SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
EP 359: Hit $2m Revenue Buy/Sell Other Athelets Gear On Cheap with Brendan Candon of SidelineSwap.com
18 Jul 2016
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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I give away $100 every Monday. Top Tribe, this is episode 359 of The Top. Coming up tomorrow morning, you will hear from Cam and Ankin Miller. There are two 33-year-old men selling baby products with a huge reorder rate at BabyMori.com.
top a try but good morning our guest today is brendan cannon he is the co-founder and ceo of sideline swap a 500 startups batch 17 participant sideline swap is a community marketplace where athletes buy and sell their sports gear most of our users or their users are middle school high school and college athletes selling online for the first time they've got revenue and traction with gross sales running close to two million dollars brendan are you ready to take us to the top
Yeah, let's do it. Okay. All right. So first things first, what does SidelineSwap do and how do you guys make money?
Sure. So, like it's kind of said in the bio, 5.12 makes it easy for athletes to buy, sell, and trade sports gear. We started the company, I played sports in college, kind of played every sport growing up, and after college I had to buy some equipment, and a lacrosse stick that I had to buy was like $250. And instead of buying it at a retail store, I bought it for like $50 from a friend offline.
And that led to a conversation about, you know, this should be easier to do. eBay is kind of focused on power sellers, retailers. I grew up with some great experience with some of the offline options. I started to just like close and decline. And so that's kind of why we got started.
And what year was that, by the way? When did you found it?
We launched an early version of the site in 2012. We kind of did it as a side project for a while. I went full-time on it last year.
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Chapter 2: What is SidelineSwap and how does it operate?
Or have you added 12% to that?
That's the price that the seller listed it for. Okay. And so during the checkout process, average shipping cost is about $5 to the buyer, would end up paying about $60, and the seller, once all is said and done, would receive about $48.
Yep, yep. Or 55 minus 12%, so about $48 total. Exactly. Got it. Okay, very good. I always love asking this question. Do you remember in 2012 what your revenue was, your year one revenue?
It was nothing. I mean, even in the beginning of last year, we hadn't really built out the transaction process, so we didn't make any money for the first couple years. When we rebuilt the site and launched the platform last year, that's when we started to make money.
So what was 2015 total top line revenue?
Top line, we did about $400,000 in sales. We took 12% of that, so our revenue was about just under $40,000.
Okay, very good. And what will you guys do here, or what have you done so far in 2016, and what do you think you'll do the whole year?
So our current run rate is 240,000 for revenue. So we're on pace to do over 2 million in sales. In total transaction volume? Yeah, over 2 million in total transaction volume.
Nice. And give us a sense of kind of growth and usage. So how many total buyers and sellers have you, you know, split those out for me. How many total buyers have used the platform since launch?
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Chapter 3: How did SidelineSwap generate revenue in its early years?
And so a kid who wants a top-end piece of gear, but parents won't buy it for them, this is a way for them to get it at like 50% off. And if it's used a couple times, they're fine with that.
Yeah, it makes good sense. I'm curious, how do you... I mean, it sounds like the natural marketing play for something like this would be to get an athlete to come on and sell their signed hockey stick from the championship or something. How are you marketing this to get new users?
Yeah, so it's not... The memorabilia piece isn't as big as you think. It really is more of like... just usable gear, kind of a play-it-against-sports, which is like a big offline franchise with secondhand sports gear of that type of model. And we market it to high school and college athletes.
One thing that we do do is like a lot of college athletes, after they're done, you know, most athletes don't go pro. And so when they're done, they'll come on at the end of the season and unload their gear once they're done with their NCAA career. And so there is this like aspirational element where last week we had,
A kid named Miles Jones is a two-time player of the year in lacrosse for his position. And he came on and auctioned off his Duke Cross gear for charity. And so you could get that type of stuff. And then we pushed that heavy on social media. And so those are the types of things that happens with how we acquire users. A lot of it's done through Instagram.
But we get pretty creative about our content marketing and how we leverage the athletes who already are on the platform.
Yeah, it's impressive. Rarely do you see kind of a company, a marketplace or a SaaS company or anything that's really actually crushing social. You guys are actually crushing social. I mean, 50,000, I think, Instagram followers. How are you building that?
That's our main account. So we actually, we do each, you can look at it like at FiveLineSwap on Instagram, but we have six different accounts, one for each sport. So if you look at FiveLineSwap.hockey.baseball.com, our total Instagram following is about 150,000.
We kind of have this cool content strategy, global posts, user-submitted videos of highlights and gear that they use and stuff from the site. So we've tripled our Instagram following over the past six months. by putting in some of those strategies. And yeah, social is a huge driver for us. And that's where most of our growth comes from.
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Chapter 4: What is the business model and fee structure of SidelineSwap?
Nice. Okay, cool. Is that going to be on a safe, one of the safe kind of structures?
No, it's just on a traditional convertible boat.
Okay, so there will be a discount and a discount rate and all that jazz? Yeah. Yeah. Great.
And so the goal, I mean, we look at companies like Poshmark in the women's fashion space, which is the marketplace, Reverb in the music space, and the verticalization of eBay and Craigslist of how people have cut out these big verticals and built these really strong community marketplaces. No one's done it in sports, and that's our goal is to be the marketplace for athletes.
I think it's a $60 billion industry, and there's a ton of potential for what we could do here. So in terms of an eventual exit, there's a bunch of ways we could go. But right now, our goal is to just build the biggest marketplace possible.
Well, Brandon, as people follow you through the raise and as you build the business, where's the best place for them to do that online?
Folks, breaking news, we've added two capuchin monkeys that can sit at a computer, write a cold email and close a deal better than most of your salespeople.
They're going to join the world's greatest business show on October 6th in Austin, Texas. In addition to these amazing monkeys, which you can't miss live on stage, you'll see tech billionaires battle. Authors launch their books. Startups go from bootstrapped to billions live on stage. You don't want to miss it. Go to NathanLatka.com forward slash Austin live to get your tickets now.
They are almost sold out. We have so many people buying like Blake Allen. Timothy Della Force, we're almost sold out. Go see the monkeys. Watch the billionaires. NathanLatka.com forward slash AustinLive. Get your tickets right now. Okay, Top Tribe, I have to tell you, many people go, Nathan, you came out of nowhere. Your website's growing so fast. How'd you do it? The answer is simple.
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Chapter 5: How has SidelineSwap's revenue and growth evolved over time?
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folks breaking news we've added two capuchin monkeys that can sit at a computer write a cold email and close a deal better than most of your sales people they're going to join the world's greatest business show on october 6th in austin texas in addition to these amazing monkeys which you can't miss live on stage you'll see tech billionaires battle authors launch their books startups go from bootstrap to billions live on stage you don't want
Go to NathanLatke.com forward slash Austin live to get your tickets now. They are almost sold out. We have so many people buying like Blake Allen, Timothy De La Force were almost sold out. Go see the monkeys. Watch the billionaires. NathanLatke.com forward slash Austin live. Get your tickets right now. Okay, Top Tribe, I'll see you bright and early tomorrow morning.
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