Startup Spotlight - Find A Player

Each Friday the RookieOven Startup Spotlight highlights a member of the Scottish tech startup community. The aim is to, as the name suggests, put the spotlight on Scotland’s best startups from across the country. It’s an opportunity to share information about an exciting tech startup from Scotland you may not have heard of. Giving a brief overview of the company, what they do, where they are and who they are. This week the spotlight falls on Find a Player.

Already being named the "Facebook for sports", Find a Player is your go to for sports, and I don’t mean just football or rugby. This app covers 140 sports and counting! Their goal is to make it easier for players to find each other and play the sports they love. It all started when Jim Law, the founder and CEO, got so frustrated with the experience of organising games of 5-aside football that he became determined to find a solution. Countless prototypes and proof of concepts later, Jim and a group of very clever and hard-working team members – John Hamelink (CTO), Lee McLaughlin (Head of Product), Andy Gilchrist (Creative Director), Owen O’Donnel (Chairman), Duncan Brown (IOS Developer), and Kush Mishra (Android Developer) – created Find a Player.

The Press has beamed with compliments for Find A Player:

• "A key tactic for finding a ringer for your team." – the Sun
• "Takes the hassle out of running your sports team." – Sport Review
• "Glasgow entrepreneur creates app to make five-a-sides-call-offs a thing of the past.” – Evening Times

What makes Find a Player so unique, and our pick for this week’s Startup Spotlight, is they are a sports company that runs like a tech startup. John Hamelink, the CTO, says “we’re an interesting bunch…everything is measured and analysed. We’re working with some really talented people and it shows in our product.” Find a Player’s business model focuses first and foremost on scale. Similar to other startups, their “mission is to increase our user numbers as much as possible, so we can then position ourselves to be able to monetise our use base at a scale that would interest larger companies.” And they are doing a great job at that! Last year through Seedrs, a crowdfunding site, they raised £150,000 in just three days. Let me repeat: Just. Three. Days. With another fund raising event around the corner, Find a Player is doing a superb job with creating an app and listening to the needs of their audience.

You can find the team at either their office in The Whiskey Bond or their desk space at RookieOven. They welcome everyone to check out their site and social media to stay up to date:

• Find a Player Homepage
• Facebook
• Twitter
• YouTube

Be sure to download the free app available via the App Store and Google Play.