Our story — so far

A trip to the past with the future in the rearview mirror

On the months following Pedro’s initial pitch at Le Wagon’s demo day, the most common question from friends and colleagues would be “when can I invest in FootInvest?”.

The mission of democratising investment in sports assets had always been considered by us, Nuno and Pedro, as both very appealing and significantly challenging, mainly due to its regulatory and operational constraints
which have inhibited the emergence of sizeable incumbents in this sector.

Nonetheless, with interest rising everyday, one simple conclusion had to be drawn: there is an unserved market of retail investors interested in using their sports knowledge for medium to long term financial profits.

That is why the ‘Footinvest’ project officially started on July of 2019, after a couple of months performing a detailed market analysis, considering a significant set of very different business models — from gambling and fantasy sports to alternative investment and tokenisation platforms.

However, our story starts a few years before…

We met on the 9th of September, 2013.

It is easy to memorize as it was our first day at PwC. With a shared business administration academic background — not that useful if you want to admin a new business — we became colleagues and good friends.

We have worked as management consultants for 5 years, mainly on risk and compliance or operational efficiency related projects, serving medium-sized and major banks operating in Portugal and Angola.

It was in 2014, during our first project together in Luanda (hence the nice picture of its bay), that the first chat about the FootBid product took place
— a platform where investors could acquire a share of an athletes’ rights, thus providing liquidity to clubs whilst capitalising on their passion and expertise.

Despite the shared dream of creating an innovative product, the idea was stored in a file, together with roughly 50 others, waiting to be picked up by Pedro, 5 years later.

So what happened since 2019?

As former consultants, we are always focused on managing the next delivery or mitigating project risks and not that used to spending time looking back and celebrate our achievements.

Let’s make an exception then! Since the beginning of 2019 we have:

• Quit our (nicely paid) corporate jobs and joined Le Wagon’s 9-week intensive bootcamp in order to learn how to code, becoming recurring Teaching Assistants there afterwards;
• Designed an initial business model that can deliver the initial product that will materialize our mission, after studying several industries in detail
  — still highly confidential;
• Learned, a lot, with seasoned entrepreneurs, other early-stage start-ups, sports agents, marketeers, lawyers, teachers, students, testers, friends, family and anyone else who crossed their path with ours;
• Developed, at barely no cost, a prototype of our ideal product, as an investment simulator, and tested it successfully with friends (alpha) and first-movers (beta);
• Been approached by several potential investors, closed our first pre-seed round and formally created our company, increasing our ability to invest and chances of succeeding in our mission;
• Rebranded from “FootInvest” to the more original “FootBid” and
  officially launched our prototype, powered by an innovative fantasy football engine— more information about it in the upcoming post;
• Grown organically our initial user base, being featured in PC Guia (one
  of the largest Portuguese IT magazines) just a couple of weeks after our launch and winning their “App of the Day” award last Friday.

However, we know that most of the road is still ahead, waiting for us — and it is defying. We hope to have you onboard for the ride.

Stay tuned for extra content about our mission, project and products!