Making the capture of high school sports video easy and affordable is the mission of Realplay. Founder Justin Real explains the business and his motivations to get into it. Fun and insightful conversation with an energetic and focused founder.
Highlights include:
Shoutout to Podcast Listener and Walnut Member Erik Bullen for Suggesting Justin Real as a Guest
What Realplay Does
“Getting the video up until now was incredibly labor intensive and cost prohibitive… It limited … entry into the world of sports … the ability to use it to gain advantages and opportunities and education and professionally”.
The Realplay Founding Story
“… the problem with the business is not so much that the demand wasn't there or that the market wasn't vibrant, the volume was too high”.
Realplay’s AI Identifies Players, Understands Their Actions and Edits to Put Relevant Content Together: “Every Player, Every Play”
The Competition to Realplay’s Business
Realplay and WePlayed: Compare & Contrast
The Realplay Team Is Growing
Thoughts About Athletic Founders Such as Bryanne Leeming, Adam Martel and Justin Real
Justin Real’s Analogy of Startups as Baseball:” you fail 7 out of 10 times, you're going to go to the Hall of Fame”.
Investors Undervalue the Social and Economic Impact of Sports
Coaching Has Gotten Much More Effective: “…you're seeing 12, 13-year-olds looking like Olympians…”
Unlike in the Past, Athletes Now Have to Be in their Training Regimen Year-Round: Tom Brady
This Dedication and Focus Has Changed Sports, Massively Raising Performance Standards
Sal Daher Talks About Portfolio Company Vedanta Biosciences – Pitch for His Investment Syndicates
Justin Real on How Realplay Is Being Received by Coaches and Players
“And the bestselling point that we have to those parents are when we see them, we tell them put their phone in their pocket. You're there to watch the game and you're there to watch your kid play”.
Realplay’s Go to Market Approach
2020 Forecasts
How Justin’s Family Life Shaped His Entrepreneurship
Justin Real’s Parting Advice
“I listened to your podcast way at the early days of Realplay and it inspired me to keep going and reach out to guys like Christopher in Launchpad. You give us a path”.
Transcript of “Realplay: Sports Video Reinvented”
GUEST: JUSTIN REAL, FOUNDER & CEO
SAL DAHER: Welcome to Angel Invest Boston. I am your host, Sal Daher, an angel investor who delights in the fascinating tech companies being built in Boston's singular startup ecosystem. Because of the unique concentration of great universities here, Boston is a massive exporter of great startup ideas. This gives me the opportunity to invest early in the companies that will be changing our world, companies such as Vedanta Biosciences.
I'll tell you a bit more about Vedanta later. Now, I'd like to introduce my guest today, Justin Real, founder of Realplay. Justin, welcome to our studios.
JUSTIN REAL: Thanks for having me here, Sal.
Shoutout to Podcast Listener and Walnut Member Erik Bullen for Suggesting Justin Real as a Guest
Sal Daher: I'm really grateful to my Walnut colleague and listener, Erik Bullen, for suggesting that I should interview you. It's a great suggestion.
JUSTIN REAL: I couldn't agree more.
Justin Real Bio
SAL DAHER: Excellent. Justin Real studied at Union College and worked in consulting for a while, consulting and instruction, right?
JUSTIN REAL: Instruction in the oil and gas industry. Yes, there was technology thrown in there too.
SAL DAHER: But dealing with people and getting people to do things and to learn stuff and so on. He then started at MBA in Babson. In the midst of that, he founded Realplay, a startup disrupting the business of videotaping high school athletics for now.
What Realplay Does
SAL DAHER: Justin Real, please tell us what Realplay does and why it's important.
JUSTIN REAL: So, Realplay is a company that we're trying to elevate the entire experience of youth sports. And we do that by focusing on what you do on the field and taking the hard work and labor out of getting that video from the moment of play onto a shareable platform. The Realplay platform is really designed for anybody that's interested in both participating in and really experiencing youth sports from the player themselves, the parents that are obviously feeling a lot of the ways that players get to and experience the sports but also the coaches, the recruiters, the marketers out there.
“Getting the video up until now was incredibly labor intensive and cost prohibitive… It limited … entry into the world of sports … the ability to use it to gain advantages and opportunities and education and professionally”.
What we know is that when you put on a uniform, you do that to be in public and you want to be seen. You're doing something amazing, feats of amazing athletic skill that we know looks really cool that's why we've been playing the sports for as long as we have. Getting the video up until now was incredibly labor intensive and cost prohibitive especially at the upper echelons of what type of quality of you were looking for. It limited not only entry into the world of sports but also the ability to use it to gain advantages and opportunities and education and professionally.
Sports Video Content that Used to Take Nine Hours to Edit Now Gets Edited in fifty Seconds
We have this automated system that took a process that used to take around nine hours to edit a single game down for each individual player. We've cut that down to about 50 seconds and that's allowed us to not only get a significant volume of video but also scale out to six new states over the course of the next year. And we'll be experiencing a growth that we think is predictive of not just this particular sport based on softball being the largest combined sport in the US, but a lot of different sports that have been sort of left behind by some of the video providers out there.
SAL DAHER: Okay. This massive demand for it, it's not as if you're the first company that's tried to do this. It all comes down to how well you do it, how effectively you solve the pain point that exists for the players, the parents, the coaches trying to get these videos of their kids playing the sport that they've put so much into.
The Realplay Founding Story
Tell me the story how Realplay came about. How did you make the leap to be a founder?
JUSTIN REAL: Well, funny enough, I went into Babson with my consulting background thinking there's no way I'm going to be an entrepreneur. I'm going to jump project to project and continue to have a bunch of different experiences. And what I found when I was building a consulting project for myself was I couldn't get out of baseball. I couldn't stop either bringing in different projects I was working on sort of as a freelancer. I couldn't stay away from the sport and I couldn't stop playing.
All the lessons from Babson are all geared towards how do you find a problem and solve it and the problem that's existed in baseball from the start of Branch Rickey creating a minor league system all the way until now is how do you find the best player. And the best player really comes down to how do you see the best player.
Whether I was talking to a high-level agent who was dealing with contracts worth tens of millions of dollars or talking to a high school coach who's just trying to get his kids to have an educational opportunity at a place where maybe they can also go and play. The problem always came back to how do I find and see this player playing and evaluate them.
Baseball and softball are particularly difficult because it's not like you can just have a speed and height and how far you can jump and how strong you are. That only tells you so much if you go and watch some of the greatest. If you watch Mike Trout play a game and he goes 0-for-3, that's still not going to give you a picture of who the player is in total.
When it comes to this sport and the idea of visibility and data collection, there was a clear gap that we could fill. And there's a couple of other providers of different types of data whether it's biometrics and what happened within a body. The speed and the way the balls and bats interact in the sport with the swing and a pitch. Everybody is looking for sort of a new edge but everything comes back down to watching the player.
“… the problem with the business is not so much that the demand wasn't there or that the market wasn't vibrant, the volume was too high”.
And what I really focus on was if we can provide visibility to everybody. It's not just that I love baseball. It's not just that video is great but there is an incredibly impressive business model to be made off of it. There's just so many players and so many games that the problem with the business is not so much that the demand wasn't there or that the market wasn't vibrant, the volume was too high.
And that's when I started to learn a lot about artificial intelligence, machine learning, cognitive computing. Met my CTO, Andreas Randow and that's where we started to figure out that it's not just about the coolness of the product or the viability of once you have video on a platform. It's about getting it for the tens of thousands of games that are going to be played in any one's state across the country year in and year out.
SAL DAHER: Okay, so you're referring to some algorithms that you're using. So what are those algorithms doing? Are they identifying who the players are? Are they zooming in on them? Are they picking out sections that are of particular interests?
Realplay’s AI Identifies Players, Understands Their Actions and Edits to Put Relevant Content Together: “Every Player, Every Play”
JUSTIN REAL: Okay, I'm going to need you to stop telling our secrets on a podcast quickly, but yes to all your questions. One, we focus on player identification. Two, we focus on result identification so understanding what's taking place on the field, and then the third piece of automation really comes down to the editing and moving of the video and making sure that when we do crop the videos for a player ... Our slogan is Every Player, Every Play.
And when we get down to that level of player and play for a video standpoint, there's only so much of the video that we need. So we've built a system that actually edits out the pieces that you don't want. That's one of our big differentiators from what we call the streamers out there.
It's great if you can watch a whole game but there's only so many times you're going to watch Johnny from down the streets strike out for the three times in a game that he always does. You want to see your kid. And we focus on giving each player their moments in a small package as possible, which is a combination of serving the customer but also from a data size and transportation setup, there's no way that you can move that much video and that much data without breaking it down somehow. And that's one of the advantages that we take.
SAL DAHER: So, the camera is capturing all the time, and then you're selecting from this large library, the stuff that's of interest to you. You say, I want Freddy's game. You trained it on Freddy and then it picks it out but just still maintain this huge library or are you just recording Freddy on that moment? How does it work?
JUSTIN REAL: It starts from the whole raw video. The fixed cameras don't move. What happens within the shot and how those videos are stitched together based on the timing, the events and the players that are in it. That's what our software does.
We really focus on making sure that we have what we called standard shots or cropping zones that everything from what the short stop and second baseman do are the same, what the pitcher and hitter do are the same. And within that, we can move around what the system pulls from in terms of the video from that raw feed, and then what it stitches back together.
We have a split screen shot which is also unique advantage of ours. It's one thing to get ... Flap a security camera behind the home plate and just let that thing run. What we do is we have a view from behind the plate and a view from each base line which allows us to capture not just the side profile of a pitcher and hitter which mechanically is how you do the breakdown of a player and understand what they can do to improve day to day. But we also then have full field view and we can get better views of the defensive plays. And in 2020, we're rolling out our fully automated defensive system and it's one of the great differentiators that we're really pointing towards.
Pitching and hitting, it's one thing to hold up an iPhone and to capture the person you know that's going to be there. It's another thing to have a random moment where a ball head to a specific player. There's no predictive way that you can just stand there and hold that phone up for long enough. And that's where we really come in and separate ourselves from not just a camera that's up but a system that can focus on players.
The Competition to Realplay’s Business
SAL DAHER: Very good. Talk to me about the competition a bit. What's the competition that exists out there?
JUSTIN REAL: The big one out there is a company called Huddle. They started in 2006 in the football and team sports base. And what they figured out was that if you film players on an iPad, you have a system built into the camera itself that allows you to transfer that video pretty easily, a really cool product for 2006. And they've definitely built on some of their successes in basketball, volleyball, sort of indoor court sports. And the idea is point the thing at the field and give the video to the coach.
This is, I think, a fine approach for early on but what we found is that there's enough people that are offering coaches things that the minute you ask the coach or a parent to do more work, it just becomes another job. And having the video in itself is a huge advantage in the early 2000s, 2010s, but we're in a different space now.
SAL DAHER: How big a business is that?
JUSTIN REAL: They raised, I think in 2016 and forgive me if this isn't a 100% accurate, but I think they raised close to $70 million on a $460 million valuation.
Realplay and WePlayed: Compare & Contrast
SAL DAHER: Have you been across these guys who are in Boston called WePlayed?
JUSTIN REAL: I have. I've met Rob and Paul, great guys, very different background than what we're coming from. I think that they have a really interesting view on sort of the other end of it which is really the post broadcast fan experience. We both agree on the same thing though, which is what the players do will draw the players back to the video.
And I think we try to separate ourselves as we go to where cameras aren't and they're going to where the broadcast already happened. And I think that we're both proving the same point that there's a lot more in this market yet to be explored and I come across them a lot in a lot of different sporting and startup events around here.
SAL DAHER: Sure, like a college player who has a following. You can get videos out to the following and you can figure out a way to even find a video. So that's one of the big things that they had because there's an enormous mass of these videos and this is somebody that I've interviewed on the podcast before, Sam Bogoch. The company is called axle ai.
And what they do is basically trying to make sense of videos that people have, these enormous stacks of these videos and just categorize them and create these low-res versions of them that can be easily manipulated and sent back and forth because the video just resides in these disk drives.
It’s interesting. He told me that sometimes these video libraries are so huge that Amazon Web Services, they send out a truck, a semi-truck that plugs into your system directly to download the data because it would just take so long to send it over the net.
JUSTIN REAL: The number of college athletes that I've come across especially sort of that are around my age of 10, 15 years removed from playing that the minute I finish explaining what we do, I get the, "God, I wish I had that. There was a home run I hit against Bentley that I just hit it on the rope."
SAL DAHER: You hit it on the rope.
JUSTIN REAL: That's what we would say in baseball world to keep going.
The Realplay Team Is Growing
SAL DAHER: Good. So we talked about the competition. Tell me about your team.
JUSTIN REAL: My team is awesome. And it's new. About two years, if you walked into the Babson Blank Center for Entrepreneurship and look directly to your left, after entering you see tuck into a corner, this guy who looks a little too old to be in college working on a computer and has a bunch of junk around him. That was our office or my office for two years.
We're now after our last round of fundraising and a successful pilot run in 2019. I've onboarded our Vice President of Product, Michael Salerno and our Director of Finance, Rachel Bullard. As our two full-time employees, we have an ongoing relationship with our technology CTO, Andreas Randow, who's been just a contract part of this but really sort of waiting on the wings to come on full-time when we can afford a CTO of his caliber.
Michael comes to us from a couple of years at Oracle, six years at Oracle and then he founded the Boston Product Managers Association, worked for companies like Brain Shark and also has a high school daughter who's been recruited to go play volleyball and uses Huddle and some of the other tools out there and is as familiar with the product as you could possibly be.
Rachel, she's on the younger side and she comes up to us after two years at Ernst & Young and then helped Catalant and organize their financing as they closed their Series D. And similarly to everybody that ends up working for her, she has a little extra reason to be there. She was a Babson softball player and is still coaching to this day.
There's also a group of really about 10, we call them our guys. They are part-timers and we hope to bring them more into the fold as we grow. But they're 10 of a group of 67 from last year that were working for us and these are the guys that are out in the field that are setting up the cameras. They're scoring the games. They're interacting with clients both customers, parents, players, facility owners, tournament organizers. And these are all guys that have, if you dig into it a little bit, they have a little bit of baseball in them. They have a lot of ambition and they have a lot of drive to try to make something out of really this company in a way that I'd feel incredibly privileged and lucky to have.
I think a lot about there's amazing companies and startups out there in the world of marketing and sales, and all of that is incredibly lucrative and they totally understand having passion for it. There's something about this sports base that it just attracts a little extra passion.
Thoughts About Athletic Founders Such as Bryanne Leeming, Adam Martel and Justin Real
SAL DAHER: Well, thinking about athletic founders that I've interviewed, Bryanne Leeming. Do you know Bryanne?
JUSTIN REAL: I do. Yeah, she was a year ahead of me at Babson-
SAL DAHER: Yeah. I think athletics teaches people a lot. It teaches them teamwork, how to get people in the same page. It teaches them endurance. It teaches them to do their homework, show up on time for practice. Coach is going to get on your case.
Justin Real’s Analogy of Startups as Baseball:” you fail 7 out of 10 times, you're going to go to the Hall of Fame”.
JUSTIN REAL: I use baseball and softball to analogize startup more than anything else, and life. But it's a sport where if you fail 7 out of 10 times, you're going to go to the Hall of Fame. So you have to ... The way I explained it very much like pitching where you're going especially in the early days, you're going to get rejected a lot and it's going to hurt a lot.
And much like a hitter who's on a hitting slump or a pitcher who's had a bad outing the night before, you better walk to the mound or walk to the plate with the attitude that you are the greatest thing that's ever happened to this game or else you're going to lose. If you don't have that confidence, if you don't have that belief, there's no way that you get out of that rut.
So, you have to be able to handle the disappointment. You have to be able to recognize that it's going to happen. And at the same time, you have to tuck that pack in the back of your head and pursue your dreams and your goals in a way that is a little bit ridiculous and isn't really done statistically all the time. But for those three moments, it's worth it.
SAL DAHER: Yeah, baseball in particular because it is such a difficult sport, the failure rate, batting 300 is just stratospheric. It means hitting the ball effectively 30% of the time. The failing rate of startups is about something like two-thirds don't return the original capital. So your comparison is not far off and so you're being able to deal with that level of failure and still give it your best is really, really important.
I think another sort of athletic founder who is also backed by LaunchPad, Adam Martel. As a matter of fact, I interviewed him with Christopher Mirabile together because he's sort of like the poster child for the founder who understands the value of a board, who's been very coachable and so forth, and it's because he was a coach, sports-minded and he also involved with coaching and so on.
The guy just really understands what it takes to get people from one thing to another to get them to do things on a reliable basis. A lot of what you're doing in your early consulting and instructing people on how to do procedures and all that stuff.
JUSTIN REAL: The thing that I like to say is that it was more applicable in my early days when I was really hands on and dropping off equipments, setting it all up. But what I said was that whether it's a coach or tournament organizer, for someone like me that's sort of a vendor, we all have the same trunk. It's all full of some equipment that's banging around a little bit, a couple of bases, a few helmets or a bat or a glove here or there. And at any given point, you can equip the person that you know were going to forget something and you're never going to clean it up because there's always going to be a chance to either pick something that somebody left behind or give them something that you have extra.
I think you hit it on the head there something about athletes and I don't know the numbers off the top, but I've heard that there's a substantial percentage of executives in many different industries that are really led by athletes and former college athletes and it's just a great way to find someone that at the very least you know that can manage their time and has passion for something sort of beyond your average bear.
SAL DAHER: Was it Sir Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington who said that the Battle of Waterloo was won in the playing fields of Eton. The connection between leadership and sports is very closely tied. Well, the Greeks just developed their whole idea of sports although they didn't have team sports really, but just the idea of sort of physical competition very much part of the Martial virtues. And a lot of that tied with leadership, tied with getting things done in the battlefield or in commercial combat so to speak.
Investors Undervalue the Social and Economic Impact of Sports
JUSTIN REAL: If you want to come pitch with us next time, I think that there's a whole world of either investors or just general folks that are outside of the athletic realm that discounts sports. It's a hobby. It's fun to do. No one needs to do it. But there's something that separates it from, I think, almost every other activity that we do there where it's so much analogous to life and has such a deep rooted feeling when you're in it, whether you're playing at the pros and you have 50,000 people that are screaming at you, or you're some back field in Arlington and there's four people that are watching.
And if you have that moment, it will live with you forever. That moment doesn't exist in many other points of life.
SAL DAHER: And when you see that, you understand what it is, what it means to do that and you can replicate it. I've never really participated much in team sports. I played squash basically for my health. I mean, I do exercise for my health. I got to do it otherwise, I'll die of heart attack or something.
JUSTIN REAL: There's that side of it too.
SAL DAHER: No, but it's not the same as people who do it because they really enjoy it. They really love the sport and so forth. So I see the value. As I say, it's from the outside. I look at it and I see the value in it. There's always the stuff about players, getting into the habit of drinking and all that stuff, but the reality is when you look at college players, those players are much more disciplined than the average college students.
They're not the ones falling off the balcony-
JUSTIN REAL: Certainly not in season.
SAL DAHER: In season, yeah.
JUSTIN REAL: There's a way that I think and it's something that I try to promote as much as I can, but beyond the dedication side of it, the entire world of sport has taken leaps over the last 5 or 10 years just in terms of what we can share. And coaching, when you think about what a coach is, it's a person who's had enough experience that they can look at an individual that they've never seen before and impart lessons on to them that are universal.
And they have to tailor a specific message and the right type of cure or diagnosis, but all you're doing is just sharing information. And as we've seen, the internet really become a place for coaches to come together and share methodologies not just at the amateur ranks but even at the highest ranks of the game.
You have people that are pioneering new ways of developing pitches, new ways of approaching hitters and statistics that until we could collect that information and share it and someone that could come into the game without 30, 40 years' experience could really have access to that depth of knowledge, we really couldn't do that.
Coaching Has Gotten Much More Effective: “…you're seeing 12, 13-year-olds looking like Olympians…”
Now that we're here, you're seeing 12, 13-year-olds looking like Olympians in ways that they can lift and get ready for their physical endurance that comes up just in their weight room because we've come up with better exercises and more comprehensive ways to do things. And I would challenge some of the problems with drinking a little bit only because there's such a focus on nutrition these days, and it's not just the spoils of war where you get to go and celebrate. Obviously, that's a big part of it.
But every athlete now sees any advantage that they can take as an advantage and if that means that you can sleep better, you can recover better, then that means you go and drink as much. It's probably why you don't drink as much and this might be slightly controversial but I know in minor league baseball, they just made it so that marijuana charges or anything related to marijuana is no longer suspendable. And I really am an advocate for pushing non-opioid types of recovery in a way that I think that there was some pretty insidious ways that athletes were treated based on what they were given and what they meant to owners and teams and just the revenue of it.
But if we can find a way to treat their bodies better, not only are they going to be happy but they're going to perform better too.
SAL DAHER: Yeah. Well, I'm very much a skeptic of marijuana and THC. I think-
JUSTIN REAL: I think of it more for the pain and the inflammation aspect of it which again, I'm no doctor and I'm just going off of what the industry is out there saying but there's a lot of players that are happy that it's at least an option.
Unlike in the Past, Athletes Now Have to Be in their Training Regimen Year-Round: Tom Brady
SAL DAHER: Yeah, as I say, I understand the competition that has been created. It's so funny, when you think like Arnold Palmer, these guys, they weren't full-time athletes. They're selling cars in the off season and they're practicing once in a while but they're not like nowadays, if you're a top level athlete like that, you're engaged in your profession year round, all the time.
JUSTIN REAL: We have a couple of great examples of it here in Boston. Obviously, Tom Brady is-
SAL DAHER: Tom Brady. Yeah, he doesn't deviate… He's on it all the time.
JUSTIN REAL: It's a life.
SAL DAHER: It's a life.
This Dedication and Focus Has Changed Sports, Massively Raising Performance Standards
JUSTIN REAL: It's what he's turned into everything where ... And baseball is great because of the statistical history. And we have such just treasure trove of information from guys that played in the 1910s and comparing those to those guys that are playing now. And there's a lot that we share, the distances, the types of balls have changed, the rules, the crowds, the shapes of the fields have all changed but we're still trying to hit a pitch.
And what people, they talked about comparing the Joe DiMaggio's and Ted Williams to guys like J.D. Martinez and Mookie Betts. And there's a lot to compare but at the same time, I don't think that Joe DiMaggio saw 104 mile an hour fast ball and the types of break-in stuff that we can throw out these days. At the same time, I don't think that a lot of the pitchers that were greats and obviously, the Nolan Ryan's and Greg Maddux's are excluded.
But I don't think a lot of guys from the 60s, 70s and 80s even get looked at nowadays. You have to be throwing at least 90 miles an hour to be considered for a D1 team, let alone what you need to be in order to be a pro. There's free agents out there that can throw 94, 95 and 10 years ago, that would have been some of the best arms in the league. And we've just kept elevating and kept pushing because there is no perfect way to do this game but there are some things that we can lean on that make us all a little bit better.
SAL DAHER: So, Babe Ruth's training regimen would not have ... I mean, in the current-
JUSTIN REAL: Babe Ruth still to this day statistically stands as just ... Even if you want to say something like he was hung over for half the games, where he was in terms of where everyone else in his league was like he compares to guys now, which is insane because the guys that were playing back then can't ... They're hitting 12 home runs, now is considered power, and Babe Ruth is over here hitting 46. What he did was unparalleled.
SAL DAHER: It's just the natural talent. It's like Pelé or somebody like that. It's just so much natural talent that it overwhelmed all the crazy stuff that he was doing. But anyway coming up next, I will ask Justin Real about how Realplay is being received by coaches and players. However, before we do that, I'd like to tell you a bit about interesting company in which I'm invested, Vedanta Biosciences. This is a little bit of a pitch for my investment syndicates.
Sal Daher Talks About Portfolio Company Vedanta Biosciences – Pitch for His Investment Syndicates
JUSTIN REAL: I could not promote that idea more.
SAL DAHER: It's basically a bunch of people get together, write a bunch of checks to invest in one startup. What it does is it helps bulk up my conviction investments. If I really, really like a company, I bring in a bunch of people and invest alongside with me and other angels that are investing. So it's a chance for someone who maybe doesn't have the time to be working as an angel and doing all the due diligence or doesn't have the experience to join much more experienced people in investing in these really interesting companies because by the way, disclosure, I'm an investor in Realplay. My colleague in Walnut, Erik Bullen, is involved in the company and he's very bullish in the company, Christopher Mirabile being bullish on the company and all these other things.
This is an example of how you make your decision with other angels who are very knowledgeable because you can't possibly know everything about every single company, so you got to participate with other people and let them help inform you of the company. So the point of syndicates, that's exactly it. So you can kind of share the risk.
But anyway, the point I make here a lot is Boston is just awash in really interesting companies, particularly in the biotech space. And Vedanta is one of those. They are basically sort of like reengineering the microbiome to create treatments for drug-resistant bacteria. In the particular case is C. difficile which kills old people in the hospital, immune compromised. C. difficile is horrible because there's no treatment for it really that's very effective. It's a big problem.
They have a trial going on right now which is basically reengineering the gut bacteria so they can apply a treatment of a different consortium of gut bacteria that makes the C. difficile go away. And those guys are making serious headway. They just got $5.8 million from CARB-X which is this group that coordinates funding for figuring out how to get around drug-resistant bacteria.
And I was an early investor and it's not in the syndicate because that was in a long time before I was doing syndicates. But this is the kind of company I run across in Boston. So if you're an acredited investor and you're interested in investing in these really cutting edge companies, look up my syndicate. Go to the website and sign up in the syndicate page.
JUSTIN REAL: If you're ever looking for any consult, I will volunteer the other Real brother. My brother is getting his MD-PhD in Mount Sinai right now. So, anything in the med space that you need a consult on. That's the one of us to call.
SAL DAHER: The Real Brothers, I like that. If he's in town, let's get together.
JUSTIN REAL: All right. I'll let him know.
SAL DAHER: You're allowed one beer?
JUSTIN REAL: Yeah. More than that-
SAL DAHER: Your training regimen allows you one beer?
JUSTIN REAL: Not to deviate back into our product or anything, but we have the whole idea of what happens when you're done creating videos which is I think the category that I would fall into. And we call that the washed up account where you have your videos from the past. You're not creating anything more. It's my training regimen. It's a little bit more about similar to you, not really having the health side effects that would come if I didn't work out and ate the way I did.
Justin Real on How Realplay Is Being Received by Coaches and Players
SAL DAHER: Okay, that's good. Moderation in all things. Justin, tell us how Realplay is being received by coaches and players. And why?
JUSTIN REAL: To be sort of short about it, they love it. And they love it for really whatever reason that particular person is in the game for. The easiest case is your 16, 17-year-old high school and college ecosystem where you're talking about players that are both trying to improve and grow into their bodies and to use their play to go onto play at the next level. And coaches who know that the way towards success and if you want to make a name in coaching is to elevate players.
So, for players that struggled to get their own video or worry that they don't have the best visibility being from the Northeast especially, there's just not that much attention that you can rely on. So the fact that we have something when you step onto the field, everything you do is captured, that really gives players a lot of feeling that what they do matters in a way that they can send it out to recruiters or to coaches to improve. Coaches love it because they don't have to do the work and these-
SAL DAHER: They just turn the machine on.
JUSTIN REAL: And that's it. And they do so much already. They are tasked with so much ... I talked to a college coach, he's got 30 guys on his team. And he says that any given point, I got 21 groups of parents that are pissed at me because there's nine of them that are playing and there's 21 that aren't getting enough playing time. And that's sort of the balance of being a coach and being a coach doesn't mean being a film producer and agent and some type of support system that is completely outside the realm of athletics or sports. And so, then we help them do that job.
“And the bestselling point that we have to those parents are when we see them, we tell them put their phone in their pocket. You're there to watch the game and you're there to watch your kid play”.
And then when you think about the younger ages, the 8U's and the 10 to 12-year-olds, that's really about capturing moments that especially for the newer parents, they're just not trained on how to do yet. You go up to the 16, 17, you would see some very professional looking moms and dads with very expensive cameras that know exactly who to talk to, but at those sort of early ages, you're just trying to watch and appreciate it. And the bestselling point that we have to those parents are when we see them, we tell them put their phone in their pocket. You're there to watch the game and you're there to watch your kid play.
SAL DAHER: Be in the moment, enjoy the game and it's going to be recorded and it's going to be affordable and it's going to be really beautifully done.
JUSTIN REAL: And you don't have to want to be a professional baseball player or softball player in order to use this video. You can just watch it because-
SAL DAHER: I'm just thinking about school plays. You identify the faces and so forth. They can have little close ups on the faces and all that.
JUSTIN REAL: Dancing, gymnastics, any of these performance sports.
SAL DAHER: So many of these things, yeah.
JUSTIN REAL: Again, you don't do it to do it in the dark. You do it to be seen.
SAL DAHER: Absolutely.
JUSTIN REAL: And I believe most of the folks that are out there on some type of stage, if they can show more than the audience that's directly in front of them, they will.
Realplay’s Go to Market Approach
SAL DAHER: What's your go-to-market plan?
JUSTIN REAL: We partner with what we call the player consolidators. That's the leagues, the tournament organizations or even the facilities that run a lot of their concentration of players whether that's bringing them all to a singular weekend or an event or just has control over a large multitude of teams. What we want to avoid is what we've seen some of the other competitors do which is go after the coaches or the institutions and get them to pay for it.
We charge players, and we know that we charge players which is slightly different than the way that it's done especially when it comes to our price point. Our lowest amount is $25 and you can get the video from your whole day. If you want from a tournament, it's $45.
SAL DAHER: Basically, you're kind of giving the cameras away and getting paid on the revenue that's being produced by the players wanting to pay for their video. And it's so affordable that it makes it accessible so many people buy it.
JUSTIN REAL: We want the question to turn away from why would I have this video to why wouldn't I buy it. And if we can get that turn, that's where we feel like we've had a successful not just product but also a price that goes along with it.
SAL DAHER: So, in the typical field, what percentage of the players who are in the field are paying you?
JUSTIN REAL: Our baseline that we shoot for is 20% of gain. So if you're looking at 20 people on the field, you got the nine players plus two backup pitchers. We're really looking to get four of those guys onboard. And if we can get four of them, that's where our breakeven is. Anything above that and that's where profit starts to roll in and we built a system that's not designed for the four, it's designed for the 20.
And our hope over time is that as teams become sort of more used to getting their video as everybody expects to have it, that we can, as part of our platform, build in a subscription model that also just adjust for price and adjusts for how often you play. But that we can get that number closer to 30%, even 40%.
And I know it's a very high adoption rate number when you think about going to a brand-new market but we really consider once they're on the field, they're in the store. They know why they're there. There's a purpose to why they're there and we're just giving them a discount thing that they stepped into the store to buy in the first place.
And if we can do that in a way where there's little friction as possible by partnering with tournaments so that they can bake our prices into the tournament fees, same thing with league fees or any league administration, facilities as well. If they can bake those prices in, that adoption rate goes up. And so far as we've seen when that happens, no player, coach or anybody pushes back if they get the video on top of what the other services that they're offering.
So, we don't do the job of putting the players on the field. That's a whole other business that is an incredibly difficult one to run and there are many people doing it successfully but that's a completely different side of the sort of production that we don't want to be a part of. We want to know that once they're there, we can really increase the value of their experience. So we go to the people who are bringing the players who would close us together.
2020 Forecasts
SAL DAHER: So how much business you expect to do in 2020?
JUSTIN REAL: Last year, we filmed about 9,200 players. Next year, based on the contracts that we have signed for 2020, that number goes up to 72,000. And that's just with six different, both facility or tournament organizers in tow. We also are negotiating with another eight for either one more potential person in 2020 but mostly for 2021. And there's a couple different business models that we're experimenting with as well where there's a national tournament provider who just wants to license the hardware and software and really take and run with it.
SAL DAHER: Those 72 place, what kind of revenue does that translate to?
JUSTIN REAL: We're forecasting somewhere between 1.5 and 2.25 million in revenue next year.
SAL DAHER: In 2020?
JUSTIN REAL: Yeah.
SAL DAHER: Okay. And '21?
JUSTIN REAL: '21, that number jumps up to about 8.5. In '22, that jumps to 19.7 million.
SAL DAHER: Where do you go breakeven?
JUSTIN REAL: 2022. What we spent our money on is expansion and increased functionality. If we didn't want to spend any money on that, we'd get to profitability three years after we establish at any facility or tournament organizer. The equipment is incredibly durable.
SAL DAHER: So, you pay off the equipment in three years and then after that is just gravy?
JUSTIN REAL: Yeah. And the beauty of it is that we don't expect anybody to come back the next year. We anticipate a 100% churn in all of our forecast just for the sheer reason that the 12-year-old that we got last year is not the same 12-year-old this year. They're going to age up into the next group and that's something that we have to anticipate. Not everybody is going to play the next year over, so we have to consider the year-to-year snapshot as our potential audience, not so much a singular player throughout their lifetime.
How Justin’s Family Life Shaped His Entrepreneurship
SAL DAHER: As we're wrapping up the interview, just give me an idea of how your family life growing up and so forth, what sort of are the factors that kind of led you into entrepreneurship? Was it like your parents entrepreneurs? How did you cotton on to this thing?
JUSTIN REAL: If you ask my mother, she would point back to a project that I did in fourth grade where you had to create a diagram of a heart and everyone's diagram was some type of 2D thing and I wanted to bring lights and pyrotechnics and some type of display piece on top of it that no fourth grader should ever be thinking of. And from there, the sort of the general thought about me was if it's something simple, then I might try to complicate it and make it bigger than what it really is.
They both run their own private practices. My dad is an author, so I think the idea of an individual really starting and having value within themselves and building a business off of it wasn't foreign. But then I went right into the medical world and then oil and gas after that, I got very comfortable in a very lucrative environment and saw the comforts there. Went to Babson and like I said, I had no intention of trying to dedicate my life to any one thing.
But I think similar to baseball, once I found that there's a drive in this where what you put in, you can get out of it and that I had more than anything the capacity to deal with the failure and wake up the next day and go get them. That's something my parents come from very humble backgrounds and we have sort of always instilled in ourselves the idea that you work every day no matter what.
And the role of failure in that is a lesson, it's not necessarily an end point. But I think what I learned from my family and my brother going off in sort of the direct opposite route that I did, but in his time, he was actually a professional ballet dancer and what we learned is one side is you got to have a work ethic where you deal with the ups and downs and the other is find something that has significant meaning. And meaning can be passion, meaning can be what you give back.
But if it gets you out of the bed in the morning and is something that means something to you no matter how much money you make out of it, that's going to be the thing that you should pursue because not only will you end up living a more fulfilled life but you'll inevitably be giving back more in a way that you feel really contributive towards.
SAL DAHER: Yeah. I mean the really successful companies, they're built not because the founders wanted to make money. I mean they like to make money and when they succeed, it's part of success, they wanted to build this thing. They had to build this thing. That's the thing they wanted to do.
JUSTIN REAL: We get a lot of question about like acquisition and when is that moment. And as much as I believe that there are very large players in this market, that at any point would be interested in swooping down and bringing us into the fold, there's a big part of me that really wants to see how far we can push this platform. And if you have Facebook for the social aspect of it and LinkedIn for a professional side, there is no universal sports platform.
And I think that there is a goal to try to go get whether where the solution to that is what our challenges. But I believe that focusing on the players, focusing on what's done at the point of play, that's how we start to build that thing and there's a part of me that I think will never be satisfied until I have the chance.
Justin Real’s Parting Advice
SAL DAHER: The last question, Justin, do you have any advice that you'd give the audience, founders, angels, people who work at startups, people who are thinking of investing in startups, people who are thinking of starting one or even going to work for one? What would you tell them?
JUSTIN REAL: That's a lot of people. For founders and anybody that's interested in starting out especially if you're planning on raising money for it, go get you a good therapist. The reality is that-
SAL DAHER: The bottle of scotch is not a therapist.
JUSTIN REAL: Less effective than you think. The reality is that there's only so many people you can really tell the true darkness to, especially early on. Your family and friends are looking at you to be okay and they want you to be able to survive in this space. And if you can't, if you tell them how dark it is and it's dark, that's not going to be that’s not going to be a great thing.
It's same thing for investors or employees. If something doesn't go great in the business, then you need an outlet to let that out to somebody who, by talking to them, you are not going to be hurting both your business chances or your social life pretty intensely.
But also, I think speaking from the baseball side, don't ever give up. There's a lot of reasons to say no to investing in a business and I understand that. And it feels like every single no is your last chance. And we live in a very big world where there's a lot of people. And if you find a market and this is obviously sort of where the investors and entrepreneurs come together, if you find a market that's worth going after, prove it.
And if you believe it, if there is proof point that you genuinely don't feel the need to fabricate or to pump up or to try to make any different than what it really is, you need to go find somebody to prove that to. That thing that we've struggled from the most when especially around Boston, even in this podcast we're experiencing, there's a lot of biomed and medical-based and even B2B businesses out there that are super easy to fund because of just a huge exit potential.
SAL DAHER: Actually, not so easy. Biotech, what's happening is one of the recurring themes that we're having on the podcast is that there are a lot of really potentially groundbreaking discoveries that can't find funding beyond like the initial angel rounds to get to the point where a big strategic player will pick it up because a lot of the VCs have been very successful, are creating their own startups and they just fund those. The $50 million babies, startups start with $50 million to kind of like do something that's completely impossible.
And so, there are a lot of other players out there who are just kind of like left with nothing in the biotech space.
JUSTIN REAL: I didn't even know that that was creeping in situation. I think I can only speak really from me being ... The pitch that always sort of stands in the back of my head is we lost to somebody that was creating a way to create just a new skincare product. I can't remember exactly what the disease was but it-
SAL DAHER: It's competition or-
JUSTIN REAL: Yeah. It affected something like 45% of all US adults, some ridiculous high number. And when thinking about market opportunity and we're sitting here as a little sports company and we're only doing the diamond sports. We don't have the multibillion potential user market that's out there.
So, what I would say both to investors and to entrepreneurs is, don't sleep on a small market. There's a lot of business to be had out there and there's so much new technology that even what we know to have existed in the past may not be applicable to what's possible in the future. And the way that we leveraged technology, the way that we adapt and integrate the way our society is with technology and how we change our experience.
I think that there's a whole new wave of pioneering that's to be done where it might not make sense based on what we've done but because we've never had the chance to do this. We don't know what it's like when every person in the world has access to the world's largest focus of information. We don't know what it means when distance is no longer a problem for communication. And I think that we're just at the beginning points of really understanding what business can be made out of that.
And then finally for just investors, the role of have you thought about question is one that I [inaudible 00:44:46] a lot only because it's presented in a way that I totally understand and it's something that you had thought of. But every entrepreneurs, CEO that I've ever talked to after a pitch that gets the question like that, their answer is inevitably, "Of course, I've thought about that. The fact that you thought about that, you should think that I would think about that."
And introductions and connections, that's sort of a separate section of this but when it comes to how the idea could materialize, think about it less of like I kind of got you or you didn't know what this was and more of a conversation. Tell me about your thoughts on this, let me know where you thought and let the entrepreneur tell you as opposed to trying to instruct them on something that they-
SAL DAHER: More like can things be on this? This is a doubt I have.
JUSTIN REAL: Yes, as opposed to trying to educate them on something that they've dedicated their at least current life to and they've probably spent a good amount of time to think about.
SAL DAHER: Yeah, but convince me, explain to me how this thing-
JUSTIN REAL: Exactly.
SAL DAHER: Yeah, that's understandable. Justin Real, founder of Realplay. Thanks a lot for making time to be in this engaging interview.
“I listened to your podcast way at the early days of Realplay and it inspired me to keep going and reach out to guys like Christopher in Launchpad. You give us a path”.
JUSTIN REAL: Sal, thanks for having me here. This is a couple of years in the making. I listened to your podcast way at the early days of Realplay and it inspired me to keep going and reach out to guys like Christopher in Launchpad. You give us a path.
SAL DAHER: I'm gratified to hear that. If one company is inspired by the podcast, it makes the whole thing worthwhile.
JUSTIN REAL: If for no other reason, I knew that that guy was out there and I just needed to figure out how to get to him.
SAL DAHER: It's a great outfit, Launchpad. Very professional, and Christopher and Ham Lord, outstanding. They've done really tremendous work. Great. I'd like to invite our listeners who enjoyed this podcast to review it on iTunes. If you can give us a review on iTunes, I'd really love that, Justin.
JUSTIN REAL: Certainly.
SAL DAHER: Yeah. This is Angel Invest Boston, conversations with Boston's most interesting angels and founders. I'm Sal Daher.
I'm glad you were able to join us. Our engineer is Raul Rosa. Our theme was composed by John McCusick. Our graphic design is by Katharine Woodman-Maynard. Our host is coached by Grace Daher.