Founder Justin Real tells us how Realplay Sports survived the COVID pause and set itself up to serve booming customer demand in 2022 and 2023. In the 2-year hiatus, Realplay expanded the type customers it can address and brought in partners to enrich its product offering. An inspiring chat with a compelling founder.
Highlights:
Sal Daher Welcomes Back Justin Real, Founder of Portfolio Company Realplay Sports
Justin Real Diplomatically Notices That There’s a Lot Less Sal
“...Realplay is a technology company with a goal of solving a problem for the amateur sports ecosystem.”
Realplay Serves Mainly the 14 to 18-year-old Players Being Recruited. Younger Players Who Aspire to Be Recruited Also Forms a Significant Clientele
“When they're watching the kid playing in the tournament venue, they can just enjoy the game instead of being there with the camera, taking a video...”
The Impact of the Angel Invest Boston Podcast in Connecting Justin Real and Launchpad
Erik Bullen Was an Early Believer in Realplay Sports
2020 Was Supposed to Be a Big Growth Year for Realplay, Then COVID Hit
The Big March 13th Event in Arizona that Never Happened
Potential Partners Began to Reach Out During COVID to Explore Collaborations
Connections Made During COVID Led to a Much Richer and Diverse Product Offering that Made Realplay More Compelling to Users
How Realplay Stayed Alive in 2020
Rapsodo Now Provides Pitch and Ball Tracking on Realplay
In 2021, Realplay Still Managed to Grow Despite All the Uncertainties
Realplay Expects 2022 to Set a Record for Growth in Revenues
Jason Real Makes the Point that Zoom Lowers the Cost of Taking a Meeting with Someone and thus Makes People More Willing to Take Meetings
Realplay’s Current Challenge Is Stepping Up to the Expected Tripling of Business in 2023
Peter Thiel’s Advice on Follow-On Investments
Parting Thoughts from Justin Real, Founder of Realplay Sports: Gratitude + Watch Out for That Curveball
ANGEL INVEST BOSTON IS SPONSORED BY:
Transcript of “Realplay After COVID”
Guest: Founder Justin Real
Sal Daher: I'm really proud to say that the Angel Invest Boston podcast is sponsored by Purdue University entrepreneurship and Peter Fasse, patent attorney at Fish & Richardson. Purdue is exceptional in its support of its faculty; faculty of its top five engineering school in helping them get their technology from the lab, out to the market, out to industry, out to the clinic.
Peter Fasse is also a great support to entrepreneurs. He is a patent attorney specializing in microfluidics and has been tremendously helpful to some of the startups which I'm involved, including a startup came out of Purdue, Savran Technologies. I'm proud to have these two sponsors for my podcast.
Sal Daher Welcomes Back Justin Real, Founder of Portfolio Company Realplay Sports
Welcome to Angel Invest Boston, conversations with Boston's most interesting angels and founders. Today, we're really excited to have back with us, Justin Real. Say hi, Justin.
Justin Real: Hello, Angel Invest Boston. How's it going, Sal?
Sal Daher: Great. Justin is an alumnus of the program. He showed up in the episode called Realplay: Sports Video Reinvented. We recorded that interview just as COVID was getting started. We had no clue. We thought it was going to be a few months, and it was going to be over. I thought I'd have Justin back on just to talk about the COVID journey and what Realplay did.
Before that, let's recapitulate Justin Real, our Realplay: Sports Video Reinvented. You can find it on my website, angelinvestboston.com. It's a great podcast. It talks about the whole backstory of Justin Real and how he discovered entrepreneurship. It's really a great podcast, and you're going to see a video of the old Sal in there. The full weight, not the lean Sal of today.
Justin Real Diplomatically Notices That There’s a Lot Less Sal
Justin very diplomatically said, "Sal, we both look very different from the [laughs] that past January video." We look very different, meaning he's got a little bit more of a beard now, and I have 115 pounds less of flab on me. Anyway, a little--
Justin Real: Everybody has their own journey, Sal.
Sal Daher: Yes, yes, yes. Mr. Diplomat over there. Anyway, okay, Justin, tell us what problem Realplay is solving and for whom?
Justin Real: Well, I'm sure when you're going back and listening, this is going to sound slightly different than before. For the most part, the problems and who we're solving them for are the same.
Sal Daher: Assume the listener has not listened to the other podcast. They're independent events. This podcast should stand alone, and the other podcast itself stands alone because there are things that you talk about there that we're not going to talk about here, like your journey in entrepreneurship and all that stuff. Today, we're going to drill down on COVID, and so forth, but do a little catch up for people, explain what Realplay...problems is solving, and for whom it's solving a problem.
“...Realplay is a technology company with a goal of solving a problem for the amateur sports ecosystem.”
Justin Real: Concisely as I can be, Realplay is a technology company with a goal of solving a problem for the amateur sports ecosystem. From the facilities, multi-field complexes, teams, and gatherers of the game, we serve a product that is intended to generate video of everything that happens on a field without any of the labor or intensive work that was previously needed to go into delivering video-based and data-based products for amateur athlete customers.
We have a multi-camera system. It can be deployed at any field across the country. We had a beachhead market of baseball and softball as our initial sport that we got into because that's the world that I know and one that was being served slightly differently than your typical field sports. From the beginning, I had an idea of getting a video for every play and a video for every player, and to have that all be done without somebody spending hours behind an editing computer without having a need for a very expensive infrastructure.
We achieve that goal with a system that can either be ours that we deploy entirely, or a system and a software suite that can be deployed to an existing camera layout or an existing set of video cameras that are on a field and take in the information, the feed that's there, and then do the same type of automated, no labor processing, editing, posting, and tagging that our system has learned how to do better and better over the years.
Sal Daher: Excellent, excellent. To help frame this for listeners, there are these tournament sites all across the United States. There are hundreds of them. They are destinations for young people who want to become professional athletes, but they have to play at these places, and I suspect that Justin, you had your turn at a few of these places before you played college baseball, right?
Realplay Serves Mainly the 14 to 18-year-old Players Being Recruited. Younger Players Who Aspire to Be Recruited Also Forms a Significant Clientele
Justin Real: I did, yes. One of the things that we've learned is that as purpose-driven as a lot of our customers are, we have about 55%, 56% of our customers are in that recruiting, trying to get better in the 14 to 18-year-old range. It's a very easy purpose-driven sale to make. What you do on the field, you want to show to a college coach, you want to try to get better to show to a college coach, but 45% and 44% of our customers also exist beneath the age of 13. As important as it is to provide those high level, we did some work with the USA Baseball's drafts or events, and really have the top 300 players in the country in front of our cameras.
As important and easy as those are to get, the younger families, the younger parents are just as demanding for video of everything that their son or daughter does on a field as anybody else. Even though it might not necessarily be at the speeds or grace as some of the older players that have been practicing for longer, watching your child make their first diving catch and celebrate an amazing moment with their teammate can be worth every penny that you pay for it, no matter what the price.
Our price just happens to be affordable and, in a way, where that's not going to be a drag or require a special type of moment for it to happen, but rather everything, from the first ground ball you feel to the last home run, you hit.
“When they're watching the kid playing in the tournament venue, they can just enjoy the game instead of being there with the camera, taking a video...”
Sal Daher: Well, actually it allows parents to be more in the moment, so to speak. When they're watching the kid playing in the tournament venue, they can just enjoy the game instead of being there with the camera, taking a video and then spending countless, countless hours of trying to find where the kid played, and where that great hit came in. Was it the third game, was it the fourth game? All of that is done with machine vision. You have an algorithm that picks that up.
It is, I think, from when I interviewed you, you were still very much dependent on your own cameras. This is an innovation; you are now camera agnostic. You're basically taking the cameras that are installed and you have abstracted yourself to basically being a layer that sits on top of the hardware that's on the site. What you do is you provide a software platform to understand what's on the videos, which is really a very valuable thing.
Justin Real: Very much so. We do still have sites and we're happy to provide our own cameras because we know that they're the best, we're not camera manufacturers, but we do stick cameras inside of protective housing in a way that you might not have thought to if you didn't already have them. Yes, the reality of the market is that we are not the first ones to invent video as a product.
What we are here to do is to perfect and improve the way that that experience takes place for the end customer and for the businesses that run these events and facilities. We needed to make sure that our cameras weren't going to prohibit us from expanding nor did we want to eliminate anybody that already had cameras as a potential customer. In that approach, we wanted to make sure that really the slogan is, every play and every player and we could add to that now, every field because there is no field we haven't prepared for.
Sal Daher: Every field.
Justin Real: There are definitely groups out there that have some pretty, impressive infrastructure and there's groups out there that have no idea how to run a video system in the first place. We want to be able to provide software and the ability to generate revenue and products from what they do on the field into a video space that allows anybody to enjoy it the way that we believe most of these customers are trying to do.
The Impact of the Angel Invest Boston Podcast in Connecting Justin Real and Launchpad
Sal Daher: Excellent. Excellent. You can provide the camera, but if the site has its own camera, you can use their camera, their existing system. That is tremendous. Shortly after the interview, I made an investment in the company. They are backed by the Launchpad. Actually, today on the day that we're recording, this is the day that we launched an interview with Erik Bullen. We've been talking about Realplay and about your advisory relationship with Erik. It was very interesting because he started angel investing because he was listening to the podcast.
Justin Real: Erik and I have that in common. I think I might have said this on the last one and I've told you this a few times, but it's worth repeating, I think. For any budding entrepreneurs out there, the feeling I had and where I was, was back walking through the campus of the Babson, where I was getting my MBA and trying to start this business, all at the same time and listening to this podcast about all these angel investors in the Boston area.
Then this guy Sal Daher and these other two fellows, Christopher Mirabile and Ham Lord, we're talking about people that were using technology to democratize solutions to problems that would expand market opportunities while being able to drive more profitability for companies that were really just not novel but built for scale. I was sitting there screaming into my headphones, and no one would listen to me that I thought I was mad.
A couple of months later, I think, built up enough understanding of what was out there to get in front of Launchpad and talk with Christopher. Since then, it's been the best relationship that we've had from an investment group across the board. I think that the reason I had faith that it would be that way. It goes back to listening to this and Erik.
Erik’s somebody that also saw us well before Launchpad did and was just on for a very long time, and could not promote having good advisors.
Erik Bullen Was an Early Believer in Realplay Sports
People who understand and are willing to be a sounding board, to get into the foxhole and grind with you a little bit when you need it. It really is-- It's something to go from being a one-man or one-woman show and believing in this. Then to have other people buy-in, like Erik, who you trust. You understand that they've been through it. They have the experience to know from what and getting him on board was, I think, probably one of the first steps that we took towards really going from an idea to a company,
Sal Daher: It's very gratifying to support founders creating these new companies that are going to create a lot of value. As it happens, Realplay is probably one of the last few companies that I invested in. It's not just a life sciences company. Because at that time, I kind of switched just to focus the life sciences. I can't resist going back because founders are so compelling. I have to go back.
One of the things I wanted to talk to you about is what happened during COVID. When we last left the story, COVID was just beginning and we had all these illusions that COVID was going to be a few months and that it was going to be gone, everything is going to go back to normal. So, tell us your COVID story, Justin Real of Realplay.
Justin Real: The story goes, the initial stages were definitely much like everybody's very abrupt but I think ours has a particular sense of up and down to it. The first big Realplay expansion was supposed to happen in 2020. There's a lot of different ways that we are now where we want it to be at the end of that 2020 season, but just never got a chance to go there.
2020 Was Supposed to Be a Big Growth Year for Realplay, Then COVID Hit
At the beginning of 2020, the goal was to find some new customers, expand into different states. We had this group out in Arizona that was going to do a 30-field, 700-team just epic, giant tournament that was going to be a real kickoff to the year. Full disclosure, we were bootstrapping a whole host of things like our sales and marketing and some of the operations together in ways that were concerning, if you wanted to put a real measure to it.
The whole team, everybody that we had was out in Arizona. We had found an office space where we could put our processors. We really fought with the local government to be able to do the business that we wanted to because a lot of this was on public fields. We were finally in a place where we had the funding, the marketing, the sales, the equipment ready to go. The first event was March 13th.
Sal Daher: Oh no.
Justin Real: If you can call back to that time, and being in Arizona, we saw MLB Spring Training shut down on March 12th.
Sal Daher: That was terrible. I had a very traumatic experience as well. Because my younger daughter, her wedding was scheduled for March 28th and that was a very painful experience. The poor thing. She never had a wedding reception. She ended up on, like March 24th eloping with benefit of clergy. She and her fiancé went off to the church and they got married, and they have not had a wedding reception since. Imagine that. So please continue.
The Big March 13th Event in Arizona that Never Happened
Justin Real: Yes, on March 14th, me and Rachel and Brandon and Justin and Matt, Kevin was out there too. We all just broke everything down. We had probably a full moving truck's worth of equipment that we had to break down in a day. Got that all to FedEx, shifted off. Probably went for the last time you could ever go to a Topgolf and celebrated a little bit and then came back and it was hunkering season.
That was it that we thought-- We had this tearful goodbye everybody at the airport, we didn't know what was going to happen next and it was a really bad time to be both trying to pursue growth while also being in the business of people gathering together and in the first few months it was really hard.
Sal Daher: That's your team that was there and you had to break down all the equipment that you brought for this event in Arizona and head back, not knowing if anybody was going to have a job, or the company's going to survive something like this happening depending on live events, what's the chance that you're going to survive. If you're somebody who's recording tournaments, please continue.
Justin Real: Yes. As corny as it sounds and I'll expect my royalty check from MLB [Major League Baseball] anytime soon, or maybe a Chevy, I remember. One of the compelling older videos that we were going back to is the James Earl Jones beats from Field of Dreams, which ironically is a group that's now also building a multi-field complex out in Iowa. The idea of baseball being able to continue and baseball and softball, being something that's at the heart of the country and as soon as we come back, we'll be ready.
Potential Partners Began to Reach Out During COVID to Explore Collaborations
That's what kept us somewhat around for those first few months. Then two things happened which was surprising, but also really encouraging and gave us hope to keep on pushing. The first and probably the most effective was, we started getting outreach not just from new customers, but also some very, really impressive industry partners. Ball tracking data, people that had been involved with MLB and drafts in every school imaginable we were working with, folks in the registration and payments platform, and they were all sitting around with equal time on their hands and wanted to see if we could integrate, find ways to pilot and partner, and develop products together, that we probably would not have had a chance to otherwise.
Sal Daher: For those who know even less about sports than I do, MLB is Major League Baseball.
Justin Real: Apologies.
Sal Daher: Yes.
Justin Real: MLB is Major League Baseball, if-
Sal Daher: I know just enough to know that it's major league baseball.
Justin Real: If anybody wants to sound all fancy, the sports equivalent of Attorneys General is making sure you don't say the MLB, you just say MLB because that's how the insiders say it.
Sal Daher: Okay.
Justin Real: In this space, the sports world, and baseball and softball specifically, watching what the ball does, understanding the speed, the spin, the movement, those are all things that we've been seeing with our eyes for the past 150 years. There's finally now ways to measure and track and quantify all those things that are happening. To be able to bring the video technology that we have and the ball tracking data and player data together in one place really set us off on a trajectory that we definitely intended to go down but didn't think it would happen within the first year of our existence.
We figured we'd need to establish ourselves. We'd need to make enough waves to merit those types of conversations but because of the downtime, we really were able to foster relationships that had tremendous benefit.
Sal Daher: These were not players in the space that had thriving business going on at that time, but they were people who heard about you and said, "I wonder if we couldn't connect your system to what we're doing to keep track of ball speed, keep track of all these other statistics and then interpret that and, and enrich the information that's provided on the videos?" Basically, you used the downtime from COVID to create a richer product offering. Is it correct to say that, with more depth?
Connections Made During COVID Led to a Much Richer and Diverse Product Offering that Made Realplay More Compelling to Users
Justin Real: A lot more depth, a lot more variability for what you can do with it, a lot more credibility. The early-stage part of who we were was negated by our flexibility in a time where being small was a benefit. We could move quickly and try things that most established companies couldn't and our dev team, to their credit was phenomenal. We had a host of different challenges and hurdles to overcome that we had never put on our roadmap, that these integrations brought into the light. Having this increased product, having a new way of talking with customers allowed us not only the product side to mature and get just a stronger foothold, but also the way in which we converse with our customers.
Understanding where the needs are, where the pain points are in manners that we just hadn't been able to. We have a lot of credit to give to our partners to opening doors for us, we have a lot of lessons learned both from their products and ours. Without that, I don't know if we would maintain the hope and the optimism required to get through such a challenging time. It was still, we were out there operating in August of 2020, believe it or not, and getting out on planes, and out to events was startling.
How Realplay Stayed Alive in 2020
Sal Daher: There were events going on August of 2020?
Justin Real: Very small regions of the country that were really focused on trying to get kids outside and have different restrictions. One of the things mentally that [me] and the team had to really deal with was, we'd go out to one of our partners out in the Midwest, and you're there. You see this environment that's different than what you're used to back here in Massachusetts and to get this sense of normalcy a little bit.
Sal Daher: You were lucky that you're in a federation of states which have different jurisdictions, different rules, different climates, different population density, all the different situations. Being a small player, you could pick and choose, where there were places where the tournament sites were open, you could target those. Also, I think you were lucky that you had just finished the raise, right? Right before COVID struck.
Justin Real: We were right in the middle of it. Outside of the challenge of operating, which was its own can of worms, trying to raise money for a business that required people to gather together was-- [chuckles]
Sal Daher: Oh, my gosh, so you were raising during that period?
Justin Real: We were trying desperately to. We needed to keep the lights on. I got to give all the credit in the world to the PPP one and two loans and Rachel Bullard, who was our finance lead really brought us to a point, where for the first time a tiny company like ours, and we had operated in 2019 at a pretty high level. We were able to bring in significant amount of capital that we could work with and allowed us the type of flexibility in the shorter time to really go and explore like you're saying, where those small and effective opportunities could be.
Sal Daher: I must say that the PPP loans when I heard about them, when I heard that they'd been passed, I said, "Probably going to come after the whole crunch's gone." But they didn't. It was like, the crisis started in March. We got our checks in late April, early May. I want to think April-- I remember I had these tax bills to pay for my buildings, my apartment buildings, that's my business, I [unintelligible 00:23:14] apartment buildings, and it was really tight.
Buildings provide a cash flow. My partner and I live from buildings. All of a sudden, we were looking at putting money in there just to keep the buildings afloat and that PPP loan came in, just in time to help us pay the bill we had to the municipalities and to keep the lights on. Anyway, your approach was, take the PPP loans, continue with the raise. Were you able to continue raising during the beginning of the lockdown?
Justin Real: Yes. What we did is instead of going and seeking a priced round, we just kept a convertible note open. That allowed us to go and find the people that are willing to support us. It's the same note terms that you came in on way back before the pandemic is what we just ended up keeping open for almost two full years, and continued extending and building and amending and getting everybody's buy-in.
When you pair that with the PPP loans, we were able to make an investment in the technology, so that we could really go and attempt something in 2021. Now 2020 was about as-- 2019 was a good first year and a good first step for us, but it wasn't very bootstrapped. It was a lot of hard work and productivity that we put to use and learnings. 2020 was supposed to be this next iteration, and it was not. It was me and Rachel and a couple of other people out there. We were really hands-on, moving as much as we could by ourselves because we couldn't get other people involved.
Sal Daher: You took the PPP loan, you enriched your product offerings. What are these vendors that you connected with? Are you free to mention their names?
Rapsodo Now Provides Pitch and Ball Tracking on Realplay
Justin Real: Yes, the first and the biggest was a company called Rapsodo. They helped provide a [a] whole host of different value for us. They are a preeminent pitch and ball tracking system and they were looking to explore breaking into new markets. They worked with us to develop [a] in-game product, which was not traditionally what they'd done. They'd done a lot of training and in facility or practice work. We worked with the company Playbook 365 that does tournament registrations and general player management.
We worked and are developing some new relationships now with bat trackers. People that can put a sensor into a bat or a baseball or softball and we can move data that way. We also worked with different types of hosts. We were working primarily on the tournament gameplay side but starting to work with showcases and college camps that host prospect camps and give players an opportunity to be in front of colleges. It was not necessarily something we intended to do but allowed us the opportunity to go and explore what that portable product and version of our product could be.
The PPP really did-- It allowed us to breathe which I think is something you rarely get in this startup world. There's a lot of just terrible things that happen because of this pandemic and none of it is good and I wish it never did happen. I will say that because of the downtime though, we were granted a gift of being able to stop and catch breath in a way that the season goes, the way that the product and sales cycle go in this world.
We're in it now, we don't really have a lot of downtime and we don't have the opportunity to take a minute to think about what to do next. That doesn't also come with well we're three weeks behind on trying to deploy or we have a product development deadline that we have to hit. Being able to sit back we weren't in control. It was okay that we weren't in control and to take a moment to breathe. I think as scary as it was, was a really important and necessary regrouping that we were able to take away from it.
Sal Daher: Let's continue with the narrative arc, so 2020 was PPP, going to places that were still open, deepening the product offering with various partners that you mentioned, and then so what happened in 21, 2021.
In 2021, Realplay Still Managed to Grow Despite All the Uncertainties
Justin Real: 2021 is when we really hit our stride. We still very much were suffering from the outcomes of COVID. If you know about this world, you'll know that everybody makes their travel plans for the summer in those early months of winter maybe all the way up through April. Thinking back to 2021, we had just gotten the idea of vaccines out there. We didn't really know and we saw a real diminished market but a market that was coming back.
We jokingly said something to the extent of it turns out getting your kids outside for two and a half hours has a lot of value to parents after keeping them indoor for long periods of time. [Sal laughs knowingly.] We took advantage of that where we could. There's also a lot of grandparents that couldn't get to go and see their kids or their grandkids play, so there was more adoption at the places that we went to again having the extra capital to go and focus on product development, sales marketing allowed us to be more effective.
Sal Daher: When you said adoption, does that mean that you were providing a way for grandparents who could not be in person there to see what was going on with their grandkids in the tournament events?
Justin Real: We now offer live streaming but we didn't in '21. What we mean by adoption is the amount of players or families of players that end up purchasing the product in our opt-in scenarios. We have certain events and a business model that has variability to it, but in some situations our prices are baked into the event where you show up and just as part of showing up, you're going to get a Realplay account and all the videos that come with it. In others where you can choose to purchase the videos after the fact, and those purchases went up pretty impressively so.
Sal Daher: Oh wow. I can imagine. That's the grandparents, so they went up purchasing the videos for the grandparents to see, not just the potential recruiters or whatever scouts.
Justin Real: Exactly. On the one side the you made our marketing day and it's really is one of our best marketing tools especially for the younger parents but we say, we have a card that we hand out says, "Keep your phone in your pocket, we got you covered." That was especially true when you could only have one parent, maybe in the stands and the more that we could stand-in for parents, the parents saw the value of being able to walk away with video of what happened on the field.
Combine that with the added depth that came from having ball tracking and being able to understand that we really did hit an adoption level and a stride that proved we are very much on the cusp of breaking out. We have a business model and a technology that's ready for scale. We didn't get to really test the scale of it last year because we weren't really in growth mode. This year we really have the chance to. That's what we staring down the barrel of right now. There’s excitement and tension and joy and terror, pretty baked into all that.
Realplay Expects 2022 to Set a Record for Growth in Revenues
I believe this whole role of startup CEO is supposed to be filled with that constantly. We have a lot that I think we accelerated because we had that downtime, because we had the ability to stop and think and try some things in a much smaller and lower-stakes world where I don't know if we have the freedom to fail in the same way that we did in 2020. 2021 was good for us. Really established us in a way that we needed to be established. '22 is going to be our biggest growth year ever and going and rather than focusing on, "Will there be baseball?" We got to focus on how do you go and get customers in bunches? What do you do in order to streamline your production and your operation? The regular problems that any early-stage company should be worried about and turns out that we needed that time.
Sal Daher: You're going to come at it because right now you're going to be drinking from a fire hose because every single person who's been cooped up for two years in the spring is planning to be at the tournament event this summer. You guys are going to have a lot, a lot of business.
Justin Real: It is a remarkable truth that I am eternally grateful for, but baseball and softball and the sports, the kids, whether it's the vaccine or fatigue, I don't exactly know what the answer is, but they are back and they are back with a passion and we are here to serve all of them.
Sal Daher: Awesome. It's so great to see this. We were blessed in a way that our grandkids didn't suffer that much from COVID, actually. My seven-year-old grandson and my four-year-old granddaughter became actually pretty good friends and they play with each other now and they interact much better after COVID than before. Both of them certainly suffered from not being able to go out and all kinds of restrictions and so forth. They’re so happy. The day that they didn't have to wear a mask at school anymore, they were so happy. I think as we approach the summer of '22, it's going to be a time of very, very intense activity at Realplay.
Justin Real: That's the hope. Me and my fiancé welcomed two new nephews into the world. One, February of 2020, and the other, this just past February of '22. it's crazy to think that little Leo, he is a little bit past two now doesn't remember a time before masks and doesn't remember a world that this wasn't a part of it. It’s not something that I think to totally put behind us and not ever speak of again, but what we've learned from the business side, I think let's just be as straightforward business folks as we can. The adoption of Zoom and video conferencing and the willingness for people to participate in that I think is going to accelerate the speed that business grows at across the board.
The need for the in-person meeting is always going to be more impactful than the Zoom meeting without question but the willingness to accept that as a viable step beforehand, I think is a real difference-maker. One that I hope allows people to have conversations that might not otherwise be able to have, allows people to pursue conversations or relationships or partnerships. Even in little half-hour snippets, you get a lot from those over Zoom in a way that you couldn't. That’s, I think, why we were so lucky to get with those additional partners and people that helped us get to that pilot level was because we could meet and we could see each other in a way and brainstorm.
Jason Real Makes the Point that Zoom Lowers the Cost of Taking a Meeting with Someone and thus Makes People More Willing to Take Meetings
Sal Daher: Tremendous. That is an interesting observation. That the fast-hit Zoom meeting removes the friction of you taking a call from someone that you may not know very well, lowers the hurdle to make a connection. Absolutely. Minus the travel time, you know, if it's a zoom session that's scheduled for 15 minutes, it's very clear people observe that really well. Like Mitt Romney when he was Governor of Massachusetts, he had this, I thought it was pretty cool trick, that he had 15-minute meetings. Everybody who came to you didn't have our meetings. It was just 15- minute meetings.
An assistant would come in and be taking notes to do the follow up to the 15 minutes, so that Mitt Romney never spent more than 15 minutes with anybody and the follow-ups were done by the staff person who was there. This is a little bit like the Mitt Romney thing and if you can do it in terms of putting on your Calendly and having like a 15-minute meeting, maybe it gets filled up. Maybe they can't get a meeting with you for a month, but in a month and a half, maybe they can spend 15 minutes with you, where they can have a chance to make a difference.
Like Andy Warhol “...we'll all be famous for 15 minutes...”, well maybe we can all be in someone else's consciousness for 15 minutes.
Justin, where is it that Realplay is right now and where is it that you would like things to be going and how can we help? What kind of resources could be useful for you at this point?
Justin Real: Well, appreciate that and anybody that is interested in a very much growing sports technology, video technology, machine learning, and AI driven company, please feel free to reach out to me or anybody that you know that's associated to the company. On the investor side, again, I can't go far without thanking our board and names like Barry Kaufman, Alex Beletsky, Jerome Taylor, who's a Professor at Babson saw me back when I was an MBA baby and all the way through till now.
Christopher Mirabile, Raza Shaikh, Alex Brown and these are all names of people that without whom I just would not have been able to make it through the pandemic. We wouldn't have been able to really hone and use the experience sounding board, so anybody that knows them and they're interested in reaching out to Realplay. They'll be happy to be conduits for you.
Realplay’s Current Challenge Is Stepping Up to the Expected Tripling of Business in 2023
In terms of what is next for us we have a huge amount on our plate for this year. And we triple that in 2023. The goal for this year was like I said to try to really prove our business development chops and we did that almost too well. There are customers and clients that we're having to tell to wait until 2023 because they're just too big and we don't want to serve them poorly and it's a good problem to have, but a problem nonetheless. The fundraising is back on and we got to do our thing to make sure that we can get to that level in 2023 and beyond.
What's nice though is that unlike any time before I feel very confident in tracking the trajectory and basing that in reality. There's no shortage of investors and podcasts and people who will tell you that your Excel sheet that you put together in your early stages is worth about as much as the mouse that you use to click through it on. I think that for us, being able to base our projections, base our expectation in what we've done, in what we know, is the type of confidence fuel, rocket fuel, what have you, that unlocks something different that and how you're driven by hope and optimism in the past. Now you're driven by righteousness and belief in a way that's been proven and there might not be a lot of more dangerous places to be than trying to stop an entrepreneur who's been proven right about product market fit and the opportunity to serve that market and that market itself.
Sal Daher: Don’t stand in front of him or her.
Justin Real: I’ve seen it. God, there's so many great companies coming out of Boston and the relentlessness that comes with being able to know you're not just making it up, not to say that we ever were just making it up but we didn't know nearly as much as we know.
Sal Daher: There's a little bit of reality distortion that always goes on. In memory of Steve jobs, his Reality Distortion Field, you are creating something that doesn't exist and you are therefore distorting reality. You're, you're disturbing reality because you're bringing into existence something that’s never existed before. Something that's entirely new and so there's a lot of belief that has to go into that and suspension of disbelief. That is tremendous.
Peter Thiel’s Advice on Follow-On Investments
It's funny because it brings to mind Peter Thiel, advising investing in early stage and he says, "I don't like to do follow-on checks, especially those checks to kind rescue the business. if I invest in a business and it's not going gangbusters, I don't write further checks. The one exception that I make for writing further checks is when they're growing and they need capital to keep growing. His example was Facebook came to them said, "We need to buy more servers because we got so many people using our service." He was an early investor in Facebook. We need so many people using our service that were crashing all the time.
AWS wasn't fully developed at that time, it was before... People were just stacking servers on top of each other to provide the Facebook service and he wrote further checks. That was when he made an exception, and it paid off handsomely. So fueling the growth. Not that there's risk, there's risk when a company doesn't grow and there's risk when a company is growing gangbusters but it's a great opportunity.
Justin Real: There's, I think a lot of early-stage folks, and I'll admit to being as guilty of this as anybody but "All we need is capital, and we're on our way," is pretty easy phrase to put out there, and to really know that and to know your numbers, know your balance sheet, understand what is your cost driver, what is your revenue driver? What are the things that you can do that you've done in the past?
In a world where you are trying to distort reality and create faith in you and in this product, and something that has no followers behind it when you started. Seeing the little miracle, seeing the little things that happen that prove your point that prove that it was worth putting that time and that's the most powerful evidence and part of this whole thing.
I think why people probably get addicted to this early-stage world a little bit is because you get to see your faith rewarded in such a clear, it-wasn't-before-and-now-it-is a type of way that I don't know if there's a lot of opportunities outside of science and discovery that allow for that type of belief, then evidence to be generated.
What you do after that, and how you grow past the early stages is a whole other set of challenges and takes a whole different approach to it but there is something that I think we'll miss and hopefully, we'll always try to keep it around as the product grows as the product changes where we always look for rewarding the faith and proving that faith in what we do is more than just company culture.
It needs to be inherent in everybody that is a member of Realplay, I think it is held by every board member and every investor that we have is this set of belief in the crazy and impossible that we say we can do because we say so. To be able to reward that and that'll keep it going.
I have...our newest board member, John Clark, great guy, he is over at the Fenway sports group, knows a thing or two about running some very successful sports agencies and occasionally he has to shake me up a little bit and say, "Listen, validation is worth about as much as the paper that is on and you have to stop just focusing on validation, we got to start putting numbers down to things."
At first, I thought that that's like, "Okay, man, you're jaded, you don't understand this early-stage stuff. You don't get how important it is for this guy to say that we're on to something." On the flip side, to be able to actually put numbers down with validation, to validate more than just the product is good, to validate that you can make a business out of it is so much more powerful and it's much more for our confidence, our ability to grow our ability to pitch that I really do believe that being able to do the business in every way, is the most powerful fuel and motivator you'll ever get. That's not something that I think I totally had in mind when we got started.
Sal Daher: That's a great thought. Justin Real founder of Realplay, reinventing sports videos, any closing thoughts for our audience of founders, angel investors; do they come to mind?
Parting Thoughts from Justin Real, Founder of Realplay Sports: Gratitude + Watch Out for That Curveball
Justin Real: First, every investor and anybody that's listening to this that's involved with Realplay, I don't get enough time to say thank you and be appreciative of the people that are out there. I do know that a good amount of the Launchpad and other investment groups that have investors or investments in Realplay do listen to this. Just want to take the time to thank them where we can because without that type of support and backing, we don't get to this point.
Really, I think for anybody that's out there, if the pandemic has taught us anything is that nothing is stable, nothing is subject to being permanent. Everything is going to change at all times. To expect that at some point, whether it's at your earliest age, at your latest stage, that you aren't going to need to be able to adjust, that you're not going to need to be thinking about risk management, that you don't have to figure out how to ward off competitors, or new security risks that you never thought that you had to deal with, or supply chain issues. Always be ready for the next thing to come. I think maybe one of the mistakes that people make thinking about what achieving success looks like, when it comes to starting a business looks a lot like retirement, where you're just letting it run and not really letting anything else be a part of this.
This is a full contact sport that requires your head on a swivel at all times and be ready for it because the most established players in the world got knocked pretty good when this whole thing came around. They had to be adjusting, they had to be nimble and if you're not ready for a long, long life and career of that type of insanity, then you're probably going to end up as another story of somebody that got two-thirds of the way through and then either someone took it over for you or you realized it wasn't for you.
If you get into this, knowing that the fastball is comin’, and you see a curveball every other pitch, if you know that there's always going to be a variation, if you know that every assumption that you have is going to get questioned, turned around and thrown back at your face, I think that there's a level of enjoying the ride that might come from this that I hope to be able to impart or to give people faith that they can. Every challenge is challenging, every hurdle is incredibly high. You have to get your legs up above it, and rarely is there anybody else that's going to come and do it for you. That's the job. It's a privilege, it's a challenge, it's a lot of fun, it's a lot of sleepless nights, and none of it is really found in most other places, so take advantage of it while you can.
Sal Daher: Well said. Justin Real founder of Realplay. Thanks a lot for being back on the podcast to tell us your COVID story. I look forward to hearing further reports after the tremendous summer season of 2022. Best wishes to you and have a great time.
Justin Real: I really appreciate the opportunity Sal and we'll get you out there on the field. We'll get some video of you someday soon. Its exactly what [unintelligible 00:47:45] on that legendary swing [unintelligible 00:47:49].
Sal Daher: Oh geez. Low expectations please. Awesome, Justin. Stay well. This is Angel Invest Boston. I'm Sal Daher.
Sal Daher: I'm glad you were able to join us. Our engineer is Raul Rosa, our theme was composed by John McKusick, our graphic design is by Katharine Woodward-Maynard. Our host is coached by Grace Daher.