could be nothing, it could be a complete game changer. Literally. No pun intended there. Nope, no pun intended. But yeah, I mean we're, you know, talking to a few tournament operators that just, it could just be really fun to go and just kill this thing together and have a lot of fun doing it along the way. So we'll see how it plays out over the coming months. The good news is we're in control here and we're going to be really smart. We're going to be really intentional, see.

Where it goes from the kind of business owner founder side, I think I'm learning there's a lot of people in our audience who are some level of self employed and that includes tech, tech founders, even to facility owners. But there's a, you know, there's a through line there, the pains and stresses that everyone feels. Talk about going through this your second time. Obviously you, you did this before with the previous app business which sounds like it was similar enough in terms of, you know, kind of what it did and the service it provided. Talk about some of the things you learned, some of the pitfalls maybe you're avoiding this time. And then I know you went through the process of selling to any extent you can. Kind of talk about best practices for someone who does get to the level where they're getting approached to be acquired. I know I sold a business before and we talked about this last time. There's a lot of things you learn very quickly that you should focus on and avoid the next time if you're lucky enough for that to happen.

Yeah, that's a whole podcast right there. Just on, on the. I can, I can talk for hours on all those things. Um, see where with some. How is it different the second time? You know, one is, I think I was a little like arrogant coming into this. I came into the second one thinking, like, this is going to be easy. Like, we got this, we've been there, done that. You can't throw anything at me that I haven't seen yet. I, I came into it arrogant and I got humbled, like fairly quickly. Quickly. Because I don't know, man, I gotta be honest, like, I'm not sure it's any easier. In fact, I would argue that in many ways it's actually harder because there were so many things I didn't know the first time. Like, I was just sort of oblivious to so many things that I know that now I know can happen. And those are all in the back of my crawl and like I lose sleep over those. There's no signal of any of those things happening. But the fact that I know they can happen versus the first time, I just, just kind of dumb, man. I didn't, I didn't know you could just wake up one day and be sued for no real reason. And I didn't know like, you know, like all those things. And so, yeah, I mean that, that part of it is like, yes, from a pure knowledge perspective, it's easier. When we went to go add payments, I knew exactly what to do, right? Like, I didn't have to. Knew who to call, knew what to do, how to implement it, all the things. But from like wisdom perspective, you almost know too much, which has kind of made it harder because so many of those things are out of your control.

I've heard, heard a lot about this. I've listened to a lot of businessy type podcasts, founder type podcasts over these past couple of years and there is a definite theme there of not knowing what you don't know is beneficial the first time around. Because you're kind of a little younger, a little bit more stupid. You just try stuff, it fails, sometimes it hurts. You ultimately learn through that. And, you know, there's a lot of trial and error in any business, whereas if you've done it before, you've had success, you think you. You can always point out the downsides of everything you do now you can understand how it could go wrong. And I think sometimes I've found this personally, that can handicap you a little bit because you're not willing to take that swing because you're like, well, this could go wrong, or here's where it could backfire. And I'm so smart because I know how it could backfire. And then you kind of lose some of that, like, zeal to just. Just try it. What's the worst that could happen?

Yeah. And you have more to lose, right? It's like the first time, like, what was catastrophic? Like, I don't even really know. And now it's like, there's just. There's more to lose is the reality. There's also more to gain. Right. So I. I try to not get too stuck there, but that. That is certainly has been an interesting learning. I think one of the other key differences this time is, like, ego sort of can take over real easy, right? And like, with the first couple company, the number of employees that we had meant a lot to me for some weird ego reason that I. I don't. I don't know, like, but I. I took a lot of pride. And like, we're 30 employees. We're 35 employees. We're like. And it was just like a badge for me to be able to say that. And while I loved working, we. We had an amazing team. And I mean that. I. I genuinely miss being around those people every day. It's been one of the hardest parts of all this for me is being not with them. But that said, also managing a team of people is exhausting for me because I am just such a. I just want to get stuff done person. Right. My bias for action is super high, and I don't want to sit in planning meetings, and I don't want to overthink things. Just go get started, and if we're right, awesome along, well, we'll figure it out. Right? Like, that is just my general M.O. and the more we grew, the harder that became. And so I kind of, you know, so my goal with this company has done a 180 of, like, actually, my goal with this company is like, I think we can stay under five employees and go a real long way and just have a lot of fun and be real intentional about who we're hiring and make sure they're a good fit for us. Because the reality is, like, it's kind of hard to work with me at times, but because I'm just such a go, go, go person when it comes to this kind of stuff. And so I, yeah, I, I just summarizing, it's like, yeah, first company, it was like, how many people can we hire fast? And we had raised money, so that helped. And this time I'm just the opposite. Like, we. I don't want to get over five. And I think we can do it.

It's a lot easier to spend somebody else's money to hire too.

It's a lot easier, man. A lot easier.

I think that's, I think that's really good advice and insight on kind of the. The founder mindset. One slightly topical thing I wanted to talk to you about. I think you weighed in on this on LinkedIn and obviously I think the big news in youth sports over the last maybe couple of weeks has been Dick's investing in unrivaled. And I think you had a. I think you called out one of the things in the press release where they talked about better tech integration and just sort of, you know, highlighting the need for that in the space in general. Not necessarily just with them, just overall. But would love to kind of get your thoughts on that seeming partnership, what it might mean and maybe just higher level where you see the industry heading. Obviously tons of money coming in, tons of consolidation with some real serious money and brands and you can kind of start wherever you want there.

I think the Dick's investment into unrivaled just a huge signal. We've been hearing about the growth of esports and depending on what article you follow, is a $50 billion market. 70. It's enormous and growing like crazy. And just on a personal level, I'm part of that and I'm seeing it and I'm here for it. The reason I'm so passionate about Doozy is because I've seen what youth sports has done to my son and, and his friends and I'm, I think, you know, our youth needs more youth sports in their lives. They need the structure, they need the discipline, they need the leadership. The world needs this. Like, there's no silver bullets to a lot of the bad stuff that's going on. This is one of the really good bullets we got. And I, to the extent I can play a role in Helping to grow that. Like I'm here for it. Right. It's how I'm spending my days and nights. So, yeah, I think, you know, we've been hearing a lot about it, but this is one of the first big ones where we're now seeing it, right? Whatever. 20 million bucks into unrivaled. Yeah, it's big. It's a big deal. And yeah, I think my LinkedIn post, like the thing that caught my attention and one of the articles that I read was they'll be using some of this funds just to invest in the tournament experience and sort of validating to read like, all right, I'm not. Well, I'm crazy, but not completely crazy or alone. Like other people are seeing this too, that tournament. It's time to upgrade that tournament experience. You think about the parents now. Like, I'm an older parent. We didn't have our son till a little later in life. But like most of those parents run around, you know, they're, they were. They've had cell phones in their hands their entire life. Right. And, and that's sort of a, that's a newer thing and their expectations are pretty high when it comes to that stuff. They're used to doing everything in their life through this and youth sports is dragging there. And so I was exceeded. I was excited just to kind of see the signal of, of somebody the caliber of Dick saying, we're going to make an investment here. We're going to help this company create world class youth tournament experiences. Let's go.

Yeah, I think it's exciting, I think to, you know, your point about sending out the bracket and maybe there's a sponsor, maybe here's where you could do during the rain delay that types of stuff like. And people are spending basically vacation weekends at tournaments and outside of the sports, to your point, there's a lot of downtime and I'm willing to bet a lot of these, you know, the larger companies here are going to find ways like how else can we entertain people, namely parents. Right. I spoke to, I'm forgetting his name, that he's, he's launching the Valhalla Soccer Valhalla Arena SC in Denver. And you know, it's a little bit different. It's not so much tournaments, but they're like, hey, our facility is here to entertain parents. We have a beer hall with a screen and it's like, you know, you got these parents here, they want to watch their kids. But there's also like an hour of sitting around time on either side of that and you know, how can we entertain them? And I think that's a natural part of where maybe this, you know, how can we improve events? What else, what other lifestyle activities can we bring to that?

Yeah, yeah. And I think it's also a careful balance. I mean, I'll talk out of the other side of my mouth here for a second, but, like, you know, my son is playing in Cooperstown in June, and, and so my wife has been coordinating all that and it's been a lot and I, I have. She's done all of the work. But, like, there is a balance of, like, yeah, you want to upgrade this experience, but let's also not like, lose the spirit of. And I'm a. I'm a baseball guy. Right. It's like the spirit of baseball as well. Right. It's a cool game. Right. Like, let's make sure we're respecting that, not completely changing it, but yet I think we can layer on some tech that would remove a lot of the friction that's out there for parents so that we can actually go and enjoy and focus on the week that we're going to have at Cooperstown that everybody's excited to go have. Right. And so it is a balance of, like, as with all things, it's like you don't want to go so far with tech that we're losing the spirit of the sport, but yet you also don't want to operate like 1920 as well. There's a happy medium in there. Right. And that's, that's the sweet spot that we want to find. I don't want to ruin experiences like Cooperstown. Like, it's, it's intentionally. You want some of that old schoolness to it. Right. Like, that vibe to it is cool, but we can.

You don't need your head in the phone all day. I don't know if you've been to Disney in the last five years, but, like, I'm, I'm on that Disney. Plus, you can't navigate, you can't get out without scheduling a ride and scheduling a meal. And you're just blowing through phone battery and your head's always down.

Balance.

Yep. Tony, listen, I think this was a great conversation. I've enjoyed learning more about what you're building. I've been following along on LinkedIn. Why don't you tell our listeners and our audience will feature this in the newsletter as well, where they can find you, how they can learn more about doozy and anything else you want to kind of plug.

Yeah, man, I feel like I've like turned this into a LinkedIn commercial. But yeah, I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. I'm posting every day. I try to post something and it's trying to find a healthy mix of sharing our journey, building Doozy entrepreneur experiences. Just being as a second time founder and I share some personal stuff because I'm just, I'm literally living all of this right now. So it's, it's just a fun collision of all these things that I'm just really grateful for. But yeah, if that's interesting to you, I'm, I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. Just Tony Caudel, look me up there. Would love to connect for for sure. And then as far as Doozy is concerned, our website is just doozyme.com so justdoozyme.com you can check it out.

You want to spell it just in case?

Yeah, that's probably a good idea. So J U S T D U E s y m e.com just do the. Com. I'm not a marketer that could probably be shortened at some point but and our as with many startups, our website, you know, it just needs a facelift. But you can learn a little bit more there or just ping me. I mean I'm having all sorts of fun conversations, especially if you're a tournament operator out there that's this is resonating and you're kind of looking to update that, that tournament, that tournament experience, you know, through ticketing and communications. Like I'm really interested in those conversations and have some fun ones going on right now.

All right, listen, thanks for joining us and thanks, buddy. Yeah, best of luck with everything.

Yeah, we'll talk soon. Take care.

Yeah, you as well.