The Sports Spot

Purpose

The purpose of The Sports Stop is to give viewers who do not have time to watch all sports games that occur throughout the course of the night to be caught up with scores and current events of players or teams of their choosing.

Problem / Solution

Sporting events can be time consuming and not all games are shown on TV, which limits the viewership. A lot of people are very busy and do not always have time to catch a full game or go to bed before the game is over. The Sports Stop gives viewers a summary of the previous few night’s games without having to have watched the entire game. Consumers should use The Sports Stop because it allows the user stay up to date with their favorite teams and players without the time commitment of having to watch the entire game.

Another issue at hand is that sometimes not all games are shown on TV or users do not have access to certain channels through their specific cable providers and therefore they are not able to access the game.

Why Now?

The Sports Stop would be viable now because people are continuously adding more commitments to their schedules and further reducing the amount of time to enjoy for themselves. Personally, I have to plan out time into my schedule to watch certain games or find myself searching online results to games or news about players I’m interested in. With The Sports Stop, users will have all of that information in one place and do not have to hop between the Internet and different sporting applications on their smart phones. Users will be able to customize their settings, allowing them to follow specific teams, players, and coaches or just receive general information about sporting events such as scores and highlights from the game. Allowing users to customize their settings gives them chance to have all of the information they want to see in one place, which can save them time by not having to use other mediums to achieve the same information.

Audience

The Sports Stop will have a target market of women between the ages of 18–26. The Sports Stop will be user friendly and men can certainly use it along with women but men tend to watch sporting events more often than women do.

Competitive Advantage

Current competitors to The Sports Stop are Good Old Sport, the ESPN app and theSkimm. Good Old Sport is a daily email that users would receive in their mailbox, that summarizes sporting events from the previous night using humor. Good Old Sport’s website is simple and easy to use and once a user has signed up they will receive an email welcoming them to Good Old Sport. This company is also a start-up, having started in 2015. Although Good Old Sport summarizes everything that happened in the sports world, it does not give users the ability to personalize the results or give them the option to find articles about the teams and players.

The ESPN app allows you to personalize your preferences and pick different teams based on league and sport. The ESPN app also sends the user notifications and you can have it update you when a game starts, half time, and ends. This app does not summarize sporting events, but show the score throughout the game and shows important replays. If a user is not connected to Wi-Fi while using the ESPN app, a user could potentially use a lot of their network’s data by constantly refreshing the app to get a current update of the score. This app is available for download from the Apple App, Google Play, Windows, and Amazon Apps. Users can also access information from ESPN on Snapchat’s Discover page. The Discover page on Snapchat allows users to tap through stories, GIFs that you can send to other users, and videos. The Discover page is an interactive page with different all different types of sources: ESPN, CNN, Cosmopolitan, Food Network and many more. The ESPN Discover chat allows users to see what most relevant new stories are in the sports world.

Good Old Sport and the ESPN app seem to be the two largest competitors The Sports Stop would have in the current market, especially since Good Old Sport has a very similar concept to The Sports Stop and ESPN has the app and also information in Snapchat Discover.

TheSkimm is also considered to be a competitor to The Sports Stop because it’s a daily email that summarizes all current news events and occasionally will summarize the outcome of a popular sporting event, such as the Super Bowl or the NCAA championship game. TheSkimm does not include sporting events in every email, for that reason that is why theSkimm is not considered a main competitor but still included because when it does summarize sporting events, users will only have to go to one place to get their news. The Skimm sends out emails Monday through Friday.

The Sports Stop has the competitive advantage over Good Old Sport, the ESPN app and theSkimm because it gives users the information they want regarding the sports teams and players of their choosing, along with an overall summary of all outcomes of the games. It is a personalized experience that allows the users to get exactly what information they want and it is all located in one space.

Prototype

The Sports Stop application will only be available on IOS devices to start and once the company makes enough money an Android version will be available. The prototypes for The Sports Stop application were made to fit an iPhone 6 screen but the app is also supported by other IOS devices like iPads and other iPhone models. The current prototypes are a very basic and show how the app would be easy to use. Once users have bought the app they will be able to login by using either their email or their Facebook account. Once they have created an account, they will be directed to the home screen where they will be able to read the summary of the sporting events. At the top of screen, they allowed to go either of these pages: home, articles, settings and profile. There is also a search button where users can search teams, scores, articles, etc.

Business Model

The Sports Stop will make money buy users having to pay an initial price of $1.99 in-order to download the application in the Apple App Store. As the app will also have articles about players and teams, news organizations or individual writers will be able to pay to have their articles on the app.

According to estimatemyapp.com, The Sports Stop will cost approximately $34,200 to build the website and approximately $28,350 to build the app equaling a total of $62,550. In order to build the website it would take about 15 designer days and 61 developer days. To complete the app there would be about 15 designer days and 48 developer days. As my app will take about 11 weeks to build, The Sports Stop will not be available for purchase until end of July/beginning of August.

Here is a copy of estimated expenses for the first year of the Sports Stop.