RallyMe
United States
2012 - 2026
Business: Sport-focused Crowdfunding Startup
Business Stage: Ideation to Market to Acquisition
Industry: Sport Tech
Challenges: Product creation, fundraising, GTM strategy and execution, growth, acquisition
1. Assess
It’s 2009 and I’m having a hard time raising money for an independent documentary about the niche sport of ski jumping when my agent of my last film (Edge of Never) told me about a new model for raising money online: crowdfunding. What would later become mainstream with companies like Kickstarter and GoFundMe, crowdfunding was limited to a Los Angelos-based startup called IndieGoGo. Kerig looked at the platform but decided the vibe was wrong, but the idea seemed right. Working with multi-talented colleague (Salt Lake’s Whitney Childers) they built a very simple site to raise money for his film. The idea worked and later, while making the film, he noticed the demeaning and inefficient methods that the film’s athletes were subjected to. Where, he wondered, was a crowdfunding solution for athletes?
Context
In 2010 the Aspen Institute reported that the greatest barrier to kids participating in sport was money; kids were quitting sports due to a lack of relatively small amounts of money. At the time, I was also coaching youth hockey and saw this disturbing trend firsthand. I was getting teary calls from parents who, though their kids were loving playing hockey, were going to have to leave the team. Why? Becuase they just couldn’t afford it. How much are we talking, I remember saying to one single mom. Five hundred dollars. And her kid LOVED to play hockey. We quietly passed the hat and collected enough to keep the kid playing, but how sustainable was that? And the thought I changing a kid’s life for the better for a mere $500? What an ROI!
Product & Problem
Now it’s 2011 and we’d won the Banff Film Festival (a big deal in mountain culture) with the ski jumping film and as soon as it sold, I began architecting a rudimentary framework for a crowdfunding platform dedicated to youth and amateur sports. The idea was simple: give athletes and their families the tools and training to raise money online so they could achieve their often-expensive athletic goals. The business model was straightforward—we would charge a nominal 5% fee on every dollar raised through the platform. Now, we just had to raise enough money to build and launch a minimum viable product.
Proposed Solution
2. Shift
It may be tech, but it all starts with the right people. Re-enlisting the key members of our film production team, marketing savant Whitney Childers and my ever-stable film-producing partner and lawyer, Scott Zeller, we began brainstorming the new crowdfunding project. Adding former Kickstarter developer Tim Ruppert, who I met in a men’s league hockey locker room, we had a core team that would give anyone confidence.
The platform was designed to be intuitive and effective. A classic marketplace product, it provided a platform to display and explain its campaign, collected money from Boosters and distributed it to Ralliers. We worked hard to make it simple and clear, but we didn’t stop there. We offered step-by-step in-person and online guidance to help athletes craft compelling fundraising campaigns. Unlike the general crowdfunding platforms that would come later, we tailored RallyMe specifically to the sports community, ensuring features and taxonomy aligned with the unique needs of athletes. And our team provided much more than customer service; in some cases they pretty much managed the campaigns.
Team & Product
From the beginning, we knew that branding would be crucial. We built RallyMe around the concept of empowerment and passion, ensuring that athletes felt they were part of something bigger them themselves. We also drew on the nostalgia of classic sports brands and tried to give it a subtle tech twist. The brand bible was thorough and simple, every choice focusing on highlighting trust and teamwork in our technology product.
In the beginning, we asked ourselves one question: What can our little team be the best in the world at? The answer, we CAN create the best crowdfunding platform for athletes in the world. Though many potential investors and advisors urged us to expand into other areas of fundraising, we all agreed that we only focus on sport. Though there was certainly financial merit in other approaches, we appreciated the clarity and energy that just focusing on something that we had the ability to be the best in the world brought.
Branding & Positioning
Raising money for startups is never easy, but our mission (helping families and kids be able to afford to play sports) made it easy to at least get the meetings. Then the hard work began. First I had to educate people on crowdfunding and how it worked (remember, GoFundMe didn’t yet exist) then I had to help people understand the good that keeping kids in sports would do. Some meetings were pretty short; it’s amazing how many people actually HATE sports, but I found plenty of them. But the great thing about the world of sport is that we all like to play together. After the first few investors signed on, we quickly had a solid bench behind us.
Thanks to my background in skiing, I knew that high-level skiers with Olympic aspirations faced massive financial challenges long before ever vying for podiums. This was an area where I knew we could help, and we proved it. In our very first effort, we raised $23,000 for world champion ski jumper Lindsey Van. With our proof of concept in the bag, we pitched a partnership to the then-Executive Director of the U.S. Ski Team (now called U.S. Ski & Snowboard) and found our first major organizational partner. This partnership allowed us to launch with real credibility and confidence.
Prove It & Fund It
3. Scale
It's now 2013 and RallyMe is growing exponentially. In Year 1, with one partnership, we raised less than $1 million for athletes and their families. By the end of Year 2, we had 17 partnerships and were raising more than $5 million for athletes. Experiencing 100% year-over-year growth, we kept creating more flywheels of growth by creating more partnerships. Athletes got the money they needed, organizations benefitted by the goodwill of putting an invaluable tool in the hands of their athletes (and letting them use their trademarks on their fundraising campaigns) and RallyMe was thriving. From 2013-2016 we would repeat this partnership process 50 more times.
Process
As dozens of skiers and their families began rallies on RallyMe, we focused on creating win-win partnerships with other sports organizations that athletes and their families already trusted. These included national governing bodies (USA Cycling, USA Hockey, US Rowing, etc.), registration platforms (SportsNgin), as well as clubs, leagues, and teams.
Partnerships
As RallyMe continued to gain traction with media stories in USA Today, a plug on the Steven Colbert show, and some blockbuster tweets from high-level influencer-athletes. Now we needed to scale even faster to beat competition that hadn’t existed three years before. For that we needed institutional funds. I shifted my focus to fundraising, targeting venture capital firms and super-angels who understood the intersection of sports and technology. There was interest from some good potential backers, but as we were on the cusp of taking one such deal, something unexpected happened.
Promotion
RallyMe’s registration platform partner, SportsNgin, got acquired by NBC Sports and renamed SportsEngine. On behalf of the newly formed company, NBC Universal came calling. Four years from starting the company, after RallyMe had become the leading sports crowdfunding platform, supporting thousands of athletes across multiple disciplines, and with multi-year partnerships with 37 national governing bodies, it was in a great place, but well-funded competition was beginning to encroach and I knew we’d need to take in a big bet to play in the burgeoning big leagues. In 2018 we made the decision to sell RallyMe to NBC Universal. It was a hard decision but it was the right one.