We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Sean Leary a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Sean, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?
I had a college scholarship to one of the best universities and baseball programs in the United States, and in the blink of an eye it was gone. My education, my baseball career and my future seemed like it evaporated– but despite all of that, I found my vision and purpose.
In college I set out to build a business that would help athletes dealing with adversity create college opportunities and a better future for themselves. At the time, I had lost my college scholarship to Pepperdine University due to a University-wide recruiting violation which had impacted dozens of athletes on multiple teams. These athletes hadn’t done anything wrong, they had simply accepted a scholarship to a great school without knowledge of the school’s NCAA violation. I came from a split family and very humble upbringing. Even with my scholarship I still had to wash jerseys late at night as part of a work study program just to make ends meet. Paying for full tuition at a University like Pepperdine was out of the question. I had no choice but to leave the university I had worked my entire life to become a part of and go to Orange Coast College and work my way back to a Division 1 scholarship to pay for my education.
At OCC I met countless athletes dealing with similar adversity in pursuing an education and a career in sports. There was no platform to contact colleges without paying thousands of dollars to a recruiter. I believed I could change things by creating a social network to give athletes a free platform to take control of their destiny. I signed to play at Division 1 Oral Roberts University where I began fundraising the first $1 million to start my business.
After graduating I built version one of the Sports Thread social network and assembled a who’s who of advisors and board members including Dick O’Donnell, former VP of TIBCO, Marc Randolph, Founder of Netflix, and many others who gave guidance to scale our platform. We focused on a growth strategy of partnering with youth sports event companies to use our Software-as-a-Service to scale the usage of our social network. It was working incredibly well and the company was scaling until COVID hit. Youth sports events stopped. The company stopped producing revenue. We had to find a way forward. I secured financing to tide us through the pandemic and we doubled down on our work marketing to athletes and supporting them with online collegiate exposure. We focused on providing them an online community to replace the athletic community they lost from the stay at home order. Our focus sky rocketed our usage and catapulted us to becoming one of the top 200 Apple sports apps in the world – a ranking we have retained every month since.
We emerged from the pandemic, youth sports events and revenues resumed and we began helping our clients back to business operations. Two years later, we have over 100 clients who rely on our platform for their business growth and operations, our software is accessed by millions of people per year and we have helped over 10,000 athletes achieve a college scholarship or roster spot for free.
Sean, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
Sports Thread is solving a big issue in the industry of youth sports through our platform. Youth sports is a highly fragmented industry with a lot of disparate software solutions. Sports Thread combines a Social Network with a Software-as-a-Service platform for event organizers and an advertising platform for brands. This approach enables us to bring together athletes, coaches, teams, event providers and leading brands all in one community ecosystem and provide each group with the tools they need to achieve their goals in sports.
To date, Sports Thread’s social networking and Software-as-a-Service platform has been a key driver in the creation of over $100 million of economic impact on local communities. We have done this by providing a platform that enables youth sports event companies to market to teams, register athletes, collect payments and create brand engagement via our social network. Our company’s impact also has been far reaching as millions of athletes, parents and coaches use our platform to connect, interact, look up key information for their sporting events and teams and build their athletic brands within our networking community.
What I am most proud of is the social impact Sports Thread has on its users. We have helped over 10,000 athletes achieve college scholarships and roster spots through free networking on our platform – we have never charged a single dollar for promotion and networking with colleges. Our platform and social network empowers small businesses and clients in youth sports with the software tools they need to operate their events, produce revenues, and create economic impact in their communities. This local community impact driven by our clients using our software has given hundreds of thousands of youth athletes the opportunity to learn life skills through organized sports. To date, over 1 million messages and posts have been sent on our platform by our user base and clients for game-day communications, sending highlight reels to coaches, organizing practices, and user-to-user messaging.
When I was a college baseball player, I set out to build a business that would help serve athletes dealing with adversity in their lives to create opportunities and a better future for themselves. Years later, Sports Thread has done just that. We have created a purpose driven company that has impacted countless people and has the power to redefine an industry in terms of how software is used to communicate, market, brand, and network for individuals, and companies.
What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?
We have really successfully employed a consultative sales strategy to bring new companies to our platform. When we speak with a potential partner, our goal is to understand their business needs and current processes, then apply our technology to help them streamline their company, increase revenues and cut costs.
Once we bring a client on-board, we are very active as well in helping them successfully implement our software. We have an entire division of people at Sports Thread called Client Success Managers who help our clients to ensure we keep them happy and doing business with us.
How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?
Simply put, we treat people honestly and fairly. After years of business, we have never gone back on our word or left anyone hanging. When you do that long enough people begin to notice and you build a reputation of trust and integrity.
Contact Info:
- Website: sportsthread.info
- Instagram: seanleary1844
- Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/seanleary-1/