Latest / The Founder's Journey with Fexingo: First-Time Entrepreneurs, Failures, and Lessons Learned / How a Rejected College Project Became a 40M Sportstech Company
Transcript
- Lucas: There's a moment in every rejection story where the founder has to decide: do I take the feedback and move on, or do I build it anyway just to prove a point? Luna: And today's founder definitely chose the second path. Lucas: Mateo Silva was a senior at the University of Texas in 2019. He submitted a sports analytics project for his capstone — a platform that would help youth soccer clubs track player performance using game video and basic stats. His professor called it 'too ambitious for an undergrad' and gave him a B-minus. Luna: Ouch. A B-minus. That's the kind of grade that either crushes you or lights a fire. Lucas: For Silva, it was fire. He spent the next six months building the platform on nights and weekends while working a part-time job at a sporting goods store. By graduation, he had a working prototype he called ScoutIQ. His first customer was a local Austin soccer club with about 150 kids. Luna: And that soccer club became the seed that grew into a forty million dollar company? Lucas: It did. But not overnight, and not without a major near-death moment about eighteen months in. ScoutIQ now works with over seven hundred youth sports organizations across the U.S., covering soccer, basketball, baseball, and lacrosse. The valuation hit forty million in their Series A this past January. Luna: Alright, so let's back up. What exactly does ScoutIQ do that a coach couldn't just do with a spreadsheet and a stopwatch? Lucas: Great question. The core product is a mobile app and web platform where coaches upload game footage, and the software uses computer vision to track every player's movement — passes, shots, tackles, speed, positioning. It generates a profile for each athlete with measurable metrics. For a youth coach who's evaluating fifty kids across three teams, it saves hours of manual note-taking. Luna: So it's like a simplified version of what pro teams use, but priced for a club that might have a few thousand dollars in annual budget. Lucas: Exactly. And that was Silva's insight. The pro analytics market is saturated — companies like Hudl and Catapult dominate. But youth sports was essentially underserved. Most clubs still rely on coaches' gut feelings and maybe a clipboard. Silva saw a gap. Luna: But the professor called it 'too ambitious'. What was actually too ambitious about it? Lucas: Silva told me the project proposal included computer vision processing on consumer-grade footage. In 2019, that was genuinely hard to do well. His professor didn't think an undergrad could build a reliable system. And honestly, Silva admitted the first version was pretty rough — it would misidentify players in similar jerseys, and the motion tracking lagged. Luna: So the rejection wasn't wrong, it was just premature. Lucas: Right. The professor was right about the difficulty. What he didn't account for was that Silva would keep iterating. By late 2020, the accuracy improved dramatically because Silva switched from a custom model to using Google's PoseNet as a base and then fine-tuning it on sports footage. That cut development time by months. Luna: Let's talk about the near-death moment. You mentioned eighteen months in? Lucas: Yeah, 2021. ScoutIQ had about forty clubs paying a monthly subscription of two hundred dollars. Total annual revenue around ninety-six thousand. Not bad for a side project. But Silva quit his part-time job to go full time, and he hired two part-time engineers. Burn rate was about twelve thousand a month. Cash runway was down to four months. Luna: That's tight. What happened? Lucas: He realized the subscription model was wrong. Clubs with small rosters — say thirty kids — were paying the same two hundred dollars as clubs with two hundred kids. The smaller clubs felt overcharged and churned. The larger clubs felt they should get a discount for volume. Neither was happy. Luna: So he switched to a per-athlete fee. Lucas: Exactly. Five dollars per athlete per season. That meant a club with thirty kids paid a hundred fifty dollars, and a club with two hundred paid a thousand. Instant fairness. Churn dropped from eighteen percent to four percent within two quarters. And revenue actually grew because the larger clubs started adding more athletes to the platform. Luna: That's a classic pricing pivot. But you said 'near-death' — was the cash runway that critical? Lucas: He had about six weeks of cash left when the switch started showing results. He was literally having conversations with friends about borrowing money to make payroll. The pivot saved the company. Luna: I love that the solution was simpler than a subscription. Not every business needs recurring revenue if the unit economics work differently. Lucas: Right. And that's a lesson a lot of founders learn too late. They default to SaaS because that's what investors like, but sometimes a transactional model aligns better with how customers actually use the product. Luna: So after the pivot, growth accelerated. How did they go from forty clubs to over seven hundred in about four years? Lucas: Two channels. First, grassroots: Silva went to youth soccer tournaments, set up a tablet, showed coaches how it worked on the spot. He'd offer a free trial for one tournament. Coaches saw the reports and word spread. Second, partnerships with leagues: ScoutIQ signed deals with two regional youth soccer leagues — one in Texas and one in California — making the platform the official scouting tool for all their clubs. That gave them hundreds of clubs overnight. Luna: And the forty million valuation — who led the Series A? Lucas: A sports-focused VC called Pitchside Ventures, along with a few angel investors who are former pro athletes. The round was twelve million. Silva retains about sixty percent ownership. Luna: Not bad for a B-minus project. Lucas: Not bad at all. And here's a detail I really liked — after the funding, Silva sent his old professor a ScoutIQ subscription for free. He included a note saying, 'Thanks for the B-minus.' The professor wrote back that he was proud, and that he now uses ScoutIQ to evaluate his own son's soccer team. Luna: That's a full-circle moment. But it also raises a bigger question: how many good ideas get killed by early feedback from people who aren't the customer? Lucas: That's the thread we've been pulling through this whole series. The professor was evaluating an academic project, not a business. He had no obligation to think about market fit. Silva's mistake would have been treating that feedback as the final word. Luna: And he didn't. He kept building for the actual users — coaches and clubs. That's the right filter. Lucas: One thing that struck me in the interview was Silva's willingness to talk about the early technical failures. He showed me a video from 2020 where the system tagged a referee as a player and assigned him a speed score. He laughed about it, but he also kept that video as a reminder that perfection isn't the goal — improvement is. Luna: So what's next for ScoutIQ? They have soccer and basketball covered. Where does the growth come from? Lucas: They're launching into baseball and softball this fall, and Silva mentioned they're working on a feature that uses historical data to project a player's likely development trajectory — basically, if a twelve-year-old has certain metrics, what's the probability they'll be a varsity-level player by sixteen. That's the kind of tool that could change how recruiting works at the high school level. Luna: That feels like a natural extension of the product. And it's exactly the kind of thing that professor said was 'too ambitious' — now it's becoming real. Lucas: Exactly. The ambition wasn't the problem. The timing and execution were what needed to mature. Luna: You know, one thing that really stuck with me from your interview is how Silva talked about the early days when he was still working at the sporting goods store. He said that during slow shifts, he'd pull out his laptop and code features. His manager thought he was wasting time, but that's where the first version of the computer vision pipeline came together. Lucas: Yeah, I love that image. He was literally building a forty million dollar company on the clock at a retail job. And that's the kind of resourcefulness that can't be taught. It's also why we do this show — because these stories remind us that the line between 'side project' and 'real business' is thinner than people think. Luna: And speaking of side projects and real businesses — we should be honest about how this show itself works. A handful of listeners chip in monthly through buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo, and that is literally what funds making this many episodes. No ads, no sponsors, just people who find value in the conversations. Lucas: Yeah, it's a small group, but it keeps the whole thing independent. If these stories have moved your work forward in some small way, that link is there. No pressure, ever. But we thought you should know. Luna: Alright, back to ScoutIQ. One more thing I want to dig into — the sports analytics trend in general. We're seeing this data trickle down from the NBA and Premier League to high school gyms and local fields. Is that a bubble or a genuine shift? Lucas: I think it's genuine, and here's why. The cost of the technology has dropped dramatically. A decent camera and a smartphone can capture footage that ten years ago required a professional rig. And the computer vision models are now open source and getting better. So the barrier to entry is lower than ever. Luna: But does every youth team actually need analytics? I mean, some kids just play for fun. Lucas: That's fair, and Silva acknowledged that. ScoutIQ isn't for every club. It's for clubs where there's a competitive element — travel teams, select leagues, programs that feed into high school or college recruiting. Those clubs have a genuine need to evaluate players objectively. And for them, the data removes bias. A coach might overlook a kid because they're quiet or small, but the data shows they have the best passing accuracy on the team. Luna: So it's an equity tool as much as a performance tool. Lucas: Exactly. Silva told me about a girl in a Texas soccer club who was consistently overlooked for playing time because she was the youngest on the team. ScoutIQ's report showed she had the highest assist rate and the best field coverage. The coach started her more, and she eventually made a regional select team. That's a concrete outcome. Luna: That's the kind of story that makes the business real, not just a valuation number. Lucas: Absolutely. And it's why Silva is focused on keeping the price low enough that a typical club can afford it. The per-athlete fee structure was designed specifically so that a club with limited budget can still get the tool for their top teams and then scale from there. Luna: So what's the biggest risk for ScoutIQ now? Lucas: Two things. One — competition. Hudl has a youth product, and other startups like Trace and Krossover are in the space. Silva's edge is the computer vision specificity and the pricing model. But he'll need to keep innovating. Two — data privacy. These are minors' biometric data, and regulations vary by state. ScoutIQ has been proactive about encryption and parental consent, but one misstep could hurt trust. Luna: That's a good reminder that even a feel-good startup story has real operational challenges. Lucas: For sure. And Silva is aware. He's hired a compliance officer and a head of product. The company is maturing fast. Luna: One last thought — if you're a founder with a rejected idea sitting in a drawer, what's the takeaway from ScoutIQ? Lucas: Don't ask permission. Ask the customer. Silva didn't need his professor's approval to build; he needed a soccer club to say 'yes.' The rejection was a signal about academic expectations, not market viability. So go find the person who actually has the problem you're solving and see if they'll pay for it. That's the only feedback that matters. Luna: And maybe save the email from the professor. It makes a great story later. Lucas: Frame it and hang it in the office. Exactly.