Our Startups series looks at companies and founders who are innovating in the fields of athlete performance, fan engagement, team/league operations and other high-impact areas in sports. If you’d like to be considered for this series, tell us about your mission.
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World’s shortest elevator pitch: “We turn fandom into a digital asset.”
Company: Encore
Location: New York City
Year founded: 2021
Website/App: https://encore.fans/
Funding round to date: “Pre-Seed.”
Who are your investors? “We have raised more than $300,000 in grants from Solana and Rally and we received a $75,000 investment when joining the leAD accelerator program.”
Are you looking for more investment? “Always, but we don’t have an active round.”
Tell us about yourself, CEO & co-founder Mike Sorgenfrei: “I played water polo at Santa Clara University and am intimately familiar with what that experience is like as a collegiate athlete. I spent a couple of years at Morgan Stanley as an equity bond trader, didn’t love that, and I joined a startup as an inside sales team rep and ended up running that sales team and we sold to a bigger company. From there, I started my first company, an influencer marketing company. We created ways for brands to connect with micro influencers to share and distribute their content, which we sold to a bigger influencer marketing company. After that, I took time off, went surfing through Central America, and then started my next company, Nudge TV, which created a buy now experience from TV. The main idea for that technology was real-time sports betting. You’d be able to see LeBron score and automatically update your bet or buy his jersey or whatever you’d like to do in real time. We shut that down in a pandemic, but Walmart was a customer and they brought me on to run an innovation team for their international product team. Through that process, I spent a lot of time on consumer applications and blockchain technology and became fascinated with real-world applications of blockchain. Not just NFTs and cryptocurrencies, but how it’s used in supply chain and management. I talked with a few of my close friends, they run data and insights at Twitter, they are blockchain engineers, they were acquired by BlackBerry with their own startups. We started thinking about what’s the future of identity when it comes to this space? How can we leverage blockchain technology as a fan to make our fandom and our excitement about teams, leagues and musicians we love into an asset that you could be rewarded for? I also co-teach a blockchain class at Fordham University.”
Who are your co-founders/partners? “Kyano Kashi is a co-founder and lead blockchain engineer. He’s a published musician, avid basketball player and has been building on Ethereum and Solana for years. He was one of the first engineers at Deed, a YC-backed company. Nat Greywoode is a co-founder and data lead. He played professional soccer in the U.K. and manages producers and artists. He is Twitter’s Director, Marketing Insights and Analytics. Kate Weimer is head of product and design. She’s an avid music fan who has led design, product, and UX teams and is an expert in game design. She ran product at Quilt. Chris Rosa is our engineering director. He was an All-American rugby player and goes to more concerts than anyone I know, and is a cybersecurity and digital identity expert. He was an engineering director at Cylance, which was acquired by BlackBerry. What makes us unique is we are all fans who are fed up with the current experience. Our backgrounds give us the ability to understand the industry, and the intimate knowledge to know how best to change the fan experience while giving teams the data and insights they need.”
How does your product/service work? “Our product is a white labeled, either web app or mobile application, that teams, leagues and athletes can leverage to help identify their fans and build the community of fans. The way that we do that is by creating what our technology is called, the Fan ID protocol, which is a way for fans to create their identity as a fan and be rewarded for their fandom. We’re a white labeled solution. Some of the use cases we’re helping our customers with include new NIL opportunities, creating opportunities for athletes that extend past posting on social media and/or signings. There’s next-generation membership, moving past ticketing, in-arena and merchandise memberships to include all types of fans. We’re engaging international and out-of-market fans by activating and rewarding loyal fans beyond the arena. We acquire new fans and reach new audiences and demographics with an effective tool to onboard, engage and reward new fans. There’s first-party user data. We get cross-platform first party data that users are motivated to provide in return for points and rewards. And we provide new ways to monetize by creating “money can’t buy” experiences for fans that can be sold as new assets.”
What problem is your company solving? “Companies, athletes, teams, leagues spend billions of dollars trying to reach their fans and better understand their fans. We’re solving that by providing them with first-party data the fans own and they get to unlock experiences and discounts when they share their data with teams, leagues and athletes.”
What does your product cost and who is your target customer? “We’re starting with athletes, both collegiate athletes that need help with NIL opportunities, as well as professional athletes that are looking to better identify their fans. We’re quickly expanding to universities, professional teams and leagues. The way that our pricing works is there’s an upfront setup fee, just so that it’s customized and looks and feels like our customers’ experience. It’s white labeled, so we integrate it into their websites and their apps. We take an affiliate fee for the revenue we’re able to help generate.”
How are you marketing your product? “We have a partnership with leAD Lake NoNa, a sports and health tech accelerator in Orlando. They have a network of mentors that are athletes, at professional clubs or leagues or owners of leagues, and they’ve helped us make connections to athletes, students and leagues. We’re working with a small close group of pilot customers to launch our product and learn from our product and then grow from there. We’re not actively doing any outbound marketing or media buys or anything like that.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VaIaGfQppQ
How do you scale, and what is your targeted level of growth? “We scale effortlessly. The way we do that is we work with athletes, teams and leagues to create identities for their fans. We’re able to scale across all of their fans and all the touch points a fan has with the athletes, teams and leagues they love. What we call a touch point is: Do you follow me on Instagram? Have you purchased a ticket? Do you buy my merch? Do you watch my videos? We’re able to scale across all of those. We scale by working with the athletes, teams and leagues directly. Our target level of growth is we want to create identities for all fans. We’re trying to grow across all athletes, all teams, all leagues, and we’re starting with universities, teams and leagues who are up and coming and looking for an edge.”
Who are your competitors, and what makes you different? “We have a unique competitor set. There are lots of companies building loyalty programs and that’s not what we’re doing. We’re trying to be the identity layer that sits on top of those programs. There are lots of companies in the web3 space creating identities for their fans, whether that’s NFT holders or social token holders. That’s not what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to create an identity that fans own and control themselves and sits across all the different types of ways you can be a fan. Think about everything written in SportTechie, about all the different fan engagement platforms. Each of those is unique, each fan is unique on how they engage with those. We’re sitting on top of all that to become the identification layer for fan engagement so that as athletes, teams and leagues want to engage their fans, they have better insights on who they’re actually trying to engage. We see ourselves as a unique value proposition when it comes to identifying and helping fans own their own data and then first-party data for the teams, leagues and athletes — our customers.”
What’s the unfair advantage that separates your company? “We’re absolutely obsessed with the fan experience. Our whole thesis is that if you create the best experience possible for the fans, they will be more willing to share information about who they are to their athletes, teams and leagues they love. They’ll be more willing to engage, they’re going to buy more merchandise, they’re going to buy more tickets. We are 100% obsessed with empowering fans to own their own data and access discounts and rewards for their data.”
What milestone have you recently hit or will soon hit? “We just completed the leAD accelerator program and had our Demo Day in September. On Oct. 21, we launched with our first athlete, Olivia Greaves, who is a freshman at Auburn and four-time USA National Team gymnast and we’re rolling out more programs every week with our athletes.”
Beyond the pandemic, what obstacles has your company had to overcome? “We’ve had to overcome all of the startup challenges, but what’s unique to us is that there’s no one right way of being a fan. We truly believe that. So many times to date, when you think about loyalty programs or you think about creators, they’re focused on revenue generation. Who’s my season ticket holder? Who’s purchased merch? But there’s so many different types of fans outside of that. There’s out-of-market fans, there’s international fans, there’s fans that can’t afford to go. Our unique challenge is thinking about how we can support all of those fans so every type of fan could be rewarded, not just those that have the capital to spend.”
How has your company been affected by the current economic situation, and how are you dealing with it? “We’ve been affected so much that all markets are down and people are a little bit slower to pull the trigger on angel investing or investing. We’re also adjacent to the broader web3 market. What we’re doing leverages Web3 technology and leverages blockchain technology. Right now, that hype cycle, we kind of get folded into NFTs and cryptocurrencies and all of that on the surface. Of course, that market is down and being hit. We’re affected by the market in the sense where everybody’s just a little bit more gun shy and timid, and especially anything that looks or smells like web3 for people that are outside of that. They’ve slowed down on evaluating or investing.”
What are the values that are core to your brand? “Values that are core to our brands are fan first, the fan experience. What’s really important to us is the quality of fan. Not just fans who can purchase season tickets and can purchase all the merchandise, but fans that may have never been able to go or afford to see a game, but they are avid fans, they support and follow on social media, they engage in social media, they do all those things. The quality of fan is really, really important to us. And then data privacy and sanctity of data and information is critical to us. Our whole business is built on trying to create an asset for and empower fans to own and control their own data return for assets. We want to do that in an ethical way they understand that puts them in control.”
What does success ultimately look like for your company? “Success looks like fans leveraging their fan ID to unlock experiences across sports, music, brands, across anywhere, and fans being able to take control of their data and use that data as an asset.”
What should investors or customers know about you — the person, your life experiences — that shows they can believe in you? “We come with humility. We know that we don’t know everything and this world has a lot of unknowns. We look to our customers and our investors to trust us in helping to figure that out and not have the arrogance to assume we’re already right or done at it. That enables us to learn very, very quickly and build the right product from empathy and understanding and experience.”
Is there more excitement around Encore at the professional level or collegiately? “The professional level, and I would actually even say league level. A lot of times, it’s going to be the team and the athletes that are executing on some of this data. Leagues are really excited about what data holistically looks like across our entire fan base. So, up and down everybody that touches soccer or tennis or football or basketball and empowering their fans at all levels. It’s actually very big. But at the end of the day, it’s usually the teams and the athletes that are selling tickets, selling merchandise, driving revenue.”
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