The New Age of Athlete Branding - The Origin Story of Opendorse
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Executive Brief: Opendorse is a sports technology company that maximizes endorsement value for athletes. The company was founded in 2012 by two former Nebraska Cornhusker football teammates after one player’s career ended by concussions and the other was holding on to a short-term NFL career. After he was drafted in the 2011 NFL Draft by the New York Giants, the duo worked with their friend, Prince Amukamara. The rest is history. Opendorse built an easy-to-use platform for its athletes to use to create content, post, and profit. Since being founded, it has raised $10.9 million and is a rocket ship heading into the new world of content for sports and entertainment. Below, you’ll find their incredible origin story.
Opendorse’s Business
Opendorse is a sports technology company that maximizes endorsement value for athletes. Today, more than 50,000 athletes use their platform. The platform also serves 3000 sports marketers, 2,000 sports organizations, 1,000 sports agents, and has generated over 2 billion athlete followers for its clients. The company serves the full lifecycle of online endorsement business for athletes including educating, assessing, planning, sharing, creating, measuring, tracking, disclosing, regulating, listing, browsing, booking among other roles.
Opendorse’s partners include the NHL, NFLPA, NBPA, MLBPA, WNBPA, LPGA, EA Sports, Garmin, along with 100+ professional and collegiate sports teams, and hundreds of brands.
According to Crunchbase, the company has raised $10.9 million dollars since it was founded in 2012. Its most recent raise was $2 million in July 2020. The company has experienced exponential growth over the past few years, attracting investors Sean Bratches, the Managing Director of Commercial Operations for Formula 1, and Dan Mannix, the current CEO of CSM North America, a major marketing company.
Many investors believe that Opendorse is the solution to accessing and activating athlete social media channels, and it could be what helps move athlete content from major media outlets like ESPN to social media. With the recent changes to name, image, and likeness (NIL) rules in the NCAA, Opendorse has blossomed even more in the U.S. now that college athletes can leverage its services to post content and generate income. This is just the beginning for the Opendorse. Their journey to get here is a tale of hard work, relationship building and being in the right place at the right time.
Sports Business Journal
Opendorse’s Origin Story
It all started in 2007 in a dorm room in Lincoln, Nebraska.
Blake Lawrence, a freshman linebacker for the Cornhuskers originally from Kansas City, Missouri, found himself living with his new roommate, Adi Kunalic, a kicker originally from Bosnia. The two became best friends and lived the lives of normal NCAA football athletes at a major football program. After starting at linebacker for two years, Lawrence suffered his fourth concussions in less than a year and was advised by doctors to never step on the field again. Like many football players who face this fate, Lawrence took time to make his decision but ultimately decided to step away from the game.
Opendorse
A year later, the duo started their first company, Hurrdat. Hurrdat’s mission was to help business in the Midwest grow their social media. At the time, social media was still a novel space that many existing businesses had no idea how to handle. After having some early success with the business, and facing the challenges many start-ups face, Kunalic landed a spot on the Carolina Panthers’ roster in the NFL. The guys quickly had to change their meeting locations from their office in Lincoln, Nebraska to the practice facilities where the Panthers trained.
Then, it clicked.
The duo’s classmate, teammate, and close friend, Prince Amukamara got drafted in the first round of the 2011 NFL Draft by the New York Giants. Like many young athletes, he went from 10,000 followers to 100,000 followers overnight. To Lawrence, Prince’s social handles instantly became “channels”. Novel at the time, Prince’s social media growth attracted interest from large brands. It became clear that this could be a way for Prince to make more money on top of his NFL salary. Lawrence, Kunalic and Amukamara decided to capitalize.
ESPN
Using their strategy from Hurrdat, Lawrence and Kunalic treated Amukamara like any other business they worked with. They started asking themselves:
“Who is his audience?”
“Where is his audience located and what are their interests?”
“How can he entertain/engage them?”
“When and where are they most active?”
As you’d expect, helping Amukamara wasn’t like any old company. Him being a friend, Lawrence and Kunalic wanted to do right by him. The best way they knew how was through empathy and understanding his needs and transition. This ultimately led to them figuring out how they could add value.
Lawrence and Kunalic instantly realized what they had. Prince, like many athletes, was a “scroll-stopper”, also known as an account on social media that stops users in their tracks and holds their attention for a certain period. Shortly after working with Prince, they realized that his posts had so much more strength than businesses and could impact things from New York to Nebraska. Based on their numbers at the time, Prince’s engagement rate was six times higher than any business client they had had to date.
Brad Penner, The Associated Press
This concept was novel at the time, but Lawrence and Kunalic dug-in to figure out how Prince was so influential on social media. After analyzing his posts, it became clear, people use social media to connect with other people. It’s the faces in our feeds that slow our scroll. Lawrence said it best when he wrote, “Logos don’t sign autographs or win games – athletes do.” In today’s personality-obsessed culture, humans seek “real” relationships rooted in raw, authentic interactions. Sports give that connection. The athlete-to-fan relationship is very real and pure, and not many other relationships can top it.
To properly foster that relationship, though, Lawrence and Kunalic couldn’t publish content for Prince. To bring value to his fans, Prince had to keep it real, and he needed to control the voice and touch of every post.
From there, Opendorse was born.
Before Opendorse, Lawrence and Kunalic would text Prince pre-made content for him to approve, then copy, paste, and post. They would provide Prince with exact details regarding the date and time he should post so that he’d create the most engagement possible. As you’d expect, though, a professional football player’s life is busy during the day. Between practice, workouts, meetings, film sessions, and interviews, Prince could rarely post the content at the right time.
External pressures are a lot for athletes. On top of the above, you have fans, family, your professional team brand partners, alma mater responsibilities, players association, and various other responsibilities. As an athlete, you must prioritize reducing noise and stress. So, Prince focused on the field, not his cell phone.
Lawrence and Kunalic were frustrated with him because they saw the potential his social media had, but never at him. As former high-level athletes, they understood where Prince was coming from. They understood the pressure and they respected his shift in priorities. And, as a friend, they were more focused on helping him get through things in one piece than they were about making money.
Unfortunately for them, they were creating content that never got used. All their ideas felt like they were going to waste. Prince was a very busy man, and he was hard to help. The momentum had stopped, and they were left trying to figure things out. But, like many great founders, they became obsessed with finding a way to make things easier for their clients.
So, they got to work.
The duo hired software developers and built a baseline product for Opendorse. They scheduled a tweet for Prince, he received a text message, clicked the link, hit the big green “accept” button, and boom, Opendorse as you know it now was created. Shortly after Prince’s post, other NFL players started contacting them. Golden Tate reached out, then Demaryius Thomas, then the NFLPA reached out to partner with Opendorse on behalf of all NFLPA athletes.
The Opendorse team tried to build, innovate, and grow. They tried to integrate data analysis, dollar amounts, a brand-to-athlete marketplace among other integrations. But, they quickly realized that the magic in their product was the simplicity it provided for their athletes. Athletes are busy, a simple tap of the “accept” button is the perfect option for them.
From there, the Opendorse team tried to get their product in front of anyone who would listen in the sports space. They started partnering with athletic departments, teams, leagues, sponsors, licensees, marketing agencies, talent agencies and organizations of all sizes. From there, they built non-stop until the point where they became the most trusted and well-respected brand in the space.
Opendorse
What sets Opendorse apart from the others is the focus they place on building an audience for an athlete so that when they hang up the jersey at the end of their career, they can continue to engage and monetize their audience. Historically, when an athlete retired, their ability to earn from their name, image and likeness retired with them for the most part unless they were a superstar.
Presently, though, with the world of social media, athletes can build an audience, maintain their brand, and capitalize on that audience well after their retirement whether it be college or professional sports. Athletes who properly build their audience during their playing days build a personal rapport with the audience that genuinely creates a person-to-person relationship. From there, the athlete just needs to maintain that interpersonal connection moving forward after retirement.
Other things that set Opendorse apart are its strategies. Opendorse knows what works. For example, they preach to their athletes that they need to post video highlights or images from the game they just played, creating ridiculous engagement. Fans are underserved regarding the straight-from-the-stream athlete content. Beyond their ability to strategize effectively, Opendorse has positioned itself to be on the frontier of new-age digital sports media content especially with the loosening of NIL restrictions in the NCAA. The company has previously worked with professional sports and college sports, but with the way new-age sports media content is heading, this is just beginning for Opendorse.
Thank you for reading. Have a great day, and we’ll talk on Friday.
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Kendal
What to Watch This Week
Wednesday, November 10th, 2021, at 8:00 pm ET, the 3rd place Dallas Mavericks play the 5th place Chicago Bulls.