MOTI Sports to Prove Soccer Kids Are MOTI-vated by Motion Capture

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World’s shortest elevator pitch: “MOTI Sports provides high-quality technical training for youth players and coaches using 3D animation in a mobile environment.”

Company: MOTI Sports, Inc.

Location: Minneapolis, Minnesota

Year founded: 2010

 Website/App: https://motisports.com/
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/moti-mobile/id1223436986#?platform=iphone
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.motisports.motimobile

Funding round to date: “We’re getting ready to go for a third round. Series A was the initial start of the pilot to proof of concept. Series B, if you will, was a minimally viable product and getting it into the hands of users to see success. Now, we’re going into Series C to expand and enhance our marketing capability and sales channels.”

Who are your investors? “We raised $4.6 million to date. We have a number of investors originally based in the Minneapolis area, but also are scattered to points all over the U.S. at the present time. We have more than 40 investors, predominantly angel investors, as we did our first two rounds. Many are used to the medical startup [field], some are from the west coast and entertainment industry. It’s really a wide variety and mix.”

Are you looking for more investment? “Yes.”

Tell us about yourself, CEO Gordy Thomas: “I went to the University of Minnesota and worked my way through school as a computer programmer. I then co-founded a computer consulting software and training firm with offices in Minneapolis, Chicago and Bangalore. In the ‘70s and ‘80s, we helped companies in Minnesota and Illinois develop their first online systems. We distributed what I would call operating system software that we built in 43 different countries, while we also provided training to over 2,000 programmers a year from various companies in our facilities in Minneapolis and Chicago. As our company grew and expanded, I attended the Harvard Business School Owner/President Management program in the late ‘90s. The company was sold. I was then farming on a school board and investing. I walked in one day and saw MOTI Sports and invested some money in 2010. At that time, MOTI was just beginning to work with 3D technology, motion capture, etc. Football was the primary sport. The executive team convinced me they wanted some help to guide MOTI. And after the initial pilots were constructed for football, basketball, ice hockey, lacrosse, soccer and volleyball, I worked with the sport content expert and our director of content, Alan Merrick, and created a minimally viable product in 2016.”

Who are your co-founders/partners? “Our co-founders are Dean Dalton and Charles Meyer. Dean was an NFL Coach looking to solve the problem that he couldn’t get American football players to read the three-ring binder, so they just kept messing up plays. So, he was looking for a solution and it became 3D, where it was visualization and a vehicle for them to have a mobile device. That was the genesis of the MOTI program. Dean moved on and is now the Executive Director of the NFL Alumni Academy. Charles is an animator, and he worked for an animation studio company. He took Dean’s ideas and brought them to life, using various pilot animation tools initially.”

How does your product/service work? “We motion capture skills and techniques using a motion capture system, putting a uniform on an individual and recording the precise movement, how they’re doing the skill. Additionally, we use our patented 3D play simulation tool. We draw our X’s and O’s, which creates an animated activity in a 3D space, much like you’d see in some of the gaming content today in the market. We place that on a pitch, court or rink. We consider these 3D media elements as they’re completed. So, we’ll have 3D skills and 3D activities or drills, along with various videos, documents, images and audio. We package them into session plans, using drop-and-drag technology in the Cloud, where they’re stored and become session plans for delivery into a mobile device for viewing.”

What problem is your company solving? “MOTI’s solving the need to have high-quality, 3D visual skills and techniques and activities presented to players and coaches, with all the coaching points in multiple languages in a 3D perspective, which allows users to view from the perspective they learn best from, which is not necessarily video.”

What does your product cost and who is your target customer? “We currently have a free app (MOTI Soccer App), and it doesn’t cost anything to use. We provide for players to learn seven basic foot skills for free. There is an annual subscription for the 24 skills for boys and girls, which is available through Apple or Google. That’s $9.99 for an annual subscription. Coaches can access simple session plans on a trial basis or as a demo for U6, U8, U10, U12 and U14. A coach can obtain an annual subscription for a series of 12 session sessions for co-ed teams for $29.99 a year. We do have a teacher option for grades one-through-eight available for a two-week teaching unit, complete with what we call lesson plans. They are pre-written for $9.99 per year for grade level. Organizational sales are in direct sales fashion, and we do customization to fit the needs of either the club or the entity using our system.”

How are you marketing your product? “We began rolling out our product via our website, direct sales, email and social media. We’ve done specific target marketing to local soccer clubs, high school, park and rec districts, in various cities and fraternal organizations, such as the YMCA in our area. Then, we went out and met with them and got them using the product. We’ve had some excellent responses from news organizations doing various news spots around the country. Right now, it’s really been us doing it ourselves. The next phase is for us to build a sales and marketing organization to reach out, both in-person and through social media, direct sales and marketing channels.”

How do you scale, and what is your targeted level of growth? “As we raise capital, we will build partnerships with various national soccer organizations, soccer leagues, state high school coaches associations and retailers in the soccer marketplace. Additionally, we will add direct sales representation in California, Texas, Florida, New York, Connecticut, Ohio, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Washington and Illinois. Those are the largest markets. We also provide our system in English and Spanish, and we’ll continue to expand our audience by adding other languages in the future. We truly believe in providing support to the organizations using our system. Right now, we’re fundraising. We’re looking to raise $1 million. We’re projecting that will get us to a 40% growth rate in 2022. Scaling is a function of the capital available and being able to implement the sales strategies using that capital.”

Who are your competitors, and what makes you different? “Our competitors in the digital space are companies in the coaching training area, with some in the skills arena. Most are focused on either providing culture coaching or player training from a video platform, which limits the learning perspective of the learner or viewer. Our competitors usually only provide skills training for older, competitive age players, and at MOTI, we really believe that high-quality training of soccer skills happens at a very early age and is necessary. We incorporate skills with activities, and we believe it’s critical to have the players employ the techniques in the game-like scenarios. Our competitors usually focus only on providing their system in English. MOTI is engineered in additional languages already. We provide Spanish, and isn’t soccer a worldwide sport?”

What’s the unfair advantage that separates your company? “We have a 3D drawing tool. We’ve got two U.S. patents. We can create content faster in 3D for sports. I’ll just focus on soccer right now. We allow the learner, whether it be a coach or a player, to view that content from any perspective in that sphere, including the first-person point of view. Often, and this is the secret sauce if you will, we’re learning from a visual perspective that the camera man or the director or the coach, said, ‘View it from here.’ That’s not the perspective on the field that the player has. What you can do with ours, although it’s rudimentary right now, it works. You can touch that player and say, ‘What does this look like if I’m standing on the pitch, the ice rink or the court?’ We’re talking about something that’s relatively inexpensive, but more importantly, I think 3D allows learners to learn from the perspective that’s best for them. So the 3D, if you will, is our secret sauce. The fact that we use animation, we’re upgrading our models, but 3D is our key.”

What milestone have you recently hit or will soon hit? “Our most recent milestone is moving and proving we can work with older age looking models. We’re just starting to roll out our additional motion capture skills beyond the basic 24, with what I will call the one-v-one skills. If you look at our skills, they’re individual player skills, but now we’ll have shortly released 12 of these skills under pressure. We’re showing the player: Here’s the skill to use, and here is how it works against a certain pressure or an opponent. We’ll continue to enhance our curriculum. Shortly, we’re working on a high school coaching curriculum for all those folks that want to coach a high school soccer team. We’ll have a curriculum available in the US for their 12- or 16-week program.”

In what ways have you adapted to the COVID-19 pandemic? “We provide our seven foundation foot skills free to everyone. I’ve had many youth and soccer coaches download and use it at home. We created several safe-distancing session plans and provided them for use all over the country. And had them adapted and used from California to Boston.”

Beyond the pandemic, what obstacles has your company had to overcome? “The biggest obstacle we’ve run into is all organizations have a fear of training. Our former CEO, Dean Dalton said: ‘The way we’ve always done it’ are the six worst words in the coaching language. What we’ve learned is with a very simple visit, a little bit of active listening of a club or organization’s needs, we find that we present our system and we’ve had virtually 100% acceptance every time we’ve done it. The biggest thing we’ve realized is what we’re providing is a service that may not lend itself beautifully to social media, click marketing. But once we’ve digitally presented what we do, people go, ‘Oh, wow, where have you been?’ So, if anything, it’s the way we’ve always done it, the short-term solution. We’re providing a training system for an individual coach, a player, or an entire organization.That’s the biggest obstacle.”

What are the values that are core to your brand? “The values that are core to our brand are providing the highest-quality coaching, skill and coaching points available to youth at the youngest age levels that is afforded to them. The reason I’m saying that is that most coaching emphasizes skills development and training, when kids get to that 9-,10-,11-12-year-old area, and that’s where they really focus on putting in high-quality coaching. And parents pay for it. But in reality, those skills are easily learned at 4, 5, 6, 7 years old, up to 8. By the time those skills are taught at that level, and the players move up to that competitive area, they have a distinct advantage over that one player that may be physically truly gifted, and it allows them to stay with the game and have fun because they’re very skilled. The values we hold dear are providing high-quality coaching and skills that are understandable visually and in an auditory fashion to the youngest players and coaches.”

What does success ultimately look like for your company? “MOTI will continue to expand in soccer, and then we would like to move into other sports as we did with our initial pilot when that becomes viable. Part of what we realized going into this is success to us is obviously the same cash flow, positive return on investment that all investors want to see. But having the ability for success is also being able to move to that next sport and reproduce the content and delivery system within another new sport, at the base level, such as basketball. The reason we got into all these sports, you have to understand that in the early years, a gentleman named Lou Nanne, was on our board and said, ‘You got to do hockey.’ You look at the size of the hockey market. We put together basketball with a gentleman, Christopher Thomas, out of Indianapolis, Indiana, and Lou Nanne with hockey. Success is being profitable. Being beneficial is probably the second-highest thing. And then being able to replicate it into another use sport would be the third level of success.”

What should investors or customers know about you—the person, your life experiences—that shows they can believe in you? “I’ve been focused my whole life on providing high-quality support to customers, and making sure they see value from their investment. I believe that when a customer learns, meaning they become self-sufficient, they either adapt the new skill or whatever, they grow and continue to want more of the service you’re providing. I’ve always been a service provider. I’ve always looked at the idea of providing high-quality support service as something I’ve aspired to do my whole life.”

Why did you choose soccer as your focus for the time being? “As we went through our pilot, we conducted a survey

and sent our pilot 3D drawing tool to 18,000 high school coaches in 2013 and said, ‘Try this out for 60 days, let us know what you think.’ It was a desktop system because that’s what people had. We actually boiled it down and realized a lot about what coaches want and don’t want. We also realized through that process that soccer was one of the most organized sports in the United States. Although there’s some fragmentation, it’s pretty easy to walk into a community and find soccer. It’s not always easy–if you’re looking at youth sports– to walk into a community and say, ‘Where is football taught at the youth level? Where is Basketball taught?’ Depending on where you are, it’s AAU or a YMCA, but it’s highly fragmented in the other sports. So, the reasons we moved to soccer were twofold. The availability, obviously, of a gentleman like Alan Merrick. Alan played professionally for 17 years, 10 years in England, and then moved to the United States in ’76 and played his remaining professional years here. He has coaching licenses from the U.K., Canada, the United States. He helped found the Minnesota Youth Soccer Association and coached. With a resource like that, it was really easy to say, ‘How do you train coaches? How do you train players?’ This gentleman’s been training skills and seen the right ways to do it and the wrong ways to do it. It was a real easy natural selection to say, ‘Hey, Alan, you want to help out?’ And he said, ‘Sure.’ ”

Do you have a favorite quote about leadership? “I really believe the ability to have leadership is to consistently project across an organization. In our case, the ethical delivery of high quality of services to a customer.”

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