All right, welcome back to the Buying Sandlot Podcast. I'm Kyle Scott, Founder of Buying Sandlot. On today's episode I speak with Duran Frazier, the founder of Flag50, a live scoring, streaming and league management platform for Flag Football which is used by over 50 leagues encompassing 10,000 plus games scored and 50,000 players. We talk about why focusing on sports specific tech is what the market needs and wants in many cases the growth of flag football opportunities around stats and data and the overall landscape of youth sports. Before we get to it, I should mention that Flag 50 is an upcoming sponsor of the Buying Sandlot newsletter, though we had initially planned this podcast long before we had those conversations because I think Duran and Flag50 represent a great example of what sports specific tech looks like, particularly in you youth sports. And before we get started, I also want to take it take a second to plug our Buying Sandlot Summit, a two day youth sports business conference which we'll hold in Philly next April 14th and 15th. The event is designed to bring together youth sports owners, operators and investors from across the country. This will be a high end event taking place at the amazing Chess Cafe which is a high end Philly caterer backed switch House event center and hotel for the business end of our conference. And then the Amazing Ballers, a sports and social club complete with turf fields, pickleball and padel courts representing like three of the eight courts in the entire area and a high end golf simulators with those undulating tee boxes. Really cool stuff. This will serve as our evening entertainment. These are two amazing venues in one location, the Battery Building in Philly. Head on over to buying sandlot.com for tickets. Early Bird tickets are now on sale and depending on when you're listening to this, we may still have VIP tickets available. We already sold out of our early bird VIP allotment, but we should still have limited availability for regularly priced VIP tickets which includes access to the on site 4 star hotel rooms at Switch House and other benefits like access to a private room for VIPs, speakers and sponsors and a VIP breakfast on day two. The these packages were clearly more popular than we anticipated and with only 45 hotel rooms on site, the VIP packages are sure to go fast. So depending on when you're listening to this, I'm recording in early December. Some are still available. For now, regular Early Bird tickets do remain. They are priced at 599but will increase to 799 come early in the new year. Those include access to the entire event and also near a nearby hotel room block with complimentary transportation to and from the venue on all meals for all packages, all attendees are included. That includes lunch both days, happy hour and dinner on day one, breakfast on day two, and snacks throughout. Head on over to buying sandlot.com to get your tickets now and onto our interview with Jaren. All right, Joanne, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

So we're going to get into Flag 50 here in a bit, but I always ask guests to give a little bit about their background and how they got into the business. And I found this article about you. So I'm just going to read an excerpt, a couple of paragraphs, and then I want to have you react to it because I think it's really good. Not all of our guests have this, like, sort of cool thing that comes up when you Google them. All right, so I'm just going to read an excerpt here, a couple of paragraphs, and then I'm going to have you react to it. Okay? So, Jeran Frazier to Time 41 is the Restless sort. Today he's living a life many would envy. Startup investor, real estate investor, and serial entrepreneur. He even owns a gold mine, a literal gold mine, not a figure, not the figurative form. But he started with a piece of scraggly land worth less valuable than your iPhone at $800. Today, he lives and works in Carls Bay, California, where he owns a co working space called Incubate Ventures. Here, entrepreneurs mill about drinking Kombucha. I think I'm pronouncing that right, and tapping away on laptops. About 17 startups work here, a few of which Frazier has backed. And Incubate is an eclectic co working space with a palpable SoCal 5. A giant chopper chandelier dangles from the high ceilings. There's the Back to the future style DeLorean parked in the middle of the office space, flanked by cushy couches and desks. One corner of the building is the former recording studio, the Blink 182, which for some odd reason is equipped with a fire station pole for quickly exiting the sleeping loft above. All right, so give me the background on, on that lead from a magazine article about you.

Yeah, it was actually unexpected. I remember somebody coming up to me and asking me if they could write a little story on the space itself, and then it ended up, funny story, on my birthday being the front page of the business section of the San Diego Union Tribune several years back. Yeah. Backstory is I've been a serial entrepreneur for several years. I really enjoyed sort of the tech and real estate world together. I did a little bit of software engineering in college and then jumped into a real estate development company while I was still in college. That became successful and allowed me to invest in a number of different companies. I jumped back into sort of the startup world and sports tech in 2000 and opened up Incubate Ventures then and subsequently sold that business back in 2019 and sort of like put my head down and fully focused on sports tech since then.

Love it. All right, so you're here to Talk about your Flag 50. What is FLAC50?

Flag 50 is a live scoring solution sort of solving the pen and paper crisis that many suffer in the sports world. And we started about 18 months ago. I had a son playing some flag football and I was constantly catching myself yelling at the referee for a time or a score. And I realized there's got to be a better solution. And we had already built it for a number of other sports and I decided let's focus on flag football and build a solution out where basically the game officials or referees can control time and score and provides the fans a solution to watch in real time.

It feels like. Is Game Changer for flag Football too simplistic of a comparison? Just the sort of expectation set for the audience?

No, I think it's probably a good way to describe it. We've been obviously following Game Changer for many years. We were actually sort of focused on sort of alternative tier 2 sports back in 2017 when we launched a company called Stacked Stact, not to be confused with Stack Sports, but we launched that in 2017 and that was a live. Basically same same tools. We had two events or two technologies, one app to run the event day of and then a second solution for athlete profile stats, predictive analytics, live streaming, that kind of stuff. So similar concept. Game Changer obviously focused on baseball with many other sports over the last four or five years they've jumped into. I know they actually have some flag football solutions. Our goal was to focus purely on flag and really offer both athlete and consumer and league owner a solution to run the league and also a parent or a athlete have additional stats and watch and watch in real time.

I love this so much. So many people I've talked to on this show and that we just talk to in the process of putting out the newsletters, especially the ones that have been in the space for a long time. Talk about some of the difficulties in consolidating the fragmented market is so many of these sports specific use cases and maybe the difference between Game changer being so strong in baseball. And flag 50, obviously focusing on FLAG is a great example of this. And it feels like FLAG has maybe the biggest tailwinds in the space, both boys and girls. Flag relatively new compared to other sports and generally underserved for some of the reasons you laid out. Just simple things like scoring, clock, all of that. If I look at your website, you kind of have four from left to right here with arrows pointing to the next one referee controlled scoring, two real time updates, three automatic standings, four complete league management. So that's a big jump from one to four from scores to league management. So let's sort of work our way in that direction. You talked a bit about the scoring. Why, why and how does FLAG need and this flag 50 serve the scoring option that is relatively mostly non existent today for flight.

Yeah, I think the scoring is sort of the nucleus of the problem. Right. I think the scoring gives both the, the consumer, the parent and the athletes somewhere to just follow that data. And then league owners, you know, the, the crazy part and I think that a lot of flag football league owners and a lot of just sports league owners in general suffer from the pen and paper, then to an Excel spreadsheet, then to a website, whether it be Sports Engine or another website updating standings. And it's just a challenge for a lot. And there's, and then of course the errors in between and the parents calling back or the coach is calling and saying hey, scores are wrong. So we tried to create a system where it's just, you know, simple way to validate. And then once those scores are locked in, you know, we tell referees, go to both parents. We have a couple of other solutions where we're beta testing at the moment where they just walk up to the coaches and they say hey, I just want to verify the score. Both coaches and then they mark as review and then it goes straight into the system for the league owner and basically it allows them to, you know, the process minimizes a lot of time, creates a lot of efficiencies for the league owner. We've also built additional tools like we have an AI scheduler built in there. A number of things that again provide the league owner the solution to run an entire season without having to really manage that pen and paper crisis that many of these guys have been dealing with.

What makes it different than traditional tackle flag football in terms of the scoring and like the, the tech piece?

Yeah, I would say, you know, one thing is this scoring and timing for Flag is actually, you know, a little, I Think a little bit easier. Most of the plays are just managed. I mean, obviously a clock is managed on the phone and then the scoring plays are pretty simple, so there's time between. So it allows the, the game official referee to really just pull out that phone when needed. The time and the clock can be running. If there's a timeout, they simply pull out the phone and hit timeout on the phone. So I think in, in tackle football there are some, there are some similarities and I think that it will be a place eventually where we maybe partner with Pop Warner and we build some things out. But ideally, I think that the focus is like really solving the need of a sport that, like you said, is growing rapidly. It's going to be the Olympics in 2028. Female flag, fastest growing sport in the US so a lot of exciting things. I didn't jump into the sport thinking this was going to be the next big sport. I just, I happened to identify a problem and create a solution.

So you're leading with scorekeeping and timekeeping, but obviously it's going much deeper beyond that to run the league, the full league management. This is where you start to veer into the territory of the, like the existing registration platforms, the league apps, team snaps of the world. So what do you think having the sport specific like inch, inch wide, mile deep works versus, you know, some of those other strategies are a bit more mile wide, inch deep or 2 to 3 inches deep, as it were?

Yeah, you know, I think ideally, I think we look at it as we want to play in the sandbox with a lot of these guys. We don't want to box them out. So I think that we're totally open to building the API integrations that are needed to make them all successful with us at some point. I do see. I mean, we have built elements of registration in our technology. It does solve the entire sort of life cycle of both parent participant and league owner. So for us it's like it is sort of something that may be in the short term future here for us. I think ideally we do want to work with all the tools and not. And not box them out.

I mean, I love this, I don't want to say for its simplicity because I think that probably undersells what you guys are doing. You're trying to do a lot. Right. But to me, very clear problem, solution and need that you're solving for, which is flag everything. Others game changers getting into basketball and I think volleyball in particular, and I know they do a little bit in flag and they're trying to go elsewhere. I think people hold them up as like the scorekeeping leader. You know, there are other apps for this, but you're, you guys are just coming right out of the gate and saying like, hey, this is purpose built for Flag Football. We solve an immediate need. And then we could talk later about, you know, our league management features and all of these other things. But like just today, this is a useful app for anyone involved in Flag. Is that fair assessment?

Absolutely, absolutely. I think, you know, like you mentioned the game changer is they are the, you know, they are the 800 pound gorilla in the room and they've done an incredible job building, you know, building it starting with baseball and moving as a number of other sports for us. There is obviously going to be a consumer element coming. You know, obviously right now it's just watching live scores with the nucleus being the league versus being the consumer, if that makes sense. The consumer is sort of secondary in our minds, but is right behind the league owners and those solutions actually we launch here in the next, probably call it six to eight weeks with athlete profile, stats, some live streaming elements attached as well. So we're excited to see where it all goes, but we have a really solid team and, and I'm just excited to, to see this sport grow and be like right in the middle of, you know, us move into this, this run of the Olympics in 2028, you guys.

So it sounds like your ideal customer is, is at the league level. It's not at the parent level. Some of the other apps, you know, parents and leagues could use, but you want to go, you want to sell to the league and have, and run not just the scoring for individual games and parents, but control, control or you know, have the standings and the rankings and things like that. All the stats.

Yeah, I would say, I mean, you know, we talk about sort of the, the, the scoring and timing being the nucleus of the. When you have the league owner, I think the consumer and the parent sort of follow. So I do think that there's a, you know, the total addressable market on the consumer side is massive and obviously where we're headed. But in order for us to capture that and, and have the parent buy in or the consumer buy in, we need the league owner.

On your website you have NFL Flag, FNL under the lights Flag. It's unrivaled. Talk about some of the partnerships you have where you'd like to go, you know, play some of the highlights. So to speaker.

Yeah, I mean we're just, you know, we're talking to individual league owners. Obviously we've had several conversations on the NFL Flag side and, and we're excited to see where all of that goes and some of the other conversations with, with these larger leagues. You know, fnl, the west coast has a handful of leagues, the east coast has a handful of leagues. We've got some great partnerships on the under the lights side, as you mentioned, unrivaled. Not specifically with unrivaled, but just under the lights and really onboarding a number of their leagues. Same with NFL Flag. You know, we're working with, with a number of large leagues onboarding Matt Leiners league in January, which we're really excited about as, as one of the sort of premier leagues under NFL Flag. And, and then also some of the larger club leagues like Conquer in Southern California, which is a big club league and does really well nationally. And then, and then some of the other NFL club leagues in Southern California as well. And then we're, yeah, we're, we're moving into places like tournaments. We launched the tournament technology about four weeks ago and we're really excited about an upcoming event in Las Vegas this week with Oakley Alliance.

What do you think that the TAM is for Flag? Everybody knows it's growing, right? Again, I'm just looking at the numbers you have in your website here, right? So you got 50 plus leagues, you know, 10,000 games scored, 50,000 players. You know, that's today. You guys are still relatively young. How big is the market today? How big do you think it's grown to, both in terms of leagues and participation?

You know, I think right now, I mean, the numbers are based on some research around, you know, both, you know, rec and, you know, amateur club, college and where it's all headed. I think that we're probably about the numbers. About 7.1 million players nationally with 2.4 ish, 2.5 and growing in the sort of amateur space, I would say. And I mean that market, you know, we've got a number, you know, of course everyone has their idea of what the total addressable market is in terms of revenue, but we see it as several hundred million dollars. That sort of encompasses flag football. But again, the cool part is just, you know, there's so many tools I think that these league owners need. So like, if you look at sort of the fragmentation of, of sports tech in general, and it's hard because there's so many things that are needed. Right. I had a conversation with someone yesterday talking about, you know, I just wish somebody could build an app where you know, the logistics of picking up kids. I'm like, that's a whole different app. Like, that's another beast. And there are people doing that. But, like, you do have Team Snap and you do have Game Changer because. And you do have an app for soccer, but there's just different. There's different sports that need different apps, but for us, we see a need. Specifically, if you look, you know, you look at flag football in general from a coaching perspective, I think once we have a league owner buy in, I think the unique part is we open up the gates to helping coaches coach better, dialing in some AI layers that can really help these teams understand, hey, how do I, how do I. How do I call this play? I'm not a coach. So there's a lot of things that we're sort of building in from a technology perspective, leveraging AI. I know that everyone talks about AI, but we are, we are working on some pretty unique things in the AI space that I can't talk about a whole lot. But we're excited to see where it goes and how it's going to help the sport of flag football.

Yeah, I've heard a lot of the. Some of them on the show here. I think Reid from Team Snap and others, people talk about AI, and I think sometimes as society, maybe we're out over our skis in terms of what it's capable of, and sometimes we're not. I mean, it's really good at certain things. Youth sports, there seems to be a pretty big consensus here that it unlocks so many possibilities, because even if it does something good, good is better than what exists today. Take a sport like flag. You mentioned like AI play calling.

Right.

Not a sport a lot of people played growing up, calling plays, even if you are a football coach or player calling plays in flag. My kids aren't in flag yet, but, like, I imagine it's a lot different than traditional football. And so just having an AI that can surface a suggestion where there's a complete lack of knowledge on the. On the personnel in a person side feels like. Feels like a huge unlock. And I've talked about, I've talked to so many other people who are talking about AI highlights, but this is not the first conversation I've had where someone's like, hey, we can actually help with coaching, not just on the analysis side, but like in game suggestions, just to make sure everybody's got, like, all the data, all the data they need at their fingertips.

Totally. And I, I think I don't want to Get. I don't, I don't want to get in over my head and saying we're doing all these things today. I just think just understanding sort of where the future lies in terms of unlocking the league owner and the, and the parent. I think that as well as the coach, I think there is some unique ways for us to utilize things like computer vision technology, you know, and other things that I, that I can't discuss right now, but that are, that are going to be able to really do exactly what you said, which is like level up the coach in a position to help him make plays that he wouldn't know how to make if he just had basically a wristband with a bunch of plays on it.

Yeah, yeah, it sounds similar. Mike from Go Route and they have wearable. I love what they're doing. I think football and baseball primarily right now, but they basically look like Apple watches. And it's coach to player communication. And they're able to communicate with, put a play in and each player on the field can see their specific route. One of the things he talked about, and he said this at a conference in New York not too long ago, was like, now we're sitting on all this data in terms of just what worked on the field because we have the actual play call, not just the result of the play, but with the play call. So it sounds like what you're describing is if you play this out and you go really deep in flag, not only you guys have time and score, but you now know what the input was before that and what the outcome was. So from a coaching data and information perspective, huge unlock.

Totally, totally. And I think, you know, way before we get to that point, we're going to see things like five parents have a camera on the field, AI clipping tools that are, you know, going to capture those plays, dropping them into the, into the team database so that, you know, if your parents watching, they can see the plays, eventually those will drop into the athlete profiles when we get those launched in six to eight weeks. So, yeah, I mean, just a lot of really, really unique things I think that are on the horizon. But the greatest part about the world we live in with artificial intelligence is the ability to move faster than we, we were able to 12 months ago. So it's moving at light speed. And when you have, when you have engineers that understand, you know, sort of building AI first in their mindset, it really does help us. And sort of me being an engineer and involved with artificial intelligence, it's fun to sort of be, you Know, in a place where I understand it and I can see it, but also see where the future goes with it.

Yeah. Talk about the development piece. I think that's a good segue. Have you raised, are you self funding and you know, what's the team look like today? I mean, it seems like you guys are able to move pretty fast here with sort of that more modern AI focused approach.

Yeah, we have a small, lean team. We have five employees, so we're, we're moving quickly. It's partially self funded and we also have, we've raised a small round, but we are raising a bit more capital at the moment, so that's kind of where we're at. But yeah, it's been, you know, I think the blessing is with, with the world of technology. You just. I don't need a team of seven engineers to build. I just need a lean, small team. And you know, we can, we. Sometimes I'm fascinated when I jump on slack with my team and I'm like, what just happened today? It's pretty wild. So it's neat though because again, when we need to make changes, it's, you know, we're nimble enough to make changes versus having a large team and having to go talk to, you know, your lead engineer CTO and you know, there's just a little bit of red tape and trying to solve.

You mentioned earlier, you're mostly on the league side but leaning heavily, like more heavily into the event side. One, it's that accurate. And two, what is, what does that sales process look like? What different use cases can you eventually unlock for the event organizer versus. Versus the league operator?

Yeah, I mean the reason we built, obviously built the tournament technology is that every league runs at the end of the season, runs a playoff. So you needed a tool that run that basically built a tournament tool. And so we offered that, we brought that in initially for some of our, our league owners and then now we're moving into some tournaments. As we mentioned, Oakley alliance this weekend, pretty large tournament on the west coast at Raiders practice facility on the weekend. That to us is sort of an unlock in the, in terms of like we can offer more live streaming. Our ideas of offering live streaming in sort of the. Once you're opening up and watching live scores, the ability to open up that, that live streaming channel on the app and then, you know, as we, as we scale and grow into these leagues, the sales process obviously different. Right? We're, we're targeting a tournament owner and a league owner are different. Generally they're connected at Some level. So they know each other. But yeah, we've been, you know, but it's. But the, the cool part about it is there are the guys running the larger tournaments. A lot of them all know each other and they talk. We, we jumped into a conversation last week when we were talking with Oakley and. And we had like four people mention us for the tournament. So it was really neat to have, you know, have our name dropped and you know, it feels good. It feels like hey, like people are, people are talking about what we're building and I think that's a lot of affirmation that we're doing something right.

Are you guys doing anything around scheduling for tournaments or ranking teams, automate scheduling or not there yet?

Yeah, the whole, the whole system is automated. So yeah, it's, you know it's automated with a, with a manual element if that makes sense. So if you need to move things around. But yeah, the goal is to really provide a really unique user experience that allows both again league owners to do the things they need to on the league management and event management side, but also for the fan to watch that. I'm excited to see what the tournament. We have a release of some UI UX coming up in a couple of weeks that we're really excited to see and for the team. So it's exciting.

Talk maybe at a high level. I mentioned it earlier, but talk maybe just in general, not necessarily just about flag football because you got you're. Or flag 50. Excuse me. You guys are a great example of sports specific with plans to go deep. We already touched on this. Obviously you have others out there that are sport agnostic and trying to get specific in individual sports. To me, in some ways you guys all end up in the same place. You start with that very specific use case of flag football scoring. Right. And then you say okay, team and event management which is flag specific but maybe like a little less narrow than like the actual scoring on the field where then you have the platforms out there, they led with registration. I know game changers thinking about like okay, how do we expand into other sports? So like, you know, how do you think about that philosophically and like obviously I'm sure you guys feel the sports specific route is the right one, but maybe just talk through that problem at a high level because it's a, it's a topic that I see come up a lot and no one seems to have like the right answer.

Yeah, well, I'm probably not going to give you the right answer either then, you know, I think you know it's so interesting. Again, again, it was. It's not our first rodeo when it comes to building sports technology. So being in a place where we built for several Sports back in 2017, 18 up into 2020, it was on a single app that sort of wanted to be the ESPN of Tier 2 and alternative sports. We realized that you just can't be everything to everyone. And I think that's sort of the argument. Right. So for us, sort of moving into and progressing into flag football, we realized that there, you know, and I think in the US specifically, registration seems to be like the nucleus of the customer. Right. If I charge registration, then I own the customer. We're looking at it a little bit differently because I feel like the data becomes a little bit more valuable today. So if I can capture the data and provide the league owners with something that they have to have to provide efficiencies and solutions to help them grow, I think it makes things a little bit more valuable than. Than it did call it five years ago, where it was okay and easy to take an Excel spreadsheet and build your own rankings at nighttime. I think now we have this infatuation with immediate data. So I think that's something that we see as a sort of a valuable mechanism in growing. Registration is a piece. Is it going to be the nucleus of our business model? No. Is it going to be a piece of our business model? Most likely. But I think the goal really is that if we can provide enough solutions where the league owner goes, I just saved myself 30 hours a month of time. You know, that the time value equation is in their mind, easy to equate to a small subscription fee for a number of tools and then giving their fans something to watch in real time, which reduces the amount of screaming at referees for time and score. I think it just solves a lot of those equation, if that makes sense. And so we just look at it a little bit differently and it's because I've been there before, you know, is that registration piece valuable? Very valuable. Right. But the payment processing side is to me, just one small piece of much larger equation, if that makes sense.

Yeah, no, I love it and I love the data angle, you know, and it has here on your website, you have some things coming soon, you know, not going to hold you to timelines. Right. But you have advanced analytics dashboard, athlete profiles and stats. Right. So as somebody who's collecting that data today and then thinking about ways to display it and where your customers can use it, how do you think about data portability? For lack of a better term, integration.

Right.

Because if you have a family and they play one sport as Flag and they play three other sports somewhere and that athlete wants, like, data somewhere. Like, I'm. I continue to be convinced that there is a need for some protocol or app or wallet that almost pulls together all this data the way like a banking app, you know, pulls together your credit cards and your bank accounts and things like that. Especially when it comes to college recruiting. Right. I've talked to some D1 coaches who are like, we don't now, you know, TBD on flag in the NCAA, but I've talked to some D1 coaches, you know, in football and basketball, who were like, we don't recruit necessarily the way we used to and spend as much time because it's all portal stuff and guys leave after a year. So we're trying to find as much verifiable data as we have before that because we're not putting the time and effort in. In sports like basketball. So how would you think about, like, what are some ideas around that from your individual perspective and just as a whole, that athletes can take their data from one place to another or see what they collect in flag football versus what they're doing on the diamond or the court? It feels like a. A huge opportunity to the person who solves that piece of it totally.

Well, I'll start with a term that you used, and it's verifiable data. I think the challenge is this. I think the challenge, and we've noticed this, if you give a parent the opportunity to keep data on their children, generally speaking, they're going to be a little bit more bullish on kids.

Never made an error, never dropped a path.

So part of us, I think that you start with, again, I always go back to the nucleus of data ownership or control in the league. And in order for you to have verifiable data, you need to have the league in control of that. So. So we see that as sort of the initial phase of all of this as we as talk about sort of the Max Preps data of the world. And Max Preps had many conversations with the CEO in my past life when we built stacked with the same mindset of, like, why don't we have a single place like a Max Preps, which. Right. Like has the opportunity. But I don't think, you know, the business model is just a little bit different. And I think, I don't know the parent company that bought it. Does it Play On? I believe it's Play On Bought Acquired them. And you know, I, I've had a comfort conversation with those guys as well. I believe it's out there. There's got to be something at some point. You know, our goal is, you know, we're building FLAG and we're focused on flag. We know there's a number of sports that need what we have and we are building it to scale into other sports eventually, but again with a focus on that sport as a siloed sport, if that makes sense. So again, that's not something I'm even looking at for the next six to eight months, but it's something that I think we're gonna, we're gonna be in there quicker than I thought. We have some, a number of conversations going with a couple of pretty big league owners in some sports that really need our help. And so, you know, I think that as long as, again, as long as it's verifiable data, I think that the idea is you can create that solution which will help from a recruiting perspective. But it's going to be, it's, it's going to have to be verified data. It's, it cannot be a parent putting in little Johnny's, you know, touchdowns and yardage because it's going to be hard because coaches are just going to, or recruiters are going to struggle to understand how to extrapolate what the value is in the athlete.

Yeah, no, it's a great point. I love the comment of putting hands or putting it in the hands of the leagues. And I know, I think, you know, Major League Baseball is looking into ways to kind of own a bit more of the development and use where you can like quantify exit velo and things like that and sort of standardize that process. I know there are others out there that are looking at like running combines for, for athletes and they're running them. So the data, you know, you have a score, you have a speed, you know, the person like, you know, it's like proctoring an sat, but it's so, it's so diffuse. But yeah, it definitely feels like you're in the right spot of just collecting the data, knowing that it's verifiable and then you know there's value in that at some point down the road.

Yeah, and I think the other part that I didn't mention was when we move into the consumer side and we do have the parent or team manager controlling those personal stats, it will be sort of self police by the team. Right. If you have a touchdown in there, like little Bobby is not Going to let little Johnny's mom put that. Johnny got the touchdown when Bobby got it. So there's going to be a lot of policing in that, that sort of data process. Same thing goes like with Game Changer. You know, obviously everyone's paying attention. Like you have to be very careful because it's going to be semi self policed in that sense. So there is a lot more verifiable data in that world. And I'm not saying the league owner has to be nucleus of that, but I do believe that it like in order to be verified you sort of have to sort of create the boundaries around the data to get there. Yeah.

And again like perfect being the enemy. Perfect doesn't need to be the enemy of good here. Right? It doesn't. It almost doesn't exist today at large where someone could say, hey, this is my history dating back to when I was 8 years old. So you know, directionally accurate is probably good enough in a lot of cases now.

Yeah. And I was going to actually mention one of the unique things too. And you know, obviously watching college football and D1 college football this year, we've all had a chance to see Julian Saan who happened to be in the league that we started that which is really cool. So we started at a little, well actually one of the larger leagues in the U.S. he's got about 2,800 kids FNL, which is FNL North County sand, played in FNL Julian Sam played at Carlsbad High School and then obviously now in the running for the Heisman. But I look back and go, man, imagine if you had the data or the stats or your little baseball card or football card that said I played, I played against Julian. And it's just something that you could say, you know, it's just neat even as a 10 year old to say that. Right. Like a lot of these kids and I've, and I've, I've actually the value to me of high school football and I've been following it like, like crazy this year, which I never have. It's to me is so underrated. It's crazy because I feel like if we look at football in general today, college is now sort of becoming that next sort of Tier 2 NFL, right. Kids are getting paid. Then you look at high school and you're like nil. Money's going into high school. Like there's a lot of talent in high school level and it's actually really fun to watch. And I don't think they're putting enough media value on high school football. And so I, you know, I've been watching a ton of high school football. I got to watch a lot of playoffs the last month or so. And it's just neat to see like, just these young kids that, like, you're going to see a kid that's a sophomore who's going to be in the big show someday, and you can see it at a really, you know, at a. At a flag football level, which is neat.

I totally agree with you. And I know, like Peyton Manning's Omaha Productions, they're putting on either a game or series of games. We covered it a couple of weeks ago. NFL flag championships did really well on television. And clearly America can't get enough football. I mean, that's pretty well documented. I actually think high school and flag is a better way to expand that versus, like these upstart leagues and things like every. There's so much in the sports tech sort of community, the LinkedIn crowds, about all these fringe and secondary sports. And, you know, they're fun and they might represent, like, decent roi. You put in a little bit of money, exited for. For this or that. But especially when it comes to football, it's like, you know what? Like, I view those secondary leagues is like, these are the guys who didn't make it or washed out of the league or weren't good enough to get to the league. And it's like, why watch that when you could just kind of live in the same ecosystem and watch high school and flag? Because now if I'm a college fan, I want to see the same way. I used to read Rivals to see about who was coming. I was a big villain of a basketball guy. I was reading see who's going to come play for them, how many stars they are. But like, I would have watched those games. There's so many college football fans in the country who just want to watch just for the recruiting aspects of it. Then you go down to flag and you try to identify these athletes and it's in the Olympics. So that to me feels all part of the same federation where some of these newer upstart leagues that are taking place in the spring are almost like, okay, these guys rinse through the system and it's like secondary. So I'm with you on. On high school and flag just as a Consumption. Consumption sport.

Yeah. And when I was in Canton, Ohio, in July, there was a young. I think he was 14, Bryson Wright was his name. Bryson caught a spectacular catch. I think everyone's seen it. I happened to be standing Right next to the field and I caught it on camera and by one of the coolest plays I've ever seen. And I think at the time he had 33 D1 offers. I think that he's probably got 66 or 85, who knows how many now. But this kid is incredible and to watch, you know, and both. And again, let's go back to like female flag as an example. Like, I love watching female flag football. It's actually really entertaining and I think again, undervalued from a media perspective, in my opinion. So we're excited to sort of be also on that, on that piece with what we're building to be able to take the production of called Oakley alliance this weekend and put it in the app and show a larger audience female flag football because it's just really entertaining to watch. But you go back and you see these kids, you're like, well, in ninth grade this kid had 33 D1 offers and you want to watch his career, you want to watch him through high school and see where he goes, right? What college are you going to pick? You know, where's he going to play? And. And you can almost assume that some of these kids, even in ninth grade are going to make it to the NFL. So I'd be shocked if Bryson Wright doesn't make it the NFL. I'm already trying to buy his signature baseball or football cards.

Well, I was going to say, like there's a, you're touching on the collectibles aspect. And I was going to say so many people nowadays, you know, call it like mid-40s and younger, grew up playing video games, grew up playing these role playing games and all the pro sports games for the last 15 years. Their main feature is like developing a guy from high school level up, right? And leveling up, building skills. And like it feels so much more natural to want to follow that journey to maybe someone of our, you know, our demographic and younger who were used to that versus, you know, 10, 20 years ago when that just like wasn't a thing in society. Society. So like, I think the appetite is there for following the players journey from eighth grade because they were on their flag game was broadcast, the championship or the Little League World Series was broadcast. And then you get to see them play in high school and college and you could follow that entire, entire journey the way, you know, the way you would have created a player in a video game almost totally.

And you know, I think that, you know, the collectibles. I've been a, I've been a sports Card collector for many years. And I do. There's part of it. We actually built some stuff in 2017, 18, way ahead of our time of like, you know, coming up with these concepts of NFTs, which I don't like that term anymore, but digital, digital collectibles, where, you know, I think a lot of these guys have sort of failed at it. But I. Goes back to. I just think timing is everything, right? Like, we had this massive uptick in 2020, 2021 with the NFT world. I think there's going to be a comeback of digital collectibles really soon, but it's going to come back to like, who is. It really comes back to who owns the data and, and sort of controls that mechanism. Right. So for us, you know, at some point, you know, my goal is to keep kids off of social media and focus and on the field. So for me, how do I do that? How do I gamify this equation and keep them on an app, you know, challenge them, challenging themselves to get better and just also, you know, following other players and learning what other people are doing and the storytelling behind them.

Yeah, I, I love that you mentioned, like, hey, if they played against a future NFL star, like, what a cool thing if you can like unlock a digital tradable or collectible from that game. Like, hey, I got, I beat this guy, right? I. I had a buddy growing up who wound up having a cup of coffee in the major leagues, but like struck him out once, right? The digital, the digital card of the record of that actually happening.

Totally. So, you know, that stuff's all coming, right? Like, again, it goes back to the layer of artificial intelligence and how fast things are moving and the ability to create this stuff versus three years ago when there was this, you know, I. The countless companies that raised, you know, 20, 40, 100 million bucks to build these ideas out that unfortunately didn't come to fruition, but the concept still exists. And I think that there is a desire, you know, I still see a lot of these platforms floating around where you can buy, you know, from Panini to upper deck, where people are still actively involved in buying digital collectibles. So. And I think that's going to trickle down into like, you know, I do see the collectible world moving into high school and potentially even like flag football at an amateur level. Who knows?

Yeah, no, I totally agree. A few years ago, I mean, part of the problem was like, you know, as a proud owner of a cool cat on nft, which I wish I.

Would have sold, like the not so cool cat anymore.

The not so cool cat. It was a great investment, but it was hard. It was hard for the average person. You had to spend a significant amount of time just figuring out how to get crypto here and there and it's like, okay, if we could iron that out. Whether it's crypto or just regular good old fashioned cash, it seems like it's ripe for a comeback. Let me pivot in the last couple of minutes here to talk about maybe I want to get your views on the direct. Well, I guess we talked about flag. Maybe talk about what you're seeing in youth sports overall. As someone who's been in sports tech for a bit, it's clearly having a bit of a moment. I've been to a few of these events now and there's lots of private equity guys. I'm sure you're experiencing this. You're not going to struggle to raise money to the extent that would even be a thing for you. But what are your overall thoughts on where this all goes?

Yeah, that's a, that's a bit of a loaded question. Yeah, but I would say, look, we've been, we've been. The word legacy technology has sort of become modern slang in the world we're in, in terms of where, where sports tech has been. And not just sports tech, but tech in general. And I think that we're, you look 10 years ago and some of these larger companies in the sports world were acquiring 10, 12, 15 technology companies trying to bend, they banded them together and it wasn't successful. I think, I think what we're going to see is some consolidation from a, from a, just purely from a customer perspective. You know, I think sports engines currently for sale. There's some acquisitions outside of the, the Flag, FLAG football world that I, that I have heard of recently. There's things happening where I feel like the problem is a lot of these things. Again, we talk about going back to a single technology. Maybe it's communication tech or whatever. Everybody has to bolt something new on. But a lot of these companies wanted to be everything for everyone. And I think now a lot of them are realizing that if I can find one or two or three sports to be really good at, I'm going to succeed. So I think there's going to be consolidation in terms of like sport focus, if that makes sense. And I may just be saying that because I'm focused on a single sport at the moment, but I've tried the other, the other way as well. And it, it was a lot harder of A sales process, if that makes sense. Now I know who my customer is, easily identifiable, what they need, what they want. Want on the consumer side, what they're going to need and what they're going to want. I'll be able to figure it out. Because it's a single sport. That's the goal for me. And again, we're small, right? From a fundraising perspective. Yeah, there's a ton of capital out there. And so it's just. And it's a game, right, that you have to learn to play, like, properly. Because at any point you take the wrong check, you could be in a position where you no longer get to make the decisions and it just changes the scope of the business. So I'm trying. I'm trying to run the business in a place where I still have the creative capabilities of driving the business forward without having to be in a position of taking that larger check and saying, hey, I have to make the decision because this is what a VC or private equity has told me to do. But at the same time, there are actually plenty of private equity firms that are ready and willing to give you a check to say you run the show. But I do think that the model is definitely changing in real time. I think you had someone on the podcast recently that I was watching that had done some. I forget he was a sports AI, raised a significant amount of capital.

Fast break, John, from first break.

Yeah, yeah, fast break. And just, you know, listening to such a. Interesting. I mean, everybody you have in your podcast is so interesting to me. And so for me, it's unique to listen to, you know, how people are leveraging AI and how they're going to position themselves in two to three years from now. But I think for me, the exciting part is like, I know that we have a sport that's going to the Olympics. I know we have a sport that's now a D1 sport for females and growing rapidly. So for me, I feel like I can target what I feel like a small team can execute on, if that makes sense, where I don't need to hire 50 employees to do that. And that's, I guess, the beauty of being that silo focus on a sport. But I do think that some of these bigger companies are going to figure out how to silo them within their own tech stack.

Yeah. Strategic acquisition, perhaps. I think that's important for so many people. I know there's lots of operators out there who run decent businesses today, control their own destiny, and they have lots of private equity folks. I heard one person told Me calling literally every week they're getting some sort of a phone call. And it's about finding the right partner because everybody's got different goals. Even whether it's private equity or vc, within each of those buckets, there's different timelines and things like that. And, and some of it comes to size, right? Like you mentioned, you're a small team, you got like five, five people. You guys can grow. What would be a home, absolute home run win for you and your team, right? You know, you're, you're starting from a different level than where, say like, and not to keep bringing them up, but like where a game changer is today, right? I mean, they're doing 100, 150 million in revenue. Like for them, they now need to, it's the, you know, law of large numbers, right? They need to grow from a much larger base. And it's like, well, how do you do that? Well, you got to go further down the stack. And for you gu, it's like, hey, if we own flag football, we're going to have a great outcome regardless. And then we could start thinking about other sports. So I think it's good advice for anybody. Just think about what's success look like for you and not necessarily another company or a larger company or a smaller company or an investor or something like that.

I mean, I think the idea of the unicorn exit, right, that was the sort of Y combinator, like the push of when you were a startup, like you wanted to be that next unicorn. And I think that now it's, it's a beautiful time to start a company, right, because you can do it for a lot less money, but there's a lot of complexities. People think, oh, I can just go onto one of these, you know, bolt level something and build a tech stack. And you know, I can vibe code and I can. And it's not that easy, right? Like, you know, vibe coding is great if you need to solve a simple problem, but you put sports complexities in any problem and good luck, a team of solid engineers to build. And so, you know, I, I think that we're just in a, it's a beautiful time to be in the sports world. And I think that as we see, you know, the Olympics, running back, I guess the cool part too is like, it's going to be in LA for us. So being on the west coast, it's like it's my backyard. And you know, actively, I don't know if our tech's going to be the one leveraged in the Olympics. But man, that would be a dream, right? So those are the things that you sort of dream of and you hope but at the same time the idea is that there's so much opportunity out there and it's just being laser focused on a sport, solving the league owners needs and then moving into the direction of what is the next, what is the next revenue model and also what is the next technology model that allows the sport to grow. Not thinking purely revenue but also like just the growth of the sport. And how do you help that grow?

Yeah, yeah, I think that's, I think that's a good place to leave it. Listen, I think that was awesome. Why don't you tell people where they could find out more about Flag 50 and they're not using you guys already? How they can, how they could start.

Yeah, flag50com, flag50.com is the domain. You can get a bunch of information there and if you're interested in learning more, there's a couple of places to, to get some information and sign up your league as well. And yeah, you can also email me as well. But actually maybe I shouldn't give my email out because I'm bombarded. So you just on the website info lag50.com. But you're five employees away from me, so you'll find me.

Okay. Anyway, here's the sign of growth. Are you still getting the info at email or do you have somebody screening that one for you?

No, I have someone screening that. Okay, so it's good, but it'll make sense.

So that means you've hit escape velocity.

But anyway, so yeah. Well, listen, I really appreciate you taking the time, Kyle, always. You know, I'm a huge fan, a huge fan of, of what you built to buying sandlot and, and hope to continue to see it grow. And I'm excited about your event in April.

So yeah, we got to get you to Philly. We got to get you to Philly. You get a good tailwind. It's like four and a half hours from San Diego.

It's not a good surf pool out there by chance. If there is, I'll be there.

What's that?

Is there a good surf pool in Philadelphia?

Not yet, no. But I'll tell you, you're an hour from a pretty good. It's a pretty good. It's literally called surf beach. You know, Ocean City. It's probably not California St waves but like I, I'm, I spent a good chunk of the summers near that beach and like lots of surfing. So in April you just need, like, a wetsuit. You might be all right.

Okay, I'm coming. I'll bring my board with me.

There you go. There you go.

Awesome.

All right, listen, Jaren, thanks for. Thanks for joining.

Thank you. Appreciate it, Kyle.