The Big Interview – Pitchero

Mark Fletcher, founder and CEO of Pitchero – an online network for the semi-pro and amateur sports community – speaks exclusively to sportindustry.biz about the key to starting a successful sports website, and the challenges that come with it.

How did the idea for Pitchero come about?

I was at Loughborough University so I was constantly surrounded by sport. I was there around the same time that Facebook arrived at Loughborough, and within two months everyone was on it, managing their whole lives through the site – it was brilliant and it worked. 

At the time, I didn’t want to work for anyone else but I also needed a job. I was playing sport at home and our club website was terrible, our communication was really poor, so it made sense to create a platform that worked for everybody to use to communicate. It was a simple idea; build a website that was universal and could be used by every club the same way, and then rolled out across the country. 

It was very much those simple principles, but it was also desperation to create something. I had left university and didn’t have any responsibilities so I put my head down and got on with something and then it snowballed. It moved from working in a friend’s spare office, to having clubs using it, to having the responsibility of servicing clients very quickly. Suddenly, before you know it, there are 100,000 users, 200,000 users, half a million users and it’s a proper business with big responsibilities. 

What’s the secret between an idea snowballing and not?

Trust. That’s the key thing, and we are also very protective of it. The hardest thing about creating something online particularly with semi-pro and volunteers is you have to win their trust over. It’s not like a business decision, it’s not a rate of return or mathematical calculation. It’s about ‘will I look bad at my club if this goes wrong.’ So you have got to win their trust over and the biggest thing that causes everyone to use our service is to see someone else using it. If they see their rival clubs using it, or if they hear something good from a parent etc, they use Pitchero. You can take out as many advertisements in Four Four Two or Rugby World as you want but they won’t actually use us until they see somebody else using it. Then we win their trust, that’s the key. 

What sports do you cover?

The big sports we cover at the moment are football, rugby union, rugby league and cricket. We are also trying to expand our footing in hockey and netball. Hockey is really popular right now, it had a great Olympics and we are trying to get into that market. It’s also a great demographic. We would love to get involved in netball because we want to engage with more female sports, and netball seems to be very fashionable at the moment, a huge number of people are playing it.

We would like to expand into other sports too. We get approached a lot by athletics, swimming, bowles and golf, but we are focused on the sports that we have right now. 

Looking ahead, we may be looking to expand into something like triathlon or judo. A partnership can be formed quite quickly, but once you start servicing a sport, you have to service that sport. It’s very expensive to service only a few clubs – so it’s about making sure we go into a market and then dominate that market. 

How high on the agenda is the need to continue to innovate and expand?

Huge. Constant innovation, our whole focus is listening to users and being innovative. We actually struggle to keep up with the innovation, it’s hard because everything moves so fast. For example, our iPhone app, which is coming out now, is probably a year late. Innovation is everything, you don’t ever stop, every week starts with what can we improve today, what can we make faster, what new things are coming on board that we need to take account of. Right now we have one product that works, so it’s about refining that product and innovating it. 

Is that the key to a successful website?

It is. Of course, there are different elements, the biggest threat to us isn’t so much the competition out there at the moment, it’s somebody new coming in with a fresh idea that’s snappier, cleaner, faster. So we need to make sure that someone doesn’t come in and take the market like that. In terms of what makes a good sports website, it’s content. It has to be unique, it can’t be the same story that’s on Sky Sports or ESPN, it has to have something different about it. Ideally, you have to have great writers. More and more people are looking at who is writing the posts now rather than just what the content is, for example you can read the same text about the England rugby team on a dozen different websites, but Brian Moore’s take on the action in the Daily Telegraph will be very different to Ben Dirs on the BBC. 

I also think we are seeing a lot more video content, if you look at a lot of the popular sports websites in America they don’t really write news items anymore, they just do a video interview. Rather than writing a 500 word post, they just interview somebody by the side of the training pitch or in the stadium and post the video. That content is then much easier to syndicate across facebook and twitter.

When you were first starting out, what were the main challenges?

Winning the trust of the grassroot community was the hardest thing. To sell Pitchero to a club takes a few months because they have half a dozen committee meetings to decide whether they are going to use it and no one wants to make a decision on something they don’t understand, especially when it comes to technology. 

The hardest thing is getting the clubs to trust us and sign up. However, now that so many clubs are using us, it’s now seen as the thing to do. In the first instance it was simply winning trust, trusting us to run their website, trust us to manage their membership information, video’s, photos, things like that. I know I keep coming back to the word trust, but it’s a huge factor in our success.

Finally, have you noticed a post-Olympic boom?

Our traffic has really gone up since the Olympics, I don’t know if they are connected directly, or whether people are simply becoming more active at grassroots. There has definitely been a pickup in hockey, it is getting more views online than ever, but for our key sports -football, rugby and cricket – the Olympics has not had much effect. The build up to events such as the Rugby World Cup 2015 and the Rugby League World Cup next year, both of which are in England, will be very interesting.