Reboot Midyear Review
Looking back on the first half of 2020 and setting goals for the rest of the year
Recently I came across David Perell’s Mid-Year Review. For those who do not know David, he built quite the Twitter following as “the writing guy”.
He teaches a writing course, hosts podcasts, and writes newsletters, among other things.
His business is centered around teaching people how to build an online brand. And he backs it up…nearly 100k Twitter followers, 30k+ subscribers to his weekly emails, etc.
He recently posted a mid-year review, which seamlessly bounced back and forth as a scorecard for the last six months and a checklist for the next six.
I decided to use his review as a guide and create my own. While this may eventually be something I do as a personal review, I wanted to focus specifically on Reboot Motion this time, since we launched just before the start of 2020. Here we go:
Reboot Motion’s Midyear Review:
Staying Afloat
I will look back at the first half of 2020 and be most proud of one thing- our survival. Reboot launched in November 2019 and all our work was geared to going to market by serving MLB teams for the 2020 season. In early February, we were off to a great start. We had interest from lots of teams, multiple deals signed, and were sending Jimmy off to spring training for site visits.
Then, seemingly overnight, it vanished.
I’ll admit- in some ways, we were lucky:
Having this happen so early on meant our costs were low. We have no outside investors or non-founding employees. Jimmy and I could regroup, find a new game plan, and move forward.
While most of our opportunities dried up (for good reason), a couple clients stayed with us. These early customers were vital and we remain grateful.
And in other ways, we were adaptive:
A postponed MLB season was undoubtedly a blow. But I am proud at how quickly we acknowledged it, changed our mindset, and viewed it as an opportunity to double down on product. We entered the year offering consulting services. We came back to teams for the restart with a fully automated software product delivering 1) optimization reports 2) skeletal data and 3) fully processed data. (And we expect to add hitting next year.)
We are far from out of the woods. We should be OK if 2021 includes Major League Baseball as we all know and love it. But that’s no guarantee. We must continue to be adaptive and consumer focused.
Outside Help
Reboot spent its first six months as a two person team. We want to grow organically and doing so as a sports company during a pandemic has proven a challenge.
Looking backwards, we did well at getting help when needed.
We brought on a friend who runs a software development consultancy, Crux St. He spent the first couple months patching holes, improving our processes, etc.
We recently upped our work with Crux St. We want Jimmy spending less time on software and more time on biomechanics. This is the first step to doing so.
Additionally, this past week we brought on our first intern- Roy Krishnan- to help improve the look and feel of our biomechanics reports. Roy is a hustler- the perfect mix of baseball fan, computer science background, and biomechanics ability.
In both cases, we started small so both sides could feel out the fit. With Crux St, as we got more comfortable, we increased the responsibility we handed off.
This has been a win win. And moving forward, is something we will look to do again.
Diamond Kinetics
Speaking of help, we partnered with Diamond Kinetics! They are experts at app development, hardware, and consumer baseball distribution. This is great, as these are all areas where we are very much not experts.
By working with Diamond Kinetics, we will be able to get “biomechanics as a service” out to every day users faster than we ever thought possible.
The Diamond Kinetics partnership was amazing for three reasons:
We will breeze by the obvious one- Diamond Kinetics is a leader in the consumer baseball space. Combining our biomechanics engine with all the amazing things they do will create a home run product for consumers.
We learned a lot. CJ and his team have been down this road before. We haven’t. Putting a partnership together, testing unfinished apps, and figuring out distribution are just a few areas where we feel more in the know today thanks to working with Diamond Kinetics.
We discovered our true business model:
Maximizing athletic performance is a difficult problem to solve. Rather than going at it alone, we will master one part- the biomechanics- and partner with motion capture companies, hardware providers, distributors, coaches, academies, and on and on.
In a world where everyone wants to build the coolest app and own distribution, we are making the conscious decision to not focus on that.
We started the company with the mission to “help athletes move better”. We discovered we are better of with a slightly different pursuit:
help others help athletes move better
Whether that means a professional team, an academy, or an apparel company, we believe these are our customers.
Biggest First Half Mistake
One of the hardest things for me personally was appreciating the complexity of building software. I continually tried to walk before we could crawl and wanted to pursue opportunities outside of baseball.
While this will come in time, there is plenty of building to do first. We need to maximize happiness for our baseball customers before looking to grow outside of it. This means more time:
Formalizing and automating our MLB product
Iterating our consumer app with Diamond Kinetics
Building out hitting products to match our current pitching offerings (and hopefully softball products as well)
Working with elite coaches and academies
And more
For the Rest of 2020:
Customer Focus
As we look towards the rest of the 2020, we must maintain a maniacal focus towards serving our customers. We will do this in two ways:
MLB Customers:
This is the segment where we started. We need to be aware the rest of 2020 will be strange at best for MLB teams. We need to offer a service teams like so we can start building long-term relationships. Our focus should not be 2020 revenue, but long term partnerships.
Other Customers:
We decided athletes are not our target customer. Rather, we serve those helping athletes. We started this journey by partnering with Diamond Kinetics and will further the mission by working with academies, showcases, coaches, and more.
Baseball Focus
I previously wrote about Sarah Tavel’s Hierarchy of Marketplaces. The biggest takeaway was to pick a segment and maximize for happiness. Growth comes later.
While we expect to work in basketball, golf, and many other areas later on, today is about baseball.
Sustainability Focus
We want to be a company that sees sustainable growth. This means we will not be in a rush to raise capital or take out sized risks.
We believe we have an offering the market wants. We can reinvest in the business to iterate and improve our product.
We also believe we can find best in class partners to provide unmatched customer experiences quicker and better than going at it alone.
We will hire slowly, knowing that an offer implicitly comes with a long-term commitment.
Specifically, an offer from Reboot comes with an expectation that person will help shape our company’s vision, culture, and more. We need to give any employee high impact goals, trust the hell out of them, and get out of their way.
Finally, we will push harder to build our online presence. Brands today are built online and we need to push our content and interaction, with the goal of increasing trust and exposure.
Looking Beyond:
While we want to keep a narrow 2020 scope, our long term goals remain large: we plan on bringing Biomechanics as a Service (BaaS) to the world. Long-term success for us looks like the following:
Being the best biomechanics company in professional and amateur baseball…by a mile.
Repeating that success in golf, basketball, tennis, football, and beyond.
Changing the way coaches and athletes interact with “advanced data”. We want to teach and equip decision makers with the best information.
Building a strong team of scientists, developers, and company builders.