All right, welcome back to the Buying Sandlot Podcast. I am Kyle Scott, founder and editor of Buying Sandlot. On today's episode, I talked to David Rudolph, CEO of Play On Sports, the company that is powering high school sports with live streaming through the NFHS Network, Digital ticketing with Go Fan and now scores and stats with the recent acquisition of Max Preps. Play on Already streams about 650,000 high school games a year. That's roughly one third of every high school contest in America. Its GoFan app will process 80 million tickets this season. That's more than Major League Baseball sells leaguewide over the course of a year, while max preps attracts 100 million plus unique visitors annually, ranking it among the top 10 sports sites in the US onto the interview with David. Okay, David, welcome to the Buying Sandlot Podcast. Thanks for joining us.

Wow. Thank you. My pleasure.

So I think a lot of our listeners will be pretty familiar with PlayOn and some of your brands.

But.

But why don't you give a high level overview of the company, specifically where it's at now, maybe where it's evolved from, and then a bit about your background. I know you've been with Play on for quite a while, but what sort of brought you to Play on from Turner way back when?

Yeah, yeah. So Play on is not as well known because it's not a consumer brand that we use with any of our products. But under the Play on umbrella of companies, we have the NFHS Network, which is our streaming product in high school sports. We have Go Fan, which is our digital ticketing product in high school sports. And we have MaxPreps, which is our news and information scores and schedules site for high school sports. So you can probably hear a theme there. One is high school sports. That is what we are exclusively focused on. And the other theme that I think most of your listeners will pick up on is these are all products and services predominantly for the fan. So. So our core model is we provide products and services for free to state associations and schools and then in turn monetize the fan relationship, whether it's advertising in MaxPrep's example or a ticketing fee in the GoFan example or subscription from the NFHS Network streaming product. That's the overview of the company and what we do. How I got here. As you mentioned, PlayOn was started inside of Turner Broadcasting and it was focused on the streaming product. So date myself a little bit. That was over 20 years ago. We started working on it. YouTube was not a thing yet, believe it or Not So that core problem we were trying to solve is how do you take a sports, a live sports event, produce it and distribute it without it being on tv? And so that's. This seems second nature of putting video on the Internet. I mean we can do it with these things like super easy now. But at the time that was pretty unique and novel. And I'm not going to claim we were the first to put an untelevised live sports event on the Internet, but we were among the first to took these games who were not on TV and it didn't make sense for them to be on TV and distribute them in a different way. And so at Turner we were focused on the college space and we worked with the Atlantic Coast Conference and the product was called ACC select. So the company is called Playon. We've always branded our products on the streaming side to our partners. So this one was called acc. And we saw the changes that were coming and it happened in college and started looking for other applications. And it became clear that we were going to need to spin the business outside of Turner. So we did, we spun it out, raised some money to buy the business from Turner and at that point refocused on the high school space, grew that the streaming high school for about 15 years. And then it's been in the last five years that we've done some of these acquisitions where we added in ticketing and now more recently Max Preps.

You guys were obviously really early in streaming. What's probably, I'm guessing you couldn't have envisioned kind of having many pieces of the sports called the high school sports stack, for lack of a better Description back in 2008. Like how surprising is it to you that where the business has evolved over the course of two decades.

Yeah, it's been a grind. I mean what I tell you is, you know, when you're the optimistic first year, second year entrepreneur, you think you can kind of conquer the world. I didn't realize how, how challenging it was going to be to aggregate a really fragment market like high school sports is. And we can, we'll probably talk about youth here later, but youth is, is kind of similar. So I think those early visions of being able to bring some of these pieces together, I think the thoughts were there. I, you know, as we acquired Max Preps, had a conversation with the founder Andy Beal just a couple of months ago and we're kind of like, we talked about this probably 15 years ago about. These two companies seem to fit perfectly together, but through a combination of factors it took that long to actually accomplish it. So, yeah, in the early days, we've had the exact same mission since we focused on high school and we're focused on streaming. It's just, it's still. Today we want to stream every high school game, but that's the. That's the consumer experience that we want to ultimately create. This year, the school year that's wrapping up, we'll stream about 650,000 live games out of the 2 million or so in the US high school market. So about a third of the way there. But until we hit that 2 million, and I can ring the bell and say, mission complete, like, we will continue on that. But as we did get a lot bigger and streamed more games and work with more schools across more states, it did start to make sense to say, hey, what else complements this content and what else complements this consumer experience? And so, you know, Go Fan was the first one we had our, our eyes on, largely because we helped incubate that business in the early days on the ticketing side. And where that came from is one of the hardest pieces is, aside from producing games, how do you market those games? How do you find the handful of people who are a fan and potentially a viewer of each game? And, you know, unfortunately, there wasn't a database of high school sports fans that I could go buy or license or utilize. So I had the bright idea of like, well, let's just go. Let's get the list of the ticket buyers. Like, that's a great source. That didn't exist because the high school ticketing market was 100% cash at the time. And it's a massive market, several hundred million tickets sold a year. And so we helped get that GoFundMe business started. Just saying, let's create the digital ticketing. People are using credit cards more like, there's a need for it at the school level, there's a need for it at the fan level. But as a byproduct, a benefit for us is we have that first party data that we can use to help market our product from a streaming perspective. So that was our first step.

What year was that?

This was three years ago. This would have been 22 early 22 go fan. The digital ticketing had been around and growing and scaling for probably five years before that. So. And they saw a huge growth during COVID as well. Like, as soon as somebody said you could get Covid by touching money, all of a sudden schools wanted to adopt the digital ticketing platform. So it pulled that demand Forward and look, I'll finish that story a little bit. GoFan is now one of the largest, if not the largest, digital ticketing platforms in the US we'll sell 80 million tickets this year. Wow. To put it in context, I think Major League Baseball this year will sell about 65 million tickets. So from a primary ticketing perspective, it is one of the largest digital ticketing products in the US and potentially in the world. I don't know the worldwide stats. So hard to make that claim. And then the Max Preps piece again, that goes back 15 years. I just always felt if I'm watching a game, the first thing I want to know is, who are we playing? Who else have they played? Do we have any common opponents? Wow, that number 12 is really good. What year are they? You know, all that? So the schedules and the roster is the information that I always wanted. And then similarly, from a Max Prep's perspective, the information that they want is game summaries and highlights to augment the more static statistics. So luckily for us, Paramount decided to sell that asset. I'd approached them a couple of times over the years and to no success. And when they decided to sell it this time, we were pretty determined to make sure we came out as the winner.

I think your president called it. I remember reading the quote. Is it the front porch of high school sports that I read that right? Maybe talk a little bit more about the rationale behind that comment.

Yeah, it's a really good analogy. And to use it in more of a kind of a business or marketing. It's the top of funnel. MaxPreps is a huge site. I mean, it's comprehensive in terms of content, but in terms of audience, we say it's 100 million uniques every year that use the product. The true number is probably close to 120 million. So it's a top 10 sports site in the US so that's. That's probably the size of the US high school sports fan base, give or take. Like, I think with that platform, we get close to 100% of the US high school fan base uses Max Preps at some point during the course of the year. That's just Matt. Like anybody who has operated in the digital world long enough knows, like, how powerful it is if you have that sort of a top of funnel opportunity. We've had a referral relationship with MaxPreps for many years, and it's candidly from a streaming perspective, it's been our number one referral source, but we've never been able to go Much deeper than just a referral standpoint without an ownership perspective. So that's what we're going to be able to do now going forward is integrate the links and the content. Much deeper than just a, you know, putting up banner ads or having link of. Click here to watch the game, things of that nature.

How much more of their brand will you take on? I think. Was it. Is it Vidswap, you guys recently kind of rebranded with their brand name on it? Like, will that become more. More of a focus for the company? You're going to kind of keep go fan a little bit separate or can we expect like a Max Preps tickets or something like that at some point?

Yeah, to be determined. I mean, we're, we. We did the Max Preps acquisition February and March. I'm. I'm losing my months here. So it's a couple of months old. You know, step one for us was to. They've been a part of Paramount for a long time, coming into a new company and a vastly different size. Playhound's a pretty big company, but it's not Paramount. But also in an environment where I think they probably were a little bit of an outlier inside of Paramount, like there was nobody else who focused on the high school market, where here they're in a company of 450 people that that's all that everyone focuses on. So that was step one is just to pull them out, kind of get them into the company and make them feel welcome and a part of the overall vision and mission of where we're going. After that, apologies. After that, we have looked at with some of the other products that we have in terms of putting a MaxPreps brand on it. I mean, so Vidswap was the first one that we have decided to call MaxPreps Advantage. Reason there was primarily MaxPreps has 110,000 coaches who log in at some point during the course of the year to upload their scores, schedules and statistics. And so that seems like a really good opportunity to market the product there and align the brand. So I would say it's still tbd. I think we could take that further in the future. I also think each of these products, it's a little bit unique and we don't want to get into the of just like slapping the same brand on it if it doesn't fit the exact same consumer need. That'll evolve over the next couple of years.

Makes sense. Yeah, you. So you talked about the sheer number of high school sports fans you have, and I'd love to get a sense as to what that mix looks like. I imagine you have coaches, ads, you have players, you obviously have parents and families. You have college sports fans who are, you know, looking for the next recruit. And I think, you know, this probably extends. I consider high school sports under our youth remit that we cover here. But I think even further down the younger age groups, there's a lot of momentum and investment in streaming in kind of monetizing the attention around those sports. And there's been a lot of hand wringing as to, well, who's the audience? Is it just parents or there are other people who are interested? So talk a little bit about kind of the pie of who's in, who makes up that massive audience number, kind of the big pieces.

I think you hit on the key once what we say from our core properties in terms of streaming and ticketing. And now Max Scraps is the core audience are the people who have a direct relationship with someone who's on the field. Family is included in that, so parents and extended fit grandparents and out of town relatives. But I'd call it the friends, you know, the other students who, hey, that's my buddy who's playing and it's an away game and I can't watch it or it's a home game and I want to go attend and buy a ticket. But that is the core, I mean that is the vast majority of the audience. There are slivers of people who, you know, let's call them alumni of that school. They have a relationship with that school, but not particularly with someone, not exactly with someone on the field of that. You can kind of extend that into the college fan. And hey, this is a top recruit who's going to be coming to our school next year or soon and I want to watch them play. Those are much smaller slices of the pie. There are coaches, you know, who use a product to see the opponents they're going to play somewhere down the road. But those are kind of the core things. So, you know, they, the athletes themselves do use it. They obviously from a streaming standpoint are not using the live product. They're looking at it on demand and creating some clips from it that they're using for other purposes. But the core audience, again, it's someone who has a direct relationship with someone who's on the field. And I think that applies not only in high school, but I think that's probably even more pervasive as you start thinking about the broader youth sports space once you get into club and things like that, that way?

Yeah, yeah. So, you know, I wasn't sure I was aware of this 100%. So you guys don't charge any of the institutions. It's all sort of consumer driven, whether it's through ads, subscriptions or transaction fees on ticket. Is that correct?

I mean, I, I think we have a trivial amount of our revenue comes from non fan sources. But yeah, our, our core model is we provide products and services free to schools and then monetize the.

From the, from the media perspective, you guys have a ton of eyeballs on Max Preps. For example, talk a little bit about kind of the sponsorship and ad market surrounding that. I mean, lots of eyeballs, big piece of the monetization. Have you seen more interest in recent years? You know, there's so much kind of money, attention and frankly hand wringing around sponsorship dollars beyond just pro sports at this point. So what are you guys seeing on the ground?

It's still very early days. So this has been, you know, it's been a property managed by Paramount for a long time and they've monetized it. Well, you know, I don't think I'm divulging anything. They haven't, they didn't have a discreet sales team outselling Max Preps. They sold it as a part of an overall Paramount or a sports package. So there was demand for it. But this was not a property that they took to market directly. Selling, hey, do you want to be involved? So that is something that we will be doing and we're in the process of building out that sales team and going to market. So I think a year from now I'll be able to answer that question a lot better. What I will say, over the years we've had our own efforts in this space and we've had different brands approach us about a relationship. Candidly, even though our streaming numbers are large in terms of subs and games and viewers and all that stuff, it's still small in the grand scheme of the broader media market. It's never made a ton of sense for us to proactively put a big effort behind it because I don't, I don't necessarily want to call 10 million of ad revenue a small number, but like it's just not really going to move the needle that much now with Max Preps in the equation, that is a major priority for us. And so I do think you will see us go to market in the very near future. Talking about how brands can become associated with this full stack of consumer opportunities.

That we, from that standpoint, I imagine you guys are going to focus more on the larger national brands that could reach everywhere versus kind of like piecemealing it together with local sales. Because I've seen a lot again particularly in the youth space, there's some facilities that are trying to monetize their sponsorship. Really difficult. I come from a local media background. Chuck Todd of all people, the former NBC Meet the Press host has given a couple interviews recently where he talked about youth and high school sports being the savior for local journalism. And he said that they were. I'm sure you guys will take exception to this, that you know most people, the only way to watch a high school game is to go to the local news website because they have the rights to it. So first of all, I think he completely misunderstands the market. But he's saying hey this could save, you know, you can get eyeballs to local, local newspaper websites because they can check the scores and watch the high school games. And he's talking about local ad sales. And from my experience it is so difficult to do local sales at scale. So I imagine you guys will go after the big brands who are, you know, want to reach, want to spend seven figure ad deal, not four or five and six figure ad deals.

Yeah, I mean I think our sweet spot is going to be six figure sponsorships. But yeah, I do think as you early on it's certainly our plan. Again check with me in a year, I'll tell you how well we do. We will be looking at brands that are more national in nature or you know, regional, you know, kind of multi state than we are local. Like I do think there is a great local advertising and sponsorship around high school. The execution of that is extremely hard and one of the biggest challenges is you're in the space, you know like the cost to sell and to fulfill a hundred thousand dollar deal is not that different as a thousand dollar deal. And so just as a percentage of sales on the local side, like when you're selling a bunch of thousand to ten thousand dollar deals, it just eats up your margin like crazy. So yeah, I do think out of the gate we will focus on the 100,000 plus as kind of our sweet spot. But I mean look, we've seen tons of examples in local markets where brands, local brands are very successful in using that affiliation with an individual high school or a group of high schools to really drive their business. So I think there's a great model there. I don't know that that will be our focus and I don't Know that we will be uniquely positioned to scale that, but somebody will figure it out over time. Yeah. Yeah.

It's kind of the fixed cost and sometimes the headaches of dealing with lots of, lots of small deals get eat into it. Would you guys consider. I was trying to think of, I was talking to somebody the other day and trying to describe Play on and would you guys consider a better analogy, Play on as like the, the ESPN of high school sports or like the Shopify of high school sports. How do you guys think about yourselves?

That's a good question. I don't, I don't know that I've ever used the Shopify analogy. Maybe as we talk, I could, I could decide how relevant that is. I mean, I think the example we use now, let's just, let's take one of the professional leagues. I'll use mlb just since we're in the summer and it's that. So, you know, our streaming product is like MLB tv, our ticketing product, I guess. I think they're Ticketmaster. Right. Is that a. From a primary perspective is.

Or it may be StubHub now. It might be team specific. I'm not sure.

I would say MaxPreps is a lot like ESPN.com so, you know, I think it's similar from that perspective in that we've kind of cobbled together, I'll call it Best in class products kind of across the different verticals. And you know, in our case they are separate brands and separate products. But we are working to integrate the consumer experience and the consumer journey across those. So. And so the way that you'll see that start to accomplish here is you'll see content being shared between the products a lot more than they have in the past. So I'll give you an example. I've got two kids. Well, my oldest just graduated from high school. My middle is a rising senior. So I'm living this world right now. Like not beyond being. I'm a power user of all three of our primary products. Not just because I'm CEO, but like it's great. Like it works.

It's like the old Hair Club for Men commercial. Right.

Games I can't attend, I watch on the network. Games I can't attend, I buy a ton of tickets and I would bet you and my daughter's soccer season. I'm on Max Preps as much as any person in the United States looking at who we're playing and what their record is and common opponents and all that type stuff. So let's, let's just use Go Fan I office I'm sitting in now our little kitchen in the office is it's. I timed it. It's a 25 second walk from there to my office. And in the spring it was around lunchtime and my daughter was playing a playoff game and I was like, oh shoot, I haven't bought tickets for the game yet. Let me do and I said, you know what, I'm curious. Can I do that in the time it takes me to walk back to my office? So in that 25 seconds I opened the app, found the game, purchased the tickets, you know, double click Apple Pay, transferred the three tickets that I wasn't going to be using to my wife who was coming separately. All that done on the 20th. So it is an I am super biased but it is one of the best general admission ticketing platforms that has ever been built. So I then but I bought those tickets, I closed the app. I go to the game at 5 or 6 o', clock, whatever time it was, I open the app, redeem my tickets again into the game and I close the app again. It's a very utilitarian product. What do I want? I want that app to do what Then I did once I walked into the game which is I opened Max Preps to see see who are we playing? What common opponents do we have have the roster up. So as I watch the game unfold, I'm like wow, who is that player? And oh my gosh, she's only a freshman. We're going to be dealing with her for three more years after this. That's the experience I want in the Go Fan app. So now the gofund app. Besides just being a buy tickets and get into the game soon as I my tickets are redeemed. David, welcome to the game. Here's your digital program between team A and team B. Here's the schedules and scores and rosters for both teams. Here's some AI write ups about the last 5 or 10 times these teams have met. There's actually some really cool content we can create about like what to expect about the game, all that like stuff that I can use and watch. And then at halftime send me first half highlights and then at the end of the game as I'm leaving, you know I get a communication, whether it's a push notification email. Hey, thanks for attending by the way. Next game is Wednesday night at 5 o'. Clock. If you want to buy tickets, here's a link. If you can't attend and want to watch a game, here's a link as well, so that's how we'll start to share content and the consumer journey between these three unique products.

Sounds a little bit like you're describing the high school sports super app, for lack of a better term.

Yeah, I mean, look, we're a little divided of do these, these apps and experiences start to converge or do they stay separate? I can make a really strong case for both. Again, I think we'll start to experiment, I think we'll learn a ton as we both get this content to flow through in all different directions and also as we complete the user journey across all of this. But yeah, we do want to make the life easier for the high school sports fan, period, like the end. And if that ends up being fewer apps or if that ends up being, you know, multiple apps, because that's easier. There are certain constituencies, like all they do is buy tickets and if you're buying tickets, we don't want to clutter up your experience and get all this other stuff in the way of it. But even if it does stay as separate apps and experiences, we can make it easier to share content and information between those to enhance the overall experience.

How important is AI in all of that? Both from a kind of technical perspective and then also from a content perspective. You get a recap of the game at halftime or after the game. Talk about how you guys think about AI, how much you're using AI now in all capacities.

I mean, look, when you start talking about this long tail of sports stuff, of which I'd say everything in youth sports, including high school, is in that long tail, it's not even critical, it's mandatory. Like you cannot scale a business just using manual approaches with human, like it just the unit economics don't work. So I'd say we've been employing a version of AI, probably before it was even called that for a long time with the Pixelot solution that we use to capture games and track games, I'll never forget probably the first time Pixelot picturing that product was 10 years ago. I was blown away. I was like, in the world does something like this work? But that's been on the capture side, I'd say now how we're starting to use it more and what the new generative AI platforms have unlocked is how we can take that content and data and use to create new pieces of stuff. So how do you take a two hour long game and cut it into clips, whether it's a two minute game summary or whether it's individual highlights or most importantly, back to who's our core audience, the parents. It's nice for you to send me a summary of the game. Like I appreciate it, that's great. You want me to pay more? Send me highlights of my kid like that. That's a killer product. So send me the stats of my kid, send me all that time stamp together, package it all up, make it easy for me to store it and save it. Make it where I don't have to worry about pulling up my phone and trying to film stuff at the game. Make it easy for me to share through social media. Like that's, that's what I want. So that's where AI is super valuable, where you can take a game, go through and, and identify certain plays and identify certain players and then be able to extract that information and provide it to parents. So we use it a ton. But I would say it, it's going to explode in the next. I mean, what we have planned for this upcoming school year is light years ahead of anything we've ever done. And I think that's just getting started. I mean, I think where this goes over the next five years will be transformative. Yeah.

So you guys have, you have streaming and video, you have tickets, you have news and information. There's some other parts of the fan experience there. Maybe it's products, whatever, that are not included yet. Are there any obvious directions you'd like to go in if you, you know, I'm not asking to like lay out your playbook, but like anywhere else in that stack that you think makes sense for you guys to kind of be involved with?

Yeah, there's some natural adjacencies that we've expanded in a, I'd say testing way that have proven to work pretty well that you'll see us. So as an extension of ticketing is concessions. So that's not the. I'm going to pre order my concessions in advance, but that's. The school is there and you know, they don't want to take cash at the gate. They also don't want to take cash at concession stand. So giving them a platform and a solution to make that super easy and consolidate all the financials into one report so that they have a view of that entire game. How did it do from a gate perspective, how it do it from a concession perspective? So we've rolled that product out. That is scaled really quickly, but you'll see us push more aggressively in there. As an extension of ticketing, I think fundraising is another one that we've experimented with. Every school has multiple fundraisers a year. Whether that's sports related or not, it's a super fragmented space. There's a bunch of really good platforms already in there. There's a bunch of different types of fundraising, whether it's campaigns of hey, our team is going to go to this preseason tournament, we're raising money for it, or we're doing a capital campaign for xyz. There is a role for us to play in that ecosystem, just given the number of touch points we have with schools and fans. But we're still trying to determine what the right areas for us to fit in that. Again, there's a lot of great companies, a lot of great platforms that do that. So we don't want to be duplicative of anything that's, that's kind of already working there. And then I do have some longer term thoughts just. And again, advantage for me is I'm like right in the heart of it now. So all I have to do is walk around and be like that experience was less than optimal. So should we play a role in that and if so, how would we do it? So a few more things that I think are earlier in the innovation cycle but I think are pretty big opportunities down the road. But you can just think as a fan, I need information, you know, I need to be able to watch it, I need to be able to tend what am I going to wear. Like it's, that's the, you know, the core fan experience to support any team that you're a fan of, whether it's professional, college or at the youth level.

A couple more for you. You guys have taken on, you know, pretty decent size investment in the past. There's a lot of, seems to be a lot of investor momentum. High school, you know, youth, amateur sports in general. Maybe just talk a little bit about why you think investors are flocking to this. You know, this. I call it the Longer tale of Sports Beyond Pro and College.

Yeah, it's interesting to say that. I mean, I guess these things are cyclical, right? We haven't changed what we've been doing for a long time. I've been at this for 17 years and certainly the business has gotten bigger in scale and profits and all that type stuff. But the core of what we've been doing is the exact same thing. And I would bet the amount of inbound investor calls is up 10x in the last six months. I mean it is intense. So we're in a position just with where the company is that we don't want to raise money or need to raise money. I'D now, before, if those calls came in, I'd be like, oh, great, thanks for calling. Yeah, we'd love to love the table. Now I can flip the tables and be like, why are you calling? Like, what is going on? So I'll say my opinion on this is just, you know, based on a couple of dozen of these conversations and the themes we're hearing. So, I mean, so I think it starts at the top first. I mean, sports, it's very. They're prominent, right? I mean, they're. It's a. It's cool. And at the highest levels, those valuations to invest in pro and college sports, like, it's gotten crazy expensive. So even if it's not, you're. You're worried about it. From, what is my ROI going to be? What's my return on this one? Just the check size that you have to write to be able to invest in those has gone up, I don't know, a lot.

There's not many guys who could write $10 billion checks. And, you know, it was a little easier when it was 300 million.

But I think in general, besides it being cool and relatable, a lot of things that people like about sports broadly, and I think this definitely applies in the high school and youth space, is passion. So the way I say it is, how engaged is that fan? If there's a high level of engagement, you can figure out the business model and you can debate what is the right business model, what's the right way to monetize that, but you can figure it out. If the engagement is low, it's almost impossible to monetize. Even if you have some early success, it's fleeting. So there's just a high level of engagement around sports that investors love. Because again, if you find engagement, you can find monetization. So, you know, I think as folks go, you know, pro, maybe it's gotten a little too expensive or check size is too big and college is, I don't know, at least football and bat's starting to feel like an extension of pro and otherwise. There's not really opportunities to invest in college. So I think they just kind of keep going down the chain and they look at the broader youth space and go, wow, that shares a lot of the characterization characteristics, but it's super fragmented. It's like, how do I. I don't even know how to invest in it, and how do I pick winners? And so I do think, as over the last 10 years, there's been a couple of scaled companies that have emerged. We're one of them. We're. But we're not the only one. But. So I do think the scaled companies in the broader youth space have gotten a lot more attention in the last 12 to 24 months. I do think there's been some notable big investments too that not going to knock investors too much but they do tend to flock together. It's like, oh well if they're doing it then we probably better go over here and see if we can find investment in this kind of space. But I do think it is cyclical. So I think while the spotlight's on it now, I'm sure the spotlight will move on at some point. But look, it is a, it's a good space to invest in. I think I'm supposed to say that. Right. But it's. This is not a, this is not a layup. I mean this is the execution around the fragmented market is hard. And so this is not invest a dollar and turn around five years from now and get 10 back. This is invest a dollar and work really hard and it should have grown to more than a dollar. But it's not going to be a 10x and in a short time horizon like some of the other tech investments are.

Yeah, I feel like in a fragmented market like this you really need to have like a good ground game. You can't just, yeah. Flip a switch.

It's an execution play. And again that fits really well with some investors like if you have a long term horizon. And again, the investors that I've had the most meaningful conversations with have been the ones who've come across us because they use our product. They're like, I've been buying a ton of tickets on GoFund. I didn't know who it was. Like who are you guys? Or man, my nephew. I was watching their state championship game on NFHS Network. I realized you have all this kind of like, what do you guys do? Those are the most meaningful conversations. Cause they have a firsthand experience utilizing the product, see the value that it brings and they're not just looking at it from a asset class that they can try to deploy some capital into.

Yeah. They begin peeling back those layers and realize it's you guys behind all the layers. So a person or company or a peer you personally admire in the space, you know, kind of just in the broad amateur sports ecosystem that you kind of look to and like what they're doing good.

Look, none of my kids played baseball. Well, my son played for like two years. But I think the product that game changer has for baseball and softball is incredible. You know, just the live scoring kind of mindset of the baseball fan and parents and coaches and then kind of combining that with video and how it tees up all these individual player moments and what they've been able to use that data and video to create, I think it's very important. Impressive. Broader youth sports. Again, my kids are. They're soccer players, so I've used pretty much every soccer application and app that's out there. Playmetric seems to have emerged over the last couple and I think they were recently acquired. But you know, what they're doing in the registration and fan communication, I think is it's a little bit of recency bias here because I probably use that app 20 times a day. I think it's pretty cool. I'd say that, you know, the company that has just really blown me away with their tech in the last. I don't even know if it's been 12 months is actually probably since the fall. So, you know, six to nine months has been Veo. Again, super soccer bias here. I'm a soccer guy. My daughters are both soccer players, so that's both on the club and the high school side. That's the sport I spend the most time around. But Veo's tech is incredible. We work with a lot of players in the space and a lot of this tech is incredible. Veo, what they do from an AI perspective in terms of being able to break down the games is. It's one of the few things that I've seen that I said I need to talk to their CEO because I need to understand how they're doing that I haven't seen that before. So what I would say, and I bet you I'm missing 10 other innovators and startups that I just haven't seen before. What AI is unlocking in this space is unbelievable. And it's necessary because of what I talked about before, like just you can't really scale it unless you're using tech and particularly AI. So I would bet you if you ask me that question, five years from now, there's going to be 10 names that none of us have heard of now that have. Have reached some pretty significant market penetration and introduce some new products. So a ton of innovation coming in this market.

Yeah, yeah, agreed. And lots of compliments there. That's good stuff. Appreciate. Appreciate you putting that out there.

Yeah.

Is anything else? Listen, it's been great having you. I appreciate you taking the time and joining us. Anything else you want to add? Kind of about the space, where you see things going or, you know, or I'm sure folks are aware how they could find max preps and go fan. But, you know, anything you want to plug, I feel free to plug away as well.

Yeah, I mean, look, I think you'll continue to see the space evolve. I think there's been theories, I've been doing this long enough now that I've seen a bunch of theories kind of come and go. And I'd say back to that question about investors. You know, there's a whole consolidation theory percolating. You're just going to see this map of companies, you're going to see them all consolidate down into a couple of players. I actually don't think that's going to happen. I do think you'll see consolidation that happens in every industry. But it's such a fragmented market and it's fragmented by sport. So what's successful in soccer is not the same thing that's successful in baseball or lacrosse or hockey. There's very different providers in each of those. You know, could you see some consolidation by vertical? So could you see some consolidation inside of soccer or with. Inside of hockey? That's, that's fine. So again, I think you'll see it, but I don't, I don't think you're going to see just some company emerge. That's just this amalgamation of, you know, 30 or 40 of the existing products that are out there. I think back to the ground game. I think to do this right, to provide a great experience for the fans, for the coaches, for the athletes, like you've got to keep this local. Like you can't just consolidate it, cut a bunch of costs, find efficiencies and keep those folks happy. I do think there's a ton of opportunity for innovation in the space. I mean, I have almost an idea a week in terms of what I say and I just don't quite have the bandwidth to go tackle it. Some of them are probably hundred dollar ideas and some of them may be hundred million dollar ideas. But I think for those who are out there who have an interest in technology, sports and having a. Here's how I'll wrap it up. The most rewarding part of my job is now that it's a big company and it's used all over the place and hundreds of millions of people and all that stuff, it's rare I bump into someone that when I tell them what I do and work on that, they don't have a direct experience with it. So to know that our products are being used and providing value to a broad spectrum that people can relate to. Like, that's, that's cool. Like it's a it. This is, this is not an easy occupation, but it is a fun occupation and with a lot of rewards on the other side of it.

I think that's a good place to end it. David Rudolph, CEO at PlayOn. Thanks for joining us.

Thank you. It's been fun.

All right, so that was David Rudolph, CEO of Play on Sports. I don't really have anything to add here. I could react to some of this stuff in a separate podcast, but I think I'll just leave it there. If you found this interview insightful, interesting, you liked what you hear, do me a favor. In your podcast player of choice, whether that's Apple podcasts, Spotify, something else, leave us a five star review. Leave us a positive review or negative review? You think I can improve upon something? A question I should have asked, Something that maybe, maybe our guests missed? Leave it as a comment, any sort of comment and 5 star reviews. Help us with the algorithms. If you're watching this on YouTube, same deal. Subscribe to the channel, leave a thumbs up, leave a comment, interact with the post or podcast in some way, hopefully a positive way. If we brought you some value, be sure to check out buying sandlot.com youm can subscribe to our newsletter. It's free, goes out Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and some weeks Tuesdays and Thursdays. Just drop your email address in free to receive. We have premium member benefits for those who want to upgrade, but it's free to get most of our newsletters. And again, thanks for listening. Make sure to like subscribe, comment, do all that stuff. We'll see you on the next episode. Thanks.