From SportXast to Athlete Channel
Aspiring athletes will soon have a social media channel where they can easily and rapidly post short video of their best performances in games for access by coaches, college recruiters and others.
It’s called the Athlete Channel, created by SportXast after participating in the ABQid business accelerator last fall.
The company developed and launched an app in June 2014 that lets anyone instantaneously capture the last eight seconds of a sporting event to allow parents, friends and others to share video clips of the best moments in a game. To date, some 5,000 users have downloaded the app for free.
In the future, the company will charge for it and seek advertising revenue, but it needs to first build a much larger user base, which can take time. So, for now, SportXast’s three founding partners have decided instead to pursue the Athlete Channel as a subscription-based website where
aspiring athletes can compile video profiles of their achievements to show recruiters, said CEO Molly Cernicek.
The company always planned to create the website, but customer feedback through ABQid convinced Cernicek and her partners to make it a priority.
“The program helped us assess the opportunities we have to make money and scale the company, and, during the process, this route became the most-obvious next step,” Cernicek said. “The Athlete Channel seemed the quickest path forward.”
SportXast is now targeting soccer, volleyball and other athlete clubs nationwide that could rapidly bring in thousands of subscription-based users.
“We’re in discussions now with a big club in the West with like 8,000 kids,” Cernicek said.
Meanwhile, ABQid also helped SportXast build a critical network of entrepreneurs and industry peers to share information and resources.
“The biggest advantage for us was to become part of a strategic network locally and nationally,” Cernicek said. “New Mexico is not like the Silicon Valley where so many startups readily learn from one another, so it was particularly helpful to expand our entrepreneurial contacts in Albuquerque and elsewhere.”