Whether its running, cycling or swimming, group sports are making a comeback.
And that’s something that Alex Rose and Sam Browne were counting on,
as the founders of online sports events booking platform Let’s Do This.
They claim that it is the world’s largest marketplace for mass participation sports
and have already drawn in investment from sporting stars
like Serena Williams and Usain Bolt.
I think we're a bit of a rarity in starting a tech company as two non-technical people.
Rose and Browne knew each other from childhood, but became good friends
while studying at the U.K.’s University of Cambridge.
Both keen runners and cyclists, they founded Let’s Do This in July 2017
following a conversation at the pub about how difficult it was to find and sign up for races.
Browne was already working in the sports industry,
having co-founded adventure travel company IGO Adventures,
while Rose was working as an associate at a management consultancy.
When did you decide to quit your full-time jobs?
And what gave you the confidence to take the plunge to do that?
We probably sort of set about it with a combination of naivety and overconfidence.
And I think looking back on it, if we knew half the things we knew now
about the obstacles, you know, that you have to overcome to start a business,
I wonder whether we would have quit our jobs to do it.
I think it also caught me at a point where I knew I really hated the job
that I had at the moment. And suddenly the obstacles
in starting a new company suddenly didn't seem so terrifying.
So, they decided to set up Let’s Do This. The one-stop platform enables people
to find information on and book onto endurance events across the U.K.
To cover the initial start-up costs, the pair raised £150,000
from a network of London-based angel investors, mostly amateur athletes.
However, they soon realized that this wouldn’t be enough to cover the costs
of hiring software engineers to build the initial platform,
so they raised a further £1 million, mostly from the same group of investors.
You had to talk to a lot of people to, you know, to find people who were interested.
But if you can find a problem that people are passionate about then, you know,
there are always people who are willing to back exciting ideas.
In 2018, Rose and Browne moved to Palo Alto, in California,
to complete the prestigious Y Combinator start-up accelerator program,
along with another six members of the team.
Y Combinator has been the launching pad for major names like Airbnb and Reddit.
That’s when things really began to take off.
Then this guy, Pete Flint, led a $5 million seed funding round
for the company in August 2018. Flint is general partner for
venture capital firm NFX and is known for being the co-founder
of online real estate marketplace Trulia, which was bought by its competitor Zillow in 2015.
Tennis legend Serena Williams and Olympic gold-medalist Usain Bolt
also invested in the seed round.
That came about because Serena is married to a guy called Alexis Ohanian,
who was one of the co-founders of Reddit, and was part of a very, very early batch of Y Combinator.
He actually got in touch with us halfway through in one of those emails
that you can't quite believe you've received, you know, coming from,
without a doubt one of the most famous, well-connected alumni of the program,
saying that he’d just done his first Spartan Race and loved what we were building,
and would be really interested to hear more.
And then at the end of Y Combinator, when you pitch to investors,
he got back in touch about the opportunity to invest.
And at that point, I think we went back to him and said,
‘look, we'd obviously love to take investment from you,
but you also happen to be married to one of, if not the greatest female sports women ever.’
The Usain investment was another story where Sam, my co-founder,
I think, had seen that he was in London opening a bar,
and actually went to the bar opening himself and managed to corner Usain Bolt
and persuade him to have dinner with him, and pitch the idea to him then, and it went from there.
A real example of hustling your way into the right investor meeting.
Since Rose and Browne set up Let’s Do This, the company has raised just over $31 million.
The London-based company now has 65 employees, up from about 25 members of staff in early 2021.
And a passion for sport is deeply engrained in the company’s culture,
with Olympic gold-medal rower Constantine Louloudis
working as vice president of sales and business operations.
But growing the business hasn’t been without its issues.
The coronavirus pandemic forced the U.K. to go into lockdown in 2020 and 2021,
shutting down mass participation events like marathons and triathlons.
That dealt a blow to Let’s Do This, which at the time listed 18,000 of these kinds of endurance events,
making its money from commission on the tickets that are sold through the platform.
The firm saw revenues crash at the start of the pandemic,
prompting Rose and Browne cut their own pay by 70%,
as well as asking employees to take a 20% reduction in salary.
They were also forced to close down their office in San Francisco.
What impact did the coronavirus pandemic have on the business?
It’s sort of hard to overstate the impact that it had on the business.
It was, you know, it was pretty dramatic when it happened.
The whole market that we operate in had to stop.
Overnight there was suddenly no bookings coming from the platform,
revenue dropped to zero. But I think to be honest with you
our concern at the time was almost more for the market that we were in
and the organizers that we're working with, than it was for us.
We were lucky enough to have done our series A round of funding
a few months before the pandemic happened. And therefore we knew we had cash, you know,
a bank account full of cash that would see us through,
but it was much more about what was, you know, what was this going to do to the market?
How long was this going to last?
So, in a move that kept the business going, they pivoted into virtual event sign ups.
Over the summer of 2021, group sports events returned
as the U.K. government lifted coronavirus social distancing measures.
As a result, Let’s Do This has seen a rebound in business,
with 15,000 events now listed on the platform
and ticket sales doubling week-on-week for a period of around six months.
Rose is confident this growth will continue as outdoor exercise remains popular beyond the pandemic.
Lockdown has shifted how people exercise. You've seen such a huge shift to, you know,
at home connected fitness. If you look at the sales around, you know,
whether it's trainers, sneaker sales or bikes, you know, they are,
you can't buy a roadbike at the moment, they're all sold out.
There's never been so much demand. And so whilst I think there's still some
nervousness about people booking events, if you look at the broader trends that are
genuinely upstream of that, whether it's the number of people who downloaded Strava,
you know, which is three times what it’s ever been historically,
or the fact that sales of sports equipment have gone through the roof.
I think, as we come out the other end, we're expecting next year
to be to be a bigger year than the industry's ever seen.
Exercise tracking app Strava said that 1.1 billion activities
were uploaded to its platform globally in 2020, up by a third on the previous year.
You've seen how young people, particularly young people,
today want to invest in experiences beyond objects.
And then we've seen this wave of growth in athleticism, you know,
it's both the sort of serious triathlete, as well as the sort of 5k trot on a on a Sunday afternoon.
So it's just this, you know, people are increasingly healthy.
And as it turns out, you know, that's just accelerated during Covid,
you walk the streets, or you’re on the commute, you see so many people on the move.
What are the opportunities and the challenges to the global group sports event market
So the opportunity is huge. The Internet loves ticketing businesses.
Some of the challenge is just pulling this mass of information together,
as well as providing a level of information that gives you a kind of point of view,
like, ‘what's the right thing for me?’ Plus just growing a business,
it’s just trying to figure out how to grow a business.
So what’s next for the entrepreneurs?
What's next for us is going internationally,
and that starts with going to the U.S. in January of next year.
And then expanding on from there, I think we've shown a model
and we've shown some traction in the U.K. that can be applied to the same market all over the world.
And then I think eventually, I think our mission goes way beyond running and cycling and triathlon,
we want to be the online company that gets everyone offline.