Mediaboss Marketing

Baseline Scouting

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Worlds shortest elevator pitch: Baseline Scouting is a next-generation scouting offering that combines the eye test with machine learning.

Company: Baseline Scouting

Location: New York, N.Y.

Year founded: 2021

Website/App: https://baselinescouting.com/

Funding round to date: We are self-funded/pre-seed.

Who are your investors? We have no investors yet, so we dont have any (funding) raise. We have roughly $10,000.

Are you looking for more investment? Yes.

Tell us about yourself, founder & CEO Anthony Herbert: I was born and raised in Queens, N.Y. I grew up a big basketball and track and field guy. Basketball was always something I had a passion for. Im built more for track long term, but never fell out of love with basketball. Growing up, I would always play video games, team build, draft and develop rosters and things like that. Once I finished running track in college, I still wanted to give back and help people learn things I didnt know growing up so they could develop faster. For me, its always been about development and sports aspects of it. The other half is IT. Growing up, my family joked I was always good with computers and I was the familys computers person when I was two. Once I got into high school I had a concentration in internetworking, so making networks work, computer networking, things like that. It slowly shifted to cybersecurity. When I got to college, those were my two concentrations: networking and cybersecurity. I realized the future was heading in that security direction. I went down the path, helped to found an information security club at the school and thats where my career took off. I learned about machine learning and behavioral analytics while working at Securonix, the leading company for SIEM and user-entity behavior analytics and data indexing and search. Taking both of those things, I was sitting in the living room one day and thinking of what I can do with these things. I have this passion for basketball and sports development and I have all this knowledge. I asked myself: What sets LeBron apart? What sets Magic Johnson apart from every other 6-7, 6-10 person that can jump? They do the right thing and they do it 9.5 times out of 10. When you think about doing the right thing and what that entails, thats behavioral. Thats when things started to click because I was like, I know how to look at it and analyze that it. That really spearheaded the company.

Who are your co-founders/partners? My co-founder is Erick Garcia. He is a best friend from middle school and very basketball oriented. He loves a lot of sports, but baseball and basketball are his two biggest sports loves. Hes not from a tech background, but is very much into New York sports culture. In working on this, we realized he has the knack for scouting. He takes so much initiative when it comes to learning what to scout. He is crucial in helping develop what we look for, how we develop our proprietary statistics and is our chief scout and co-founder. We are partnering with Zinn Sports Groups Sandy Zinn. Hes instrumental in consulting and advising us, basically saying, I believe in what you have, but you have to put it in a way that you can demonstrate what you are doing. We had a concept and semi-idea of what our product would be, and now we have a full-fledged product, social media presence and were doing more things. Thats where he stands out, his industry knowledge and connections and ability to level with us about what we need to do.

How does your platform work? The platforms name is War Room. It is the portal in which we give teams, agents and other end users the ability to see our scouting results but also have access to our data. Thats the two biggest things to say when were selling it to them. Not only are we selling our scouting metrics and results and these player profiles, but were also giving you all this data you can use to say, Hey, this is a different way of how they are looking at things but in the same vein, they are looking at it in an inclusive way for people who just believe eyes. I need to look at video, I can tell you whats good, but then theres a newer wave of, No, I need analytics. We need these advanced metrics and things of that nature. Its subscription-based, giving them access to the platform that meshes everything together for a comprehensive and next-generational picture of scouting. Were currently doing basketball but the plan is to expand pretty soon into other sports. Basketball is our bread and butter and root.

What problem is your company solving? Were solving a few problems. The biggest one is that sports scouting, as a whole, has this level of uncertainty that from time to time rears its head. It goes beyond taking someone at the top of the draft that doesnt pan out. Its also missing out at the end of the draft. Were about being able to quickly and better than everyone else identify where the value is at all levels of the draft, but also making sure teams are getting the biggest return on their value by doing so. The average career for most athletes in most sports lasts four to five years. You have to find that value to have sustained success. Last but not least, these last five years its been really uncertain things all over the place with the pandemic, inflation, things of that nature, so how do you make it so it stands the test of time? Maybe you dont have the resources to get to somewhere in person or to scour tape for hours. We have a system and company resources to do that and aid a team.

What does your product cost and who is your target customer? Our target customers are teams. We also are looking for agents, so anyone who has a value in regards to scouting and these amateur or international pros that havent been to the league yet. The cost for a subscription of one year is $1.5 million and $2 million for two years.

How are you marketing your product? Were doing a few things. Since were going business to business, its not just the traditional path of going on social media, trying to draw as many people as possible. We are still using social media as a visual store to say, These are various samples, bits and pieces of what we are doing, to show you this is what we look at. These are some of our results. Feeding these different tidbits to draw interest from those teams and at least have them asking questions like, How did you arrive at this conclusion, while making it visually appealing and easy to digest. A lot of our marketing is direct contact and sponsored marketing. Doing email, sending out newsletters, direct contact and working relationships on professional platforms such as LinkedIn, and things like that.

How do you scale, and what is your targeted level of growth? Thats the beautiful thing. What we implemented here as a base is very easy to manage. Scaling is just outward scaling. If you need more scouts or support, its adding those individuals in. I dont think you need a ton, considering your customer base, if you look at it, is third entities in basketball. As you go into other sports, youll get more and more, but really you need to support them from any questions or anything they have. Its easy scaling for our platform that is easy to manage and is pretty self sustainable. For our growth, especially with any first round of funding we get, we want to make sure we expand from the legal side and add more people for marketing, media and, of course, a couple more scouts. If we could double our staff size that would be ideal. That will probably sustain us for quite some time.

Who are your competitors, and what makes you different? Thats another beautiful part because theres not a lot of competitors. I was beating myself up trying to figure out who our competitor is. In this space, you have people who are doing half of what we do. There are independent sport scouting agencies, consulting agreements and things of that nature being hired by teams and assisting in-house scouts. From a technology perspective, we have a lot of companies doing video analysis and things like that, like SportVu, AutoStats, NetScouts. None are doing video scouting and analysis and producing results. They are doing two of those at max. Thats what sets us apart, were giving you a holistic solution that is plug and play as well because we have what we value and what we think, but the way the model works is say you have anything you feel should be weighed more than others. We can easily tune that to your needs based on your understanding. Say the organization has their own proprietary metrics or something like that. As long as it's data or something that can be quantified, we can plug that in and factor it in. That separates us from everyone else.

Whats the unfair advantage that separates your company? Its the proprietary aspect of it. We figured out some metrics from a scouting perspective, the visual scouting, being able to generate those metrics, and putting those into our proprietary algorithm. Also, one of our proprietary metrics weve created based off of research and historical context is potential. The potential rating is based on what prospects are capable of doing and some other historical analysis, which when added up produces their potential score. Its our proprietary statistics and analysis that is the unfair advantage we have.

Baseline Scouting

What milestone have you recently hit or will soon hit? Were doing a lot of network building. It has expanded very much. Were connected with a bunch of the teams, if not all of the teams in some aspect at this point. Through our partnership network, were starting to connect with other companies. Weve had talks with other companies on that. Thats the biggest milestone, actually having a network that our name is in and starting to get well known. With our newsletters and things we are sending out, were starting to get the ears and the eyes of some of these organizations. The final thing before we really start making money is to get in the rooms and start having these conversations with these teams and I think were on the cusp of that with our latest information shares and demonstrations.

What are the values that are core to your brand? Our core value is and I learned this from other companies is a family-oriented type of company. A lot of people that work with us are through previous relationships, actual familiar relationships and once you bring in someone like our partner Zinn Sports Group and they have someone that is reputable and they bring them in, its all something that is very self-built and close-knit. Because of that, we work very well together. Ive seen that in other workplaces. You want to keep and maintain it. I would also say simplicity. A lot of things with technology that deal with AI and machine learning and you start getting in-depth with that, you start to lose the simplicity of everything. Things start to get convoluted and you start to lose the goal.

What does success ultimately look like for your company? Success for us would be one of two things. Being the go-to product for all teams in any given league we sell it in, thats the ultimate success to me. When youre in a league, competition is king and money talks. If someone were ultimately to buy it out and absorb us into an organization and we have a role there, that would be a success as well. Ultimately, it would be optioning, which is to be in-house for all the teams in the league.

What should investors or customers know about you the person, your life experiences that shows they can believe in you? Its being knowledgeable in both areas of what we are selling. From an IT perspective, Ive been in the cybersecurity world for more than a decade. Ive done customer service. So not only do I know how to walk the talk, I know how to talk the talk and make sure were actually solving problems and putting out a product that does something when you say it and ultimately assist with the goal of making someone successful. From my roots, I do very much value what being an inner-city New York kid, and really inner-city anywhere, but I can speak very fondly of New York and the experience of what it means to be somewhere gritty and understand when you make it out of somewhere and have those values, you can do anything you set your mind to. My goal is to provide you with service and product thats going to do right by you, and make sure you know we are going to work closely to help us grow and the company grow as well.

What makes your analytics and scouting better than the competitors? One thing is the base of what we do. A lot of people have these technologies and means for the pro game. When it comes to the amateur level and outside of the pro game, there is a big gap in what people are doing, so that takes time, resources and money. We have that out there. Were already doing that and figured out that simplistic way to do it and weve boiled down whats meaningful. When I talk about whats meaningful, people will scout every game and be like, He dropped 30 points in this game. Im like, Well, that doesnt mean anything because its not translatable. Anything weve done, weve done the research, worked through our algorithms, means and methods to say were doing meaningful, translatable actions as our goal. Thats going to set us apart because weve already done that work and gone through that and a lot of these others dont care to go that deep into this level or are looking at something very niche or narrow like player movement. Thats great from understanding by a biomechanical aspect and stuff like that, but thats not getting into the game that shifts so rapidly. Our platform is dynamic and able to adapt with that stuff.

Originally posted here:
Baseline Scouting's B2B system for teams combines the eye test ... - Sports Business Journal