NIL Stays Hot Thanks to Marketpryce
The FUTRSPRT Interview Series: Marketpryce CEO & Co-Founder Jason Bergman
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By: Matt Bowen
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FUTRSPRT Interview Series presents conversations with some of the sharpest minds in sports tech. Leaving no angle of competition or fan experience unscathed FUTRSPRT showcases those creating the future of sports right before our eyes.
Conviction.
Marketpryce CEO & Co-Founder Jason Bergman has too much of it to fail. Name, Image & Likeness(NIL) sponsorships are here to stay for all athletes. Thanks to the likes of Marketpryce the NIL space is evolving before our eyes. The young startup, founded in January 2021, is was created as a source for athletes, brands, and agents to discover one another and ink opportunities. Less than a year into this venture Marketpryce is an up-and-coming powerhouse. Sure, timing is everything, but the conviction behind Marketpryce makes it a clubhouse leader.
- What’s your background look like and how did Marketpryce come to be? What is Marketpryce today?
I’ve been working in sports marketing since 2016 and over the years, I’ve seen firsthand how big of a need there was in the market for a business like MarketPryce. I previously was the first sales hire (4th hire overall) at a company called OpenSponsorship, where I worked on a daily basis with professional athletes, sports agents & brands. After closing deals with brands ranging from local car dealerships all the way up to Anheuser Busch, Vitamin Shoppe & CBS Sports, as well as negotiating deals for athletes like Rob Gronkowski, Todd Gurley & Julie Ertz, I saw how there was a need in the market for a true two-sided marketplace between athletes & brands. After 3 years at OpenSponsorship, I had the idea of MarketPryce in my head, but I wanted to test out my thesis that athletes & agents would pay for a service like MarketPryce before actually diving headfirst into starting the business, so I started my own sports marketing agency. To get things off the ground, I DM’d probably 2,000 athletes on Instagram asking them if I could bring them marketing deals and I ended up working with 12 professional athletes in the NFL & NBA. After 2 years of running my own sports marketing agency, I saw firsthand how hard it was to discover & close endorsement deals consistently and I was confident that agents and athletes would 100% pay for a platform like MarketPryce that could make this process easier. In January 2021, I launched MarketPryce and after about 10 months, we’ve facilitated over 3,000 deals between 1,600 professional and student-athletes and 400+ brands like Fashion Nova, Allbirds, CBS Sports, PETA & hims.
2. Name the one technology in your personal life that you’re fascinated w/? (Car, watch, camera, XYZ app, etc.)
Can I say MarketPryce here? Lol. In case I can’t, I’m obsessed with ToDoIst and I’d be absolutely lost without it. As a founder, my mind is moving a million miles a minute and I’m thinking about new ideas to grow the business literally 24/7, so if I didn’t write these ideas down, whether it’s an idea as big as MarketPryce Florida or as small as setting a monthly reminder to pay my monthly credit card bill, I’d be absolutely lost.
3. What’s Marketpryce’s next tech initiative focused on?
We just launched MarketPryce Florida, a subsidiary of MarketPryce, and as a former Gator myself, I couldn’t be more excited about it. MarketPryce Florida is a win-win-win-win (yes, 4 win’s) which:
- Helps ALL UF student-athletes partner with local Gainesville businesses, no matter your sport, social media following, gender or background.
- Helps any local Gainesville business easily partner with UF student athletes
- Helps UF alumni and fans support UF student athletes through donations, and win cool prizes for their support
- While we don’t have a formal partnership with the UF athletic department, we still are able to help the UF athletic department and coaches compliantly answer the recruiting question they get all the time, “If I go to UF, how can you help me monetize my NIL?” by pointing to MarketPryce Florida.
4. In what ways have you grown as a leader in the past 12 months?
I have a lot of thoughts on leadership and I’ve been studying it dating back to when I graduated college back in 2015. But I think the biggest way I’ve grown as a leader is my ability to put my team in situations that they can succeed in and help them do the best work of their career. I know it sounds simple, but it takes a lot of empathy (and time) to do this on a daily basis, and I’m purposeful in not just saying this, but acting on it. I make sure to have daily calls with all of our team members and one of our three team values (along with Tenacity and Teamwork) is Transparency, so I’m always asking my team “How are you enjoying what you do here? What do you not like doing, so I can help take it off your plate?”. If you can consistently put your team in situations where they can flex their superpower, do something they’re truly passionate about, and trust them 110%, the results you’ll get are remarkable.
5. How has Marketpryce changed since its inception?
Well, we’ve gone from myself and my co-founder doing every job to 13 full time employees :) But since I was our first customer (I was the first-ever sports agent on MarketPryce), we were able to build MarketPryce with our user in mind from the start. This helped us achieve product-market fit a lot faster than other startups, and has really allowed us to stay consistent in our mission of democratizing athlete marketing since our inception.
6. In three years Marketpryce will be known for ____________?
We’re in the business of solving the problems that our users face today, so we only prepare a product roadmap for 3–6 months down the line. I strongly believe if you start planning a roadmap further out than 3–6 months (which is even a bit long), then you’ll lose touch with your customers today and not have them 3 years from now. Our mission right now is to democratize athlete marketing and become the number one place where any athlete can go in order to discover and close endorsement deals. And we’re off to a fast start, as we already have more than double the number of available endorsement opportunities for professional and student-athletes out of any of our competitors (most notably OpenSponsorship & Icon Source), and we’ve only been in business for 10 months (our biggest competitors have been around for 3+ years), so I know we’re on the right track to being the go-to marketplace for any athlete to go to in order to partner with brands.
