The Problem:

Local sports is just as big as ever these days. Whether you’re in grade school, high school, college, or even a 20-something looking for something to do, it seems like everyone is in some sort of sports league.

Yet, despite all the advances we’ve made with video technology, e-payments, and online commerce many sporting events and leagues operate the same way they always have.

This means cash boxes at events, verbal expression of interest, and signing your name with pen and paper to sign up for a local frisbee tournament.

As Eric Anderson, President, Katy Youth Basketball and first testimonial on the company’s SeedInvest campaign page says:

“We were looking to evolve from almos t 30 years of operating in a “paper environment” to one where we could manage everything (web content, registrations, payments, setting up teams, receiving sponsors monies, advertising, etc.) online and all with a significant reduction in our reliance on old legacy processes..”

Sports enthusiasts want to get out on the field – not field an endless slew of questions about signups and player fees. Think about what a small sports organization has to juggle to function: they need to help fans register for events and check schedules. Players need to make sure their memberships are up to date. Any solution needs to be intuitive, seamless, and work on a smartphone, tablet, or desktop.

Enter TopScore, a SaaS-solution to all these problems and so many more.

By targeting activity and sport-centric organizations and customers, TopScore has proven that by offering a unified platform that serves all stakeholders everyone can spend less time on administration and more time doing what everyone is there for: basking in the thrill of athletic sportsmanship and competition.

The company’s website lists the following 4 functionalities of its software:

• Registration and Event Management
• Content Management (Think blogs and updates to members)
• Network Ecosystem (Things account maintenance and event data)
• Payments & E-Commerce
• All in one easy-to-manage dashboard. Essentially you can open up shop as a league with a beautiful website and a suite of features to manage the league in minutes.

Managers and local sports enthusiasts are starting to take notice.

“Our experience using TopScore has been extremely positive. Since making the transition to TopScore about 2 years ago, we have been consistently impressed by the intuitive functionality, sport-specific features, content management, wide range of integrations, tools and enhancements based on clients’ needs, and the personalized, responsive customer service. We previously used a website platform that was clunky, outdated, and lacking in customer service. We had been nervous about changing platforms, but the TopScore team made the transition easy, and we’re so glad we made the switch!”

–Mike McGuirk, Executive Director, Bay Area Disc Association

The number of organizations that TopScore already counts as customers is eye-popping. Customer organizations now number in the hundreds, and the company has been chosen as the management software of choice by everyone from the US Olympic Committee to dozens of youth basketball leagues.

Last year the company counted a total of 600,000 users (that’s not a typo) and generated approximately $790,000 in revenue. All told this startup that began offering sports groups a software solution to all their needs just four years ago processed $52 million in transactions and membership fees in 2017.

The market for sports registrations, memberships, and ticket sales is large and dispersed. In the U.S. alone approximately $20 billion is spent annually on sports participation and registration fees alone.

It’s obvious to anyone that TopScore has an opportunity to help baseball, basketball, and soccer leagues better manage their organizations. But there’s a host of sports that are not only big hits with participants and event-goers alike. TopScore has taken an early lead by focusing on these clients. Even creating separate brands for each sport to further its offering. It offers its software “Ultimate Central” to the ultimate frisbee market, Basketball Central to basketball, even “Water Polo Central” and “Rugby Central.”

In creating a personalized offering to a particular sports market, the company’s goal is to drive brand-commitment from the organizations. As we’ll touch on in a moment, this is something competitors aren’t doing.

Gearing their software offering towards the sports-market in question has already begun to bear fruit. TopScore has a dominant position in offering software solutions to the ultimate frisbee market with an estimated 60% market share. Other sports like water polo and basketball aren’t far behind.

Because the opportunity to empower sports organizations to solve their problems using software is so big TopScore already has some competition:

Sports Engine is owned by NBC (if you couldn’t tell by the logo…) and bills itself as an owner and developer of software and mobile apps for approximately 500,000 youth, amateur and pro sports.

Owned by the national retailer, this competitor appears focused on the youth market.

With its LeagueOne sports management software Active Sports Network appears similar to TopScore in that it is sport-agnostic, catering to thousands of sporting organizations.

While competition is a worry with any business, based on our initial analysis, we think TopScore has what it takes to stay a few steps ahead of the competition.

Near as we can tell it is already the, if not one of the, biggest sports management software vendors out there after just a few years of operation. It has also managed to attract 600,000 customers including notable organizations like ultimate frisbee (as of 2012 there were 5.1 million ‘Ultimate’ players in the U.S.).

1. There’s nothing we like more than a little SaaS

As business models go, Software as a Service (SaaS) companies are just about as good as it gets. Retailers need to worry about getting foot traffic in the door. Movie theatres and studios need to worry about running the right promotional campaigns. Online retailers (yes, even Amazon) are in a perpetual pricing race-to-the-bottom.

That last example, Amazon, illustrates our point perfectly. While the world has been caught up in the headlines of Jeff Bezos being richer than Bill Gates and Amazon reaching the $1 Trillion market capitalization milestone I have always been more interested in what’s going on beneath the surface.

You see, things really got good for Bezos not when we all became loyal Prime members (of which I am one) but when Amazon Web Services (AWS) was born. Am I saying Bezos wouldn’t be the richest man in the world, and that Amazon wouldn’t be nearly as successful as it is today without its SaaS-web hosting business? You bet I am.

Consider the results of Amazon’s retail operations versus AWS in Q2 2018:

That’s right. This division that essentially charges recurring customer fees fo r access to hosting servers generates more or less the same amount of profit as all of Amazon’s retail operations.

Amazon’s latest results don’t even tell the full tale. Retail operations only recently reached what one might call “escape velocity” having generated just $400 million in operating profit in Q2 2017. And what did AWS generate, you ask? A whopping $916 million operating profit.

So you can see now why having a leading technology business that charges customers recurring fees (and producing what is known in the industry as annual recurring revenue or ARR) is such a sweet deal.

2. Early Successes

Last year Top Score produced $600,000 in revenue and it’s July 2018 trailing-twelve-month revenue (TTM) was a cool $791,000. That’s up from the year before when TTM in Summer 2017 was somewhere around $500,000 —  58% growth isn’t bad in anyone’s book. Profitability is projected for 1H 2019 – no small achievement given the costs associated with building and marketing a software platform.

The TopScore software is attracting customers. It already has over 600,000 users across 950+ sub-sites. National organizations that have already climbed aboard the “TopScore train” include USA Rugby, USA Team Handball, and USA Ultimate (frisbee).

3. Strong Management

The final reason to keep an eye on TopScore is its people.

CEO Christian Jennewein is no stranger to making big contributions to early-stage tech startups. He was previously served as the Head of Engineering for Paris-based long-distance carpooling technology startup BlaBlaCar. There he oversaw 100 staff.

Co-founder and CFO David Vatz handles the sales and finance end of things – formerly being employed as a VP of Multicurrency Payment and Foreign Exchange for BNY Mellon.

4. TopScore is to Websites As Toast is to Point-of-Sale

While analyzing TopScore, which essentially enables a full suite of tools for creating an integrative website to manage sports leagues from the back and front end, we couldn’t help but look at the similarities between it and Toast.

Toast is a point of sale software provider that caters to the specific needs of restaurants. Instead of trying to pursue the broader point of sale ecosystem, which is dominated by behemoths like Square, Toast stayed focused on restaurants as its niche vertical.

In its latest round of funding, the team raised $115 million at a $1.4 billion valuation in July 2018. To put it simply, Toast has won in the POS market by focusing in on the needs of a large vertical rather than going after the broader market.

TopScore is now doing the exact same thing in the website development market, where major competitors like Wix and Squarespace own the general small to medium size business market.

These companies have earned valuations of $4.7B and $1.7B respectively, but who is to say that a TopScore can’t end up as a multi-hundred million or billion dollar company of its own as a vertical specific website development and management solution?

To summarize, we think the approach being undertaken by TopScore is analogous to that of Toast, which is a terrific proxy for success on the strategy and go-to-market side of the business.

The Recommendation: Deal To Watch

It’s not every day you get to invest in a SaaS business solving a valid problem. For this reason, and evidence presented above, we are assigning TopScore our coveted “Deal to Watch” rating – reserved for the top 20% of reviewed crowdfunding offerings.

TopScore has a number of qualities we look for in a business. Its founders are experienced and the market they are seeking to address is a large one ($20 billion). Already the company has traction and its business model appears sound with over $800,000 in TTM revenue.

TopScore is a KingsCrowd Deal To Watch. However, you should only invest as long as you understand the risks of an early stage startup like this.