Titans: The Rise of “Just Play” with Founder Austin Barone

Inside the Episode

“There’s going to be things that take time. One of my college coaches, one that actually recruited me to Kansas he said ‘everything that’s good in life happens over a long period of time all at once’, and it’s the idea that you work your ass off, keep your head down, you stay focused and eventually, when you come up for air, you look back and you’re like, ‘wow, we’ve grown a ton.’ I think that has been a really core belief in everything that we do. We are always refining the platform, trying to make it simpler, easier, more intuitive, more expansive to the needs that coaches have.” – Austin Barone

Chapters

0:00 Revolutionizing Coaching Software

3:41 Starting Tech Company, Following True Passion

10:09 Winning and Risks in Business Growth

19:00 Building a Unique Sports Platform

25:07 Elite Brand and Pricing Strategy

28:06 Vision and Innovation in Sports Tech

36:55 Best Investment

Transcript

Austin Barone: 0:00

There’s going to be things that take time. One of my college coaches, one that actually recruited me to Kansas he said ‘everything that’s good in life happens over a long period of time all at once’, and it’s the idea that you work your ass off, keep your head down, you stay focused and eventually, when you come up for air, you look back and you’re like, ‘wow, we’ve grown a ton.’ I think that that has been a really core belief in everything that we do. We are always refining the platform, trying to make it simpler, easier, more intuitive, more expansive to the needs that coaches have.

Dan: 0:41

Welcome to Titans. A special series here at Slappin’ Glass exploring the stories, key decisions and innovations of the best companies in basketball and beyond for pushing the game to new heights for coaches, players and fans. Today we’re excited to welcome Austin Barone, founder of Just Play, the all-in-one software solution that’s helping coaches create, share and analyze content with their players and staff faster and easier than ever before. From his beginnings as a kicker for Kansas football to the early years of growing the product piece by piece, today’s episode dives into how Barone has helped fix a major problem for coaches and why so many programs from the NBA, college basketball and beyond are using Just Play. Please enjoy our conversation with Austin Barone. Before developing one of the best software products on the market for coaches and athletes, austin Barone was a kicker for Kansas football and, as was most common at the time, was given thick playbook finders to lug around to meetings and practice containing all relevant plays, formations and more. It’s here during that time where the seeds of Just Play are planted, as Barone began dreaming of a different, more modern way to help players learn and coaches keep program materials organized.

Austin Barone: 2:09

I played college football at Kansas from 12 to 15, and specialists do not do a ton in practice. I’ll just be straight up about that. We’ve got way too much time on our hands and honestly, like I think one of the things that we saw or I had time to think about, I guess was the concept of the way that guys learn was changing. I had an NFL style head coach. Our defensive coordinator was Dave Campo. He was the Super Bowl winning coach Cowboys there’s a lot of generation change between us and coach and they gave us really big binders to start the season. Three-inch binders was your standard playbook, and then every week you had your gamebook and that was 100 pages in and of itself. And so you think about the way that they learn is fundamentally different than the way that we learn, and I say we as an athlete at that time, like we’re going to school, we’re seeing devices and laptops and iPads and everything basically be transmitted over that device. It kind of just didn’t really make sense that the devices that the athletes were on on a daily basis were not what was being used in the athletic space, and so it was kind of one of those things where I think some of the coaches just kind of placated it and we’re like, yeah, you should run with it. It is kind of what it is. But we really did. We just started iterating on the product and iterating on the product and eight years later we’re either too dumb to realize how hard the hurdles were to get over or, you know, we’re pretty confident that anything anybody throws out as we’re able to handle with a high degree of care and execute at a high level.

Dan: 3:41

You said you started to work on the product and at this point you’re in college. How did you actually do that? What in your background allowed you to take this idea and then start putting together what’s now become a very complex tech company?

Austin Barone: 3:53

I think the biggest thing is, honestly, the desire to ask questions. You know, admittedly my background was accounting and finding I did not have the technical wherewithal to build a tech product. I’m not on our tech team, I have not coded one thing in my life but I was able to find a partner who had been in tech for nine years he worked at Sony on their web design team for a really long time and we just kind of started with step one and we started to ask questions of coaches and how they put all of this content together and ultimately that’s where we felt like we saw the biggest opportunity because, you know, starting in football, their workflow is spread across multiple platforms, primarily Microsoft, visio, word, powerpoint, and trying to consolidate all of that into one environment. That one is collaborative for the staff, so there’s not one person that is dependent on to basically make any changes, and also that that one person isn’t tied to the office until 2.30 in the morning to try to get work done for a 6.30 meeting the next day. And then you start to look at, you know, some of the other products that are in the space that these teams are using and they’re primarily like video streaming or video distribution platforms like Catapult and Huddle or DVSport or some of the others that are in the space, and it’s primarily just how do I get video from our local server to the athlete on their device? And what we found is that athletes learn differently. So you know, problem one is how do we get coaches to collaborate more effectively? And really we started with that problem and then ultimately, if we executed there, we could basically provide a better learning product for the athlete that then benefits the coaching staff. And you know, all that work really just started with being intellectually curious and asking questions and asking why people do things and what they need and what they’re looking for and the way their brain works. For us, that’s probably one of the biggest strengths that we have is that we are intellectually curious and we genuinely care about understanding how our consumers brain works so that we can then optimize a platform that’s best suited for them but, you know, maybe also best suited for everyone else.

Patrick: 6:11

When you answer that first question and asking what coaches are doing, what they’re using, identifying the inefficiencies in their workflow, to me it sounds like then the next step, when you start to put the tech, it’s not a big jump, but you’re committing more. What was the next milestone that drove you, that pushed you to like let’s really then start to pursue this and try to provide now the solution to the problem you’ve identified.

Austin Barone: 6:33

I think one of the biggest milestones for us, and really a key decision for me in my life personally, was I turned down a banking internship my junior year of college and to this day I’m actually still very close with the founder. I guess he was the CEO at that point. His grandfather founded the bank, but John Baum he sits on our board. I’m still very close with him to this day. But I was walking home from class and I called him out of the blue and I said hey, john, I really appreciate the offer, but I have this sports tech startup idea and, honestly, if I don’t run with it and I don’t try, 10, 20, 30 years from now, I’m always going to be asking what if and I don’t know if I can live with myself if I don’t at least try, it may fail. There’s a good chance I’m going to ask for your job when I graduate, but I need to try this for me. He respected that. He’s been incredibly valuable to me both in my personal and professional career and we’ve maintained an incredible relationship to this day. But I think going through that summer, I really committed to this idea of if I’m going to put this banking career on the backrunner. Basically and wholesale commit to this. I need to commit to it Really. During the summer I would spend my days cold calling coaches, talking to coaches, driving to see coaches and just interviewing them, asking questions, trying to understand the way they think. Ultimately, we started to hear patterns. We started to see a lot of the same challenges that they were facing and things that they were concerned with. Out of that came the ability to start to put some frameworks in place of building a product. Then, between Andy, myself and a few contract developers that we had at the time, we really started to build to show what the product would look like.

Patrick: 8:19

Nate, this is a good jumping off point In our research. You gave a commencement speech for your business school. In it you mentioned following your true passion. To me, what set out is, I think, the intentional words you used in calling it a true passion versus just a passion. I think everyone has a passion, but not everyone is going to try to pursue it to the avenues that you did. Could you just maybe elaborate or, if I’m correct, maybe I’m assuming falsely, but just what true passion means to you in pursuing a true passion?

Austin Barone: 8:47

I think the only line that I remember out of that commencement speech is I told people that they need to play with fire, and I think that when you have a true passion for something and you have the confidence in yourself to play with fire and take a risk, you should. I oftentimes will go back and speak to classes at the business school and I say you’re at a point in your life in college where there’s really not a lot of risk out there. Ultimately, you’re giving up maybe a couple nights at the hawk or a night out with friends to stay in and focus or stay in and work on something. And I’ll say this for me, my true passion has grown over the last eight years and it’s changed and it’s evolved based on what has become important in my life with this company. Early on, it was proving to ourselves that we could do this. It was trying to deliver a complete product and deliver something that coaches could find a lot of value in, and over time it grew to providing our employees with a highly stable environment to grow and be the best versions of themselves. And as we continue to grow, it’s going to be delivering an incredible product that is forward thinking for our customers and really push forward by providing genuine value and care for our coaches. One of the things that we lean on internally that we say is we want to affect winning for our clients so that they can feel the effects of winning. And feeling the effects of winning that is a wide-ranging phrase. Is that a contract extension? Is that a championship that they win? Is it security to be comfortable in the position that they’re in? There’s so many definitions of that, but we feel like it is really, really important, and something that I’m super passionate about, to make sure that all of our coaches and all of our customers and all of our partners really understand that this isn’t a nine to five for us. This isn’t a hobby. This isn’t a you know, we’ll get to it when we can. This is something that we are highly committed to, we really believe in and we’re passionate about making sure that we deliver an elite platform.

Dan: 10:59

Austin. The other thing in that speech I believe you talked about was calculated risks and this kind of time in the history of Just Play, as we’re kind of moving through the timeline. You’re in your 20s and you’re giving up internship opportunities to start a company, then you’re also growing a company and you’re making all these decisions in your 20s and I’m sure you’re dealing with people that have been doing business for a long time and all that. What have you learned? And what did you learn about calculated risks? Which ones to spend time worrying about, which ones? Not All those things as you’ve built Just Play.

Austin Barone: 11:31

That’s an incredible question, I think. For me, the one thing that I’ve learned first and foremost is we are invested in the long game and we are very okay with investing now for return later. We talk about this quite a bit on staff. You know, when you first start out you’re a poor startup that’s basically in your garage and you’re trying to make yourself seem a lot bigger. So people believe in kind of what you got going on, but the reality of it is you’re very poor and you’re just trying to make it. And the thing that we used to talk about a lot was if we put a dollar in on Monday at 8am, we want to try to get a dollar and a half out by Monday at 5. And the concept of focusing our time on things that are going to produce right away was really a key decision for us. And then, as the company has grown, we started to realize well, you know, maybe if we put a dollar in on Monday at 8am, maybe we can get two and a half dollars out by Friday. It’s this concept of being able to invest in relationships, invest in activities and not try to find instant gratification or instant reward from that, but understand that there’s going to be things that take time. One of my college coaches one that actually recruited me to Kansas he said everything that’s good in life happens over a long period of time all at once, and it’s the idea that you work your ass off, keep your heads down, you stay focused and eventually, when you come up for error, you look back and you’re like, wow, we’ve grown a ton. And I think that that has been a really core belief in everything that we do, because you can make easy decisions and live with the consequences of what some of those might be later on in life. Or you can make hard decisions and have a little bit easier path because you know that you’ve set things up the right way, and that’s sort of what we try to lean on.

Dan: 13:18

Austin moving now as we’re continuing to grow here. I know you and I talked off here a little bit about there was some small victories early on. Where you really excited about stuff, I think it leaves in 2015,. Is it the AFCA conference? You had a couple of signups and you were at that conference and things like that. Another thing, though, you had mentioned was the decision to focus on basketball as another sport to offer. You had started, I believe, with football Obviously that’s what you were in and then moving to basketball. I know you’re expanding more and more sports now, but can you talk about that move into basketball, what that has meant to just play?

Austin Barone: 13:53

So that story is really a good one, because I think a lot of times there’s people that cross your path in life and they see something that maybe you don’t see and they bring into your attention and they believe in you or what you’re doing and they try to push you in higher directions. And I was a teaching assistant with one of the basketball players at Kansas and he saw what we were doing for football and he was like you guys have got to go into basketball. There’s really nothing in the space Coach gives us a binder that’s this thick. It’s the same story that I just talked to football about, but now it’s a new sport and honestly, I was hesitant. I mean, I was a 21-year-old going through football and school and trying to figure it all out and you have an opportunity with a top five team in the country and you don’t want to mess that up because you may only get one of those shots, and so we were pretty hesitant about whether or not to do it and he kept pushing me through the semester. Finally, he actually set up a meeting with the video coordinator and a couple other people on staff and I said I don’t even know what you want me to present. We don’t have a basketball product. And he said just present the football product and just show them what you’re doing and we can go from there. So we did and they loved it. They got the value right away. Being able to teach athletes in this era is changing really fast and they saw it as a major advantage for them, with the talent that they’re bringing in, to get those players up to speed more quickly. And so that next season we ran a pilot with KU Men’s Basketball and I think, if you look back at the product journey alone, there’s all of these instances of coaches who say can you do this? Can you do this? We struggle with this, can you add this in? And by no means am I saying that we want to do everything, but the things that make sense that we can do, that are tangentially aligned to the value prop that we provide, we want to try to tackle, and basketball in this case was kind of the first example of that and you’ll see that throughout our journey across multiple sports. But the decision really ultimately rooted in the fact that the same challenges that we were trying to solve in football were starting to surface, at least to us, in other sports and basketball just happened to kind of be the first one, and we were fortunate to have a program like the University of Kansas to jump off with.

Patrick: 16:19

Austin. I’d like to ask about managing stress and, like Dan alluded to, you’re starting to have other football programs use your product. You’re jumping into a different sport. It’s a pilot season. You’re kind of beta testing it. Now you’re starting to grow outside of Kansas. How do you manage stress? How do you put out fires? How do you deal with it yourself?

Austin Barone: 16:38

I think, at the end of the day, managing stress is all about managing expectations and early on in our career we did not do a great enough job of managing expectations because, frankly, the coaching industry is really hard and coaches want things yesterday that they need in five minutes and they’re not always the best at giving you a runway or giving you time to be able to react to those things. And you may have one coach that needs something here, but then you have seven others that need this over here and I think that managing those expectations and communicating those expectations appropriately has been a really key iteration in our growth and it’s helped me manage stress on my end, both personally and professionally because, for example, my wife knew what she was signing up for. She knew that this is kind of the direction that my life was going to take and we had that conversation and it was a really key piece for us because it allowed us to grow closer and know our kind of our boundaries. My grandfather will always be one of the most influential people in my life and there’s a lot of times that he talks about the 51% and basically what that means is in their household, with him and my grandmother, there’s things that he’s the CEO of and there’s things that she’s the CEO of, and managing those balances is a really key piece to it. So I think, for me, stress management just ultimately boils down to managing expectations, understanding the deadlines and the things that need to get done, and being able to sleep at night knowing that I’m not going to be able to get everything done every day that I need to do.

Dan: 18:11

I’d like to ask about competition. As you’re building the company now and as you’re in these, you know, formative years, there’s obviously some competitors in the market that have been around for a while and, as you’re coming up, I know always for the entrepreneur’s journey the question of whether to build a better mousetrap versus differentiate and build something completely different. How have you thought about that as you’ve built JustPlay, in relation to the competition in the market and what you all do and how you build it?

Austin Barone: 18:40

It’s a great question. I think the hard thing about sports tech, it’s a relatively small market. If you look at the greater tech landscape, we’re not a Facebook, we’re not a Twitter, we’re not Instagram, we’re not an Oracle or any of these massive tech companies that exist. So the market’s pretty small, and with that there’s some industry players that have been around for a while. But If you really dig into it, everybody has their own niche, their own thing that they do really well, and so for us, at least initially, it was how can we do the thing that we want to do, the problem that we want to solve, how can we do it at an extremely elite level? Because it doesn’t exist. And then, as we go into specific sports, you start to realize that there’s maybe some industry players or some industry occupiers that have a really good foundational client base in that market, but they don’t have that same thing in another market, and so for us it’s a pretty big challenge, because we feel like we’re interacting with competition or certain companies in various markets, but in one market they might be an ally, in one market it might be a choice that the customer ends up having to make between us and somebody else, and so, at the end of the day, our answer is we see ourselves being unique in the space. We really do believe that the value that we provide, the destination that we have in mind, of what the customer can get out of it, we really don’t think that anybody else in the market can deliver on. So with that, we try to look for industry players that can help us get to that destination, but also maybe we can help them get to their destination. And the reality of this market is there’s so many players that interact with the same customer that we do that it just doesn’t make sense to not integrate with those products because we all take different parts of the value chain. You look at our video editing space. You have Cinergy, sportscode, catapult, dvsport, all of these other companies that own the video editing or the replay space and their side. Well, we’re not ever going to get into video editing or replay. There’s all these other companies that did that but video is a key component of our platform. So if we can work with those companies to provide a better ultimate experience for our customer, that’s a win. If we can deliver value and make life easier for our customer. The revenue side of things and the competition side of things will always sort itself out, but ultimately it comes down to what’s in the best interest to the customer.

Dan: 21:09

How did you and how are you trying to grow, Because you’re in the NBA now. You’re all over the place. What was that like?

Austin Barone: 21:15

Our growth strategy has always been going to individual teams. There’s a lot of people that want us to try to approach athletic departments and we will, because we have multi-sport but ultimately, coaches are going to be the ones that decide what workflow they use, and an AD is going to say, well, if I’m hiring you to be our head coach, you’re ultimately going to decide what you want to do to produce the best product on the field that you can court rank, whatever it might be. So for us, I think trying to deliver for the customer is always going to be that answer, and there was a key decision that we had to make early in our career on the basketball front. We had a competitor that was bundling their products with the product that we could ultimately replace with the product that we didn’t have. We had a board meeting, we had our board there, we had a couple of people from our staff there and we basically had to make the decision do we keep our head down, continue to deliver the value that we have, or do we shift gears and basically try to compete in this other space that we really hadn’t spent a bunch of time? Ultimately, we decided that it was in the best interest of our long-term strategy to try to build that product and honestly, I think that we’ve done so at an extremely high level. As you navigate corporate strategy, you have to tip your cap to other companies in the space as they do things, much like coaches tip their caps to other coaches. You run a great set to get you a dunk or wide open three like you have to tip your cap to people and I think the onus ends up then coming back to the leadership to decide how you react to that, and I’ve really been pleased with how we’ve reacted to that, how we built that product. The product in question is our recruiting coordinator product, which helps coaches manage just the year-round recruiting demands everything from certified event schedules to high school schedules, to their recruit database, call lists, the transfer portal. All of that can be managed now through our recruiting platform. That it’s all tied into the rest of the product where coaches can teach, scout and then do deep dives into analytics, and so that product ultimately gave us the confidence to continue to build out the necessary things that coaches use to ultimately get us to the point that we feel like we can confidently say that we’re trying to consolidate the platforms that elite teams utilize to teach, Scout, recruit and do research or dive into analytics. I think you have to tip your cap to everybody in the space. We think competition is an incredible thing for the market. It helps push everybody and choices are ultimately good in the market.

Patrick: 23:48

When ultimately making that decision, when you were faced with the other company and if you should react to them or keep your head down, what were the key factors that made you guys feel like, okay, let’s I don’t know pivot’s the right word but let us react and work on this other product?

Austin Barone: 24:04

It ultimately comes down to customer support, and what I mean by that is to our customers support us diving into this. You know what does that customer support look like? Well, we had one person on our staff at that point who had been a recruiting coordinator at the college level, so we had relatively limited experience into what managing a database of recruits, managing your schedules, managing this process looked like. So do we have customers that we could lean on, to form round tables to understand and learn and ask all those questions that we did the first time that we got into building a product? Then the next thing is okay, what are we giving up from a development resource if we move into this? Is that juice worth the squeeze? And it just boiled down to and we execute on it? Do we have the stakeholders that are invested in helping us make this successful and willing to give us the necessary feedback, willing to use it and break it and tell us what’s wrong and help us fix it, build it up from there? I think, as we continue to grow, there’s going to be a lot of bright, shiny objects that flash their eyes to us, and maybe we chase those, but maybe we don’t. We haven’t rolled out a new sport, since we rolled out look cross in twenty eighteen, and there’s a reason for that. We want to dive deeper into the sports that we’re in until we feel confident that we can roll out that next sport with the same degree of care and effectiveness that we have the others. We want to be an elite brand, we want to be an elite product and if, all of a sudden, you go from one sport to ten sports, how does the market react to that? Do you think you’re just rinsing, repeating something you did over here? Well, hockey is extremely different than basketball. Are there things that are similar? Absolutely, but if you go and talk to coaches, they’re gonna say that the games itself are very, very different. So we wanna make sure that when we roll something out, it’s really, really solid.

Dan: 26:02

Awesome. I love to ask you about something, pat and I have fun chatting about all the time is what the price things and how to come about to cost and this might be a little bit in here with the competition and looking at what competitors, all that how do you come up with the cost structure of things and how do you make decisions on what, the pricing based off of the level and the bundles and all those things? What goes into that?

Austin Barone: 26:25

There’s a lot of analysis that goes into it, from what their spend is, what their budget is, what their comfort and spending is. But I think it also goes to what’s going on the market. What are people paying for other solutions that they have? What’s their budget look like? For us, we chase price early in our career and I think it hurt us a little bit in some cases because we wanna win, because we have an elite product and people buy our value and the value that we can generate for them. We don’t wanna win because we cost less than what they’re currently doing. Is that a reason that some buy? Absolutely, there’s gonna be times were more expensive than the competition is gonna be. Times were less expensive than the competition is gonna be Times that it’s probably a brawl the dice is the one it is. But however that decision is sorted out, we want it to be done because they believe in the value, they believe in the company, believe in the people and, at the end of the day, if you believe in those three things, the money will figure itself out in the wash. And I think there’s something to be said about leading with the goal being to genuinely provide value, and you know if you get a deal, great. If you don’t, that’s okay too. We’re gonna be in the space a long time. Maybe today is not the day you become a just play client, but hopefully you’ve had a good enough experience with the product that sometime in the future you will be.

Patrick: 27:47

What is elite mean to you? We heard a lot elite or high performance. I just think you think about these things. I don’t think you just throw it out there to throw it out there. So I would just love to hear, in the broad sense, what elite means to you and your company I think elite to me boils down to having a laser focus and high passion for delivering.

Austin Barone: 28:06

When you talk about elite athletes, they have A very narrow vision on the goal that they’re trying to accomplish. For us, we have an elite vision of where our company wants to go and there’s steps involved in that. You can’t skip steps and be an elite athlete. You can’t skip steps and be an elite program. You can’t skip steps and be an elite company. When you commit to doing the daily things that you need in order to reach your full potential, that’s what I think ultimately provides the elite status and for us, it’s just ingrained in our culture that we’re gonna do those little things. We’ve got a bunch of people on the road right now. They’re going in there stopping to see coaches, there’s stopping to see current class that are under contract for four years. But those little things are important because we want to make sure that they’re not just buying but they’re using and they’re maximizing and they’re diving into the product and we’re solving the challenges that they have, because the other thing that we run into is you may have a veteran roster one year but then you have a really inexperienced roster another. Well, your challenges as a staff are going to change completely, based off of the experience level of your roster. So how do we help coaches better manage that and optimize the use of the platform to solve the needs that they’re going to experience on both sides?

Dan: 29:28

I’d love to ask about the future, innovations, things that you’re all thinking about and what you can maybe talk about and other things you’re working on that maybe you don’t, which is fine, but just how you think about. We’ve gone through some of the key decisions and things like that in the history, but going forward, the goals, the hopes of things over these next couple of years as you continue to grow.

Austin Barone: 29:49

One of the things that I think is really key to us is we genuinely believe that we are a tech company that works in sports, rather than a sports company that works in tech. Despite the fact that we have 20 plus people on our staff that either played or coached at the division one level, tech is a major component of what we do. Being a software company, I think that that was driven home to us. One of our board members that we’ve been really fortunate enough to lean on throughout the last eight years is a guy named Brian McClendon. May not mean anything to you, but I would almost guarantee you you’ve used something that he built a long time ago. Google Earth was the product that his company became. He created a company called Keyhole. If you zoom into the center of Google Earth, it’s his metal broke apartment in Lawrence, kansas, and he’s a Kansas grad that loves basketball and loves sports. I got connected to him early in the process. He made it very clear to us that technology investment is a really critical thing if you’re going to be in the software space. You can’t just build something, roll it out, have a bunch of users and then sit stagnant like your greatest protection in the space is going to be continued innovation. For us, that continued innovation is a key cornerstone of what we do. We are always refining the platform, trying to make it simpler, easier, more intuitive, more expansive to the needs that coaches have. For us, there’s really three big things that we want to focus on. One is integrations. Are there key players in the space? Are there key workflow bottlenecks that essentially, are created because two things don’t work together? How can we simplify that process for our customer? The next is the player experience. These athletes have to have an elite experience. Coaches are being challenged more and more, especially with the craziness of the transfer portal, to get players up to speed faster. You don’t have three years to develop an athlete anymore. You may have three to six months before you’ve got to have them performing at a high level because they’ve only got one year left. Or maybe they only have two years left, but you took a flyer on them and you need them to perform this year. The third component of that is keeping our eye on other problems that coaches have that they won’t solve, one that just came up out of nowhere. I think this is a little bit of a testament to the creativity that our customers have with the product. We had the Sports Illustrated article about how Jerome Tang used it to interview with. That’s just one example of probably 100, where somebody had used our platform, maybe not necessarily in a way that we intended, but when you build a product that is really high quality, that has a ton of flexibility, it opens up a lot of new doors. One of the things that we released during COVID was what we call group sessions. It’s basically the idea of okay, we’re all going to jump on a Zoom, but rather than me sharing my screen and going through all the content, the diagrams, the notes, the video, what we’re going to do is we’re going to jump on the JustPlay app and you’re going to be able to join my session With that. You’re going to have bufferless video. Because of the way that we’ve built that feature Roll out to 2023,. The Zoom meetings internally are not necessarily happening near as much, but people are having a bunch of recruiting meetings where they have to show video, style play video. They’re cramming a ton of these meetings into short time and they’re running into issues, the same issues that they experienced before. They’re experiencing now, and maybe it’s not just style play, but maybe it’s a recruiting video or it’s a facilities video, and so later this summer we’re going to roll out the concept of public group session and basically, if I’m presenting coach, I open my app, I can start a public session. If I’m speaking at a clinic, I can put a QR code that somebody can scan and they can get right into my presentation. So as I navigate my presentation anywhere in the world, somebody who has been authorized to join that session can get in and see bufferless video, a very clean presentation, and they can see the diagrams, the notes, the video, the images, the scouting reports all that stuff in one consolidated area. So we’re really excited about the release of that.

Patrick: 33:58

Austin. I’d like to follow up on continuing to innovate or look at the player experience with your product. I mean, maybe it’s a good kind of full circle moment to what, eventually, what started this company and their experience with information and how they learn. How does today’s athlete learn and are you noticing any current trends or kind of movement and how they’re shifting, how they’re learning?

Austin Barone: 34:20

It’s a great question. I think it’s one that we’re always continuing to learn and iterate from, but I think today’s athlete learns visually. They also learn in a variety of ways. Some need diagrams, some need animated diagrams to see a move, some want to read about it and read the notes, some want video. Being able to house all of that in one space that is also easy for them to use and convenient is a really key piece in the puzzle. I tell this story all the time, but, whether we like it or not, we live in a convenience world. If it’s easy, people do it. If it’s not easy, people won’t do it. It’s as simple as that. And so how can we continue to make the platform easier and easier for players to get in, access the content they need? Have it be short bits of information? I mean, during COVID, we had teams that were doing 45-minute screen recordings of videos and posting that, and we kind of had to meet with them and say, guys, that’s not how these athletes learn. The data shows you’re going to lose their attention, maybe even five to seven minutes into that video if you’re not careful. And so how can we take all of the components of what you put together in a 45-minute video, but maybe we splice it up into 10 shorter videos that the athlete can jump to on their own time. And I think the concept of athletes being able to learn on their own time and their own atmosphere, where you’re kind of meeting the athlete on their terms as opposed to forcing the athletes to come onto your terms, is a really big factor in our success as well, because it’s going to continue to change and if we keep our eye on it and help coaches navigate it, it’s going to be a big piece to the puzzle because, kind of like the old days in Confuse Line, as I get older, they say the same age. These athletes are 18 and they’re leaving at 22. At the college game, that is what it is, and coaches are getting one year older every single year. So how can we continue to deliver valuable insight to those coaches to make those decisions on how they prepare?

Dan: 36:19

Awesome, this has been awesome. Thank you for going through everything today. We’ve really enjoyed hearing everything about just playing the history of it, and so thank you for making the time to talk with us today. We’ve got one final question for you, and that question is what’s the best investment that you’ve made in your career?

Austin Barone: 36:37

It’s a really good question. I think you know, when I look at the investment that I’ve made in my life over the last eight to 10 years and going back to the commencement speech of playing with fire and following your passion and, you know, trusting yourself and believing in yourself to make the decisions that ultimately write your own path and your own story, there’s a really unique story for me. My sophomore year of high school, I made the decision to transfer from Lawrence, kansas, to Pittsburgh, kansas. I don’t want to say I was in a rut, but I was at a small private school, didn’t have a lot of diversity, didn’t, you know, get to, I guess, like the full learning experience that I ultimately wanted. And my grandparents were really really big on private school education. They didn’t want me driving to Kansas City and my parents didn’t want me driving to Kansas City either, which is about a 45 minute commute for a 16 year old. For somebody who’s going to be active in sports, that’s just a recipe for disaster. And so the spring, going into my sophomore year, I went down to visit my grandparents and, unbeknownst to my parents, I went and I toured a couple of schools that were down in Pittsburgh and got to visit, got to meet with the couple of people on the staff and it was incredible. It was an awesome experience. So I have divorced parents. Making the decision to transfer lean partially into being able to live with my grandparents. You know, I think one of the coolest things, at least in my grandparents, says you know, for the first time in my life I had one bedroom and that’s kind of a crazy like rewarding thing. But you know, when you have divorced parents you have two houses and that means you know you leave your shingards at mom’s house. You know you got practice an hour. Not dad has to go to mom’s house. You shingard and go to practice. Like it’s just creates a an interesting dynamic that adds more stress to a child’s life. And when I had the opportunity to go tour and I kind of fell in love with the school, I came home I wrote my parents a contract and I said here are the things that I’m going to agree to. I’m going to have a really high GPA, I’m going to participate in sports, I’m going to participate in the community. I put this down. I did not execute this as well as I wanted to, but I said that I would come home twice a month and my parents were very nervous about it. I think my dad was a little bit more okay with it than my mom was. It was my dad’s parents, so that kind of makes sense. But you know, ultimately I kind of said like, guys, this is what I’m doing, I need this for me. I hope you can understand. And that investment was really key in my life because my grandfather was an executive at Southwestern Bell before they got acquired by 18c. I got to go and I got to spend three incredible years living with him, learning from him, being around my grandparents. It was so incredible for my own development. But it also got me out of Lawrence and I was really big on going to school somewhere that I did not go to high school. So had I not made that move, I would not have played football, I would not have gone to Kansas, I would not have had the idea to start just play and I wouldn’t be talking to you guys here today. So when I lean on the most impactful decision, it was trusting myself to take a step, to take a leap of faith, to move away from everything that I knew was comfortable, live with my grandparents, still be relatively comfortable and take on a new challenge.