For the love of the game — The reason I sold my first startup
There are a million different motivations for becoming an entrepreneur. Changing the world. Making your first million. Being your own boss. The list goes on and on. I never set out with any of these goals. For me, my entrepreneurial vision has always been about passion for the things i love most.
Rounding the bases
The winter of 2008 in Richmond, VA was as cold and boring as usual in the telecommunications industry. I worked on the same projects day after day. I had worked my way up to middle-management after 10+ years as a Senior Software Engineer. I managed a team of 8 highly skilled developers and collectively we produced some amazing products. Despite being a successful software development manager, I went home everyday with a thirst that couldn’t be quenched. I wanted to be behind the keyboard for hours on end slinging code like the good ol’ days.
Like many people in the technology sector, I had an LLC where I dabbled from time-to-time on side projects and contract work. It was more of a formality for legal reasons than anything. I had a cushy full-time job with a six-figure salary; I never set out to build a company per se. Things were very comfortable.
In March of that year, Apple announced the first iOS SDK. At the time, I wasn’t really a fan of what Apple was doing with the iPhone, so I didn’t have much interest in learning iOS development. However, after a few months of potential clients asking if I could develop an app for them, I relented and began my journey into mobile development.
For the next year or so I developed some apps for a handful of clients and slowly developed my comfort level with Objective-C and Xcode. It was around that time that things changed for me in ways that I couldn’t imagine.
A new Minor League Baseball team was announced in November of 2009: The Richmond Flying Squirrels. They would become the Double-A affiliate of the San Francisco Giants. I am a huge baseball fan, so I was ecstatic to hear the announcement. I had planned on getting season tickets as soon as I heard the news. I looked around for mobile apps within the league and found only a handful of teams with mediocre apps at best. I knew I could develop something better.
For me, my entrepreneurial vision has always been about
passion for the things I love most.
I found the names of several front office employees in the Flying Squirrels press release and contacted them immediately. My cold pitch was that I was willing to develop an app for the team free of charge, so long as they gave me the rights I needed to use their logos and trademarks. They seemed a bit skeptical but I arranged an in-person meeting with them where I mocked up a few examples of what I thought the app could do. Their eyes lit up immediately as they understood the true potential of what a mobile app could bring to their organization.
Over the next couple of months I worked on a full-featured iOS app to be released to the public on Opening Day 2010 of the Flying Squirrels inaugural season. We collaborated on the app in “stealth mode,” because as I would find out later, Minor League Baseball is very much a cutthroat industry. Teams routinely try to one-up each other with bigger and better ideas and offerings. This mobile app I was building would be one such offering that no other team had.
Little did I know, I was about to have more than half of MiLB teams knocking at my door.
The inaugural home opener came on April 15th, 2010. I had been at work for several months crafting and honing features and functionality. Fans could view the team schedule, promotions, team stats and even listen to live game day broadcasts. The Flying Squirrels front office was blown away with the number of features I packed into the app without making it feel too complex. My goal was simple: create an experience that put the game at my fingertips with as few touches as possible.
Later that day the press release hit and the several newspaper articles went out about the app. Within hours my phone was ringing from several other MiLB clubs. I even had a few representatives from AT&T contact me to writeup a story about hot new apps.
The interest took me by surprise. Could it really be that MiLB fans wanted something like this? I was just following my passion and developed what I would want as a fan. I had no requirements, no boss, just my own vision.
The perks of passion
Within a few days of launching the Flying Squirrels app, I had already signed up a few other teams. I had no idea how to price the app and ongoing maintenance. I decided to base my pricing on team budgets which is roughly based on affiliate level (Triple-A, Double-A, Single-A etc), fan attendance and sponsorships.
However, a lot of teams were used to bartering down the price of services with memorabilia and game experiences. It was not uncommon for a team to ask me outright if they could receive the app for free in exchange for some signed baseballs, jerseys and free advertising in their game day flyers. Since I had a full-time job, I didn’t see any problem with this.
The next few months were filled with some great memories. I had the entire front row of seats behind home plate in Richmond at every home game. I received more signed baseballs than I knew what to do with. I had phone calls from hall of famers, two World Series rings and jerseys directly off of a player’s back. I even met my wife through a baseball trade show where she designed MiLB hats and apparel.
My favorite moments were hitting batting practice with the teams. As a huge fan of the game, this was truly a priceless opportunity. I traveled to a few ballparks, shagged fly balls in the outfield and hit batting practice with future big leaguers. I was living the dream of every 8 year old boy who played little league baseball.
My goal was simple: create an experience that put the
game at my fingertips with as few touches as possible.
After I picked up 10 or 15 teams I realized that I was going to need to spend a little bit more time on the app. I developed an administration interface where teams could manage their own data. Prior to that, teams would call me anytime they needed a modification. That would be fine if I was getting $100/hr for each phone call, but since most of the teams were barely paid customers I wasn’t compensating myself for the time spent.
I smartened up on my pricing and began to charge maintenance and hosting fees to new customers. By the end of the first year I had amassed 45 MiLB teams as my customers and picked up a handful of other sports teams as well. I decided to quit my job and go at it full-time. Business was good.
Over the next two years I would pickup a total of 75 MiLB baseball clubs as customers. I received various app design accolades and won the 2010 MiLB Product of the Year award at the Baseball Winter Meetings. I had the #3 app in the sports section of the App Store for 9 straight months. Out of the top 100 sports apps, 33 of them were mine. There were more than 5 million downloads and 200 million interactions from fans during this period.
I expanded my team by hiring a few new mobile developers and we developed an Android counterpart to the iPhone app. We developed custom games for kids at the ballpark and received many inquiries from fans and businesses using our apps. Without trying to do so, I had achieved market share in MiLB and had so much demand for new development outside of sports that we could barely keep up.
Why I sold
They say all good things must come to an end. What they never elaborate on is “why?”
For me, it wasn’t about the money. It wasn’t about the memorabilia and priceless memories. It wasn’t about the thousands of people I met at trade shows and baseball stadiums across America. For me it was about doing what I love: developing software. It just so happened that I also loved baseball. I had managed to marry my two favorite passions and I knocked it out of the park.
At some point along the way, the fun ended. Teams would call me up looking to develop exciting functionality for their fans, but not wanting to pay anything for the service. I’d get a call at 3am asking me to update something in the app for them, but never pay an invoice when I sent their maintenance contract. It became a burden to manage all of these relationships.
Unpaid invoices, overdue accounts, following up on emails and voicemails. The customer relations aspect was a constant nagging nightmare. I could’ve hired someone to handle that aspect, but the teams knew me. They knew Scott Davis. They didn’t want to speak to anyone else. They knew my face, my story, my passion. So here I was working on a product I loved but hating it every day.
I had heard people say “you are the brand” before, but I never really knew what that meant until then. I was very much the brand, and it would be next to impossible to escape that.
You could say I lost my passion, but that wasn’t true.
I still loved developing software, and I still loved baseball.
What I lost was my desire to work on both things together.
As the 2011 Winter Meetings rolled around, rumor on the streets had circulated that I was looking to sell my business. This was true. I had inquiries from several companies and individuals, but nothing really stuck out as a good opportunity for me. I wasn’t looking to sell for money, although that was obviously a consideration. I was looking to sell because I wanted my product to live on, but I didn’t want to deal with these customers directly any longer.
Eventually I found a company who fit that same goal, and we came to an agreement at the beginning of 2012. It wasn’t an 8 figure payday like many people dream of, but it served the purpose I was looking to achieve.
I no longer loved what I was doing, and like many hall of famers, I wanted to go out during my prime.
