Dave Kearney has little interest in sport other than being a seasonal Leinster ticket holder. However, he is an experienced tech entrepreneur who noticed a gap in the already crowded and competitive market of sport-tech. He realised that there were few digital solutions being offered to athlete to help them with their mental strength and mindfulness. So he teamed up with one of the world’s leading sports psychologists to develop an app.

In this interview, Dave Kearney spoke about:

  • How having a newborn daughter gave him the idea for the App Champion’s Mind
  • Teaming up with a US based mental health coach, Jim Afremow, for the app
  • What the app does and how it’s designed as a mindfulness app for athletes
  • How he got the company off the ground
  • How a failed marathon runner used the app and succeeded the following year
  • What the future holds for the the company

Cait Caden (CC): Hi there, and welcome to another podcast with The Currency. I’m Cait Caden and today I’ll be talking about sport, I’ll be talking about tech and I’ll be talking about sport psychology with my guest, Dave Kearney. No, not the rugby player, but someone who has entered the sport-tech market with a product that hopes to improve athletes’ mentality. Dave, you’re very welcome.

Dave Kearney (DK): Thank you.

CC: I’ll start off by saying that you have a sport-tech product which is an app called Champion’s Mind. Give me the elevator pitch for this.

DK: Sure. So we launched Champion’s Mind about six months ago and our mission is to help competitive and amateur athletes develop the mental component of their game and to help them to succeed in their chosen sport.

CC: We obviously, here in Ireland, know how impactful sport psychology can be. All you have to do is look at Jimmy McGuinness and what he did for the Donegal team in 2012 when he led them to All-Ireland victory. But how does your app actually help athletes and improve their psychology and mental state?

DK: To start off with, I founded the company with a guy called Dr Jim Afremow. And he has worked with the San Francisco Giants, he’s helped train 17 separate Olympic gold medalists, seven Hall of Famers in the US. He’s also worked with Arizona State. So, he has developed a methodology through his work. We call it MVP GG, which basically is a combination of the different components of mental skills training that has been shown over a range of different sports to help athletes improve their game, improve their focus, improve their positivity and their enjoyment of their sport.

CC: Is there routes in the app that you click on and you get certain positivity messages or exercises you can do or something like that?

DK: Yeah, so the app itself is a series of audio sessions that people can listen to. It would be very, very similar to Headspace or something like that. Mindfulness is actually one of the core components of building your focus and building your attention, which is obviously very, very important when you’re in a competition scenario.

I think the International Olympic Committee says there’s 2.1 billion athletes on the planet so we’d like to get every single one of them using the app.

Dave Kearney

CC: What exactly would the athlete do when they go onto your app?

DK: They’ll continue to use the app train every day, ideally using the various different audio sessions to focus, to visualize, to relax themselves, to practice their breathing exercises, to improve their performance.

*****

“Being an entrepreneur, the amount of time that you have available for watching sports is limited.”

CC: Are you interested in sport yourself?

DK: I’ve been in Leinster season ticket holder for about 10 years now. That’s kind of my main interest in terms of sport. I don’t tend to watch too many other sports than that. I think being a founder, being an entrepreneur, the amount of time that you have available for watching sports is somewhat more limited, unfortunately.

CC: And so what made you get into the sport tech world? You talked about your collaboration with Dr Jim Afremow, how did that come about?

DK: I guess for me it’s about personal performance as much as it is the actual sporting component to it. So, if you look at high performing sports teams, and I’m a founder and I’ve been a CEO for 10 years, one of the most important things for me is to know and understand that I’m actually doing a good job. When you look at successful sports teams, particularly very, very successful managers and sport teams, they often manage to take average performing athletes and turn them into high performing athletes by just giving them the right mental game, giving them the right framework, and team interactions that basically help elevate a team to a higher level.

CC: Jim wrote the book Champion’s Mind, didn’t he? And then you decided to put the tech behind it?

DK: Yeah. So, Jim had written three books previously. Two of them were for serious athletes. And then there was a book called The Young Champion’s Mind, which is for school-aged athletes as opposed to maybe college or early professional athletes. And I was doing it totally separately before I met him. I was doing a little bit of research into different products that we could be building. I have a team that can develop apps and develop kind of web applications. And I was just looking in the App store. I randomly did a search for this. Nothing really came up. There wasn’t any competition. And that really, really surprised me because it seems like something that a lot of people would really, really be interested in having.

So, I mailed about 20 different sports psychologists. Some of them are in Ireland, some of them have been authors of different books around the world, with a view to creating an app that we could get a million people, a billion people to download and use. Some of those people I got in touch with responded, we started some calls, we discussed different ideas. But I talked to Jim and his idea for the app was closest to mine in that what we were trying to do is build a single platform that could really, really benefit. I think the International Olympic Committee says there’s 2.1 billion athletes on the planet so we’d like to get every single one of them using the app.

As somebody who’s grown up in the Silicon Valley mindset of scaling companies from zero to hundreds of millions of users very, very quickly, it just seemed like the right opportunity for me to take on next.

Dave Kearney

CC: Big market.

DK: Exactly.

CC: So, you reached out to Jim and you decided to team up and work on this together. How did you get the product off the ground? What was your next move there?

DK: At that stage we had already done quite a good bit of market research, we had done maybe about nine months of market research. I was interested in different areas of psychology. I had a newborn daughter at the time, so I was researching sleep quite heavily. I don’t know why there was a connection there. But as I say, once I did that search and once I found that there was a gap in the market there, that’s really what kind of made me say, “Hey, this is a problem that needs to be solved.” And it’s a global problem, which was exactly what I was looking for as an entrepreneur, as somebody who’s grown up in the Silicon Valley mindset of scaling companies from zero to hundreds of millions of users very, very quickly, it just seemed like the right opportunity for me to take on next.

“When I see a problem , I want to solve it and I want to create something that makes the world a little bit different.”

CC: We spoke briefly before about you setting up your first company. And I always see with entrepreneurs, they always see a problem and they want to fix it. So, it is very interesting that you don’t have a background in sports, you have a background in tech and you set up your own company beforehand. So, tell me a bit about that experience.

DK: The previous company I founded was a company called Fluidui. It was a tool for designers around the time that the iPhone came into existence about 10 years ago. And what we did was we built a product that helped designers to conceive of new apps and create the designs for new apps as the App store or the Play Store started to explode around the world.

One of the things that we tried to do when building the product is build something that you can complete and then leave it sitting there on the internet, continuing to bring in revenue while you maybe continue to market it, but your development team can kind of go and look at new products and new solutions and continually innovate and do research and development to create new revenue streams for a company.

CC: And the you decided to take a step back and you saw the market and sport-tech and you decided to set up this company. But you’re still involved with your previous company?

It’s one of the toughest journeys that you can go on to try and create something from nothing and bring it to the attention of so many people around the world.

Dave Kearney

DK: I’m still involved in running the first company, but it actually takes a relatively low amount of maintenance to keep it going.

CC: Are you a bit of a start-up addict? Were you like, “Okay, this is going well, I need another challenge”?

DK: A little bit. That’s definitely a question that brings a smile to my face because it’s not always easy, by any stretch of the imagination. It’s one of the toughest journeys that you can go on to try and create something from nothing and bring it to the attention of so many people around the world. So, it’s definitely a challenge. It’s something that you have to be interested in and ready to do. But I think there’s a little part of me that when I see a problem like that, I want to solve it and I want to create something that makes the world a little bit different and hopefully leave the world in a better place.

CC: And the thing about any tech start-up is there’s not a need for an awful lot of tangibles. There’s not a need for an awful lot of money to put into physical things. So, it seems a little bit easier to start up a tech company than other ones. Would you agree with that?

DK: Yeah. Obviously, every company is unique, and every company has its own set of challenges. The opportunity with each company is definitely, definitely different. Part of what I looked for with this particular venture is something that could be developed in a reasonably small timeframe that had a low research and development cost, because while you’re doing research and development, you’re almost always not bringing in any revenue.

So if you think about the difference between a more traditional company, somebody setting up a shop versus setting up a start-up, you’ve got this initial research and development overhead, which might take six months, might take a year to get a product into market. And all the time you’re paying for that all along and there’s no guarantee that it will work. So, you’ve got to find something that is small enough to get out onto the market quickly to try and validate whether or not people actually care about this problem enough to pay you money. So that was definitely an important decision in terms of the area that we chose for her for this particular product.

“We plan to go down the venture investment route. And that’s a decision that we made very, very early on.”

CC: And how much money have you put into this product to date, would you say?

DK: I’d say that the total development costs are probably about €100,000.

CC: Was that from fundraising or did you have some backers?

DK: It was from various different sources.

CC: And have you entered into any partnerships yet?

DK: We haven’t done any external institutional fundraising yet. That’s something that we’re in the process of and hopefully there will be some good news on that in a couple of weeks, but nothing to announce quite yet.

We are a company that plans to go down the venture investment route. And that’s a decision that we made very, very early on. With my previous company, with Fluid, we decided at a certain point that we weren’t going to continue to take venture investment. We got it up to a point where it was doing a certain level of monthly revenue that allowed us to achieve our goals as founders.

For this one, I think my ambition is a little bit greater in the sense that we want to bring in external investors. There’s additional risks associated with that always, but the reward is that you can grow something more effectively, more quickly. The reward is that you can control a market before maybe a competitor comes in and tries to take it away from you. I think for this particular play and this particular opportunity, it’s something that I’m excited to do.

Before Champion’s Mind, Kearney developed another tech start up called Fluid UI. Photo: Bryan Meade.

CC: You talked a bit about markets there. In Ireland it is a hotbed for sport tech companies. There’s a lot of good companies coming forward with some really interesting solutions. You just have to look at STATsports who have this GPS technology that Messi is wearing. So, was this intimidating for you, not having a background in sport and having a background in tech and deciding, ‘okay, I’m going to contribute to this?

DK: No, I don’t think so. I think once you understand yourself as a founder, as an entrepreneur, you understand that you’re always going to have certain strengths and certain weaknesses. And in this particular case I had an area of interest, which was obviously sports technology and sports psychology more specifically. But also looking at that, I knew from the very start that I had to bring in somebody who had a greater degree of knowledge than I did about the venture that we were going to found.

So, we were targeting specifically the US market to start off. That’s obviously a far larger market than Ireland. So, we needed to bring in somebody that was US based, this was Dr Afremow. Very early on, you can shore up your weaknesses and make sure that you’re operating your own personal strengths as a founder or as a CEO.

CC: You officially launched the app six months ago. It’s pretty much still in its infancy. How many people have you gotten onboard with this yet? Have you gotten any athletes using it?

DK: We’ve had quite a few people. I think we have maybe about 10,000 users at the moment, which is still very, very small in the grand scheme of things.

CC: Who’s your most famous athlete?

DK: Where to start?

We had one lady from the British Olympic trampoline team who’s now qualified for the Olympics after downloading the app. We sell both individual licenses to athletes, but we’re also now starting to sell team licenses to colleges and universities.

I don’t think any sport is truly done in isolation. It’s either done competitively as part of a team or as part of a team that has coaches or people around you helping you to be better.

Dave Kearney

Our first team license was to one of the sports teams at Duke University, which is obviously one of the biggest sporting universities in the US. And we’ve got a couple more of those en route or already closed, which is great. I know that a particular Irish rugby player has downloaded the app. I won’t say which one.

CC: Dave Kearney?

DK: Not my namesake.

I think a lot of the other initial download audience that we’ve had has come from Jim’s social media following and his promotional work. It’s people that would have maybe previously read his books or engage with him or worked with him as a sports psychologist. We had another lady that last year tried to run the Boston Marathon and failed, unfortunately, to complete it. Tried it again this year. Used the Champion’s Mind app to prepare herself mentally, including on the morning of the marathon, and did successfully completed this year.

CC: That’s impressive.

DK: Absolutely. A marathon is a long, long distance. What can I say?

CC: Would you say that it’s targeted more towards solo athletes or is it a team based thing?

DK: It’s both. And I think at the moment, our focus is slightly more on teams. There are components and there is information on the App relating to teamwork and how you, as an athlete, can perform better as part of a team. But that team around individual athletes also includes your coaches. It includes other people, even if you’re just running solo. It would include the people that you happen to run with, in a running club or people in your friends or family who are also running with you or your co-workers.

I don’t think any sport is truly done in isolation. It’s either done competitively as part of a team or as part of a team that has coaches or people around you helping you to be better.

“We’re an early stage start-up. We have to focus. We have six people so we can’t go out and tackle every market.”

CC: So, you’re looking elsewhere and not really in Ireland at the moment in terms of market. Or are you looking a bit in Ireland as well?

DK: What we set out to do was to launch and to own the American market first. It’s quite simple. America has 100 times as many people as Ireland does, the market there is much, much bigger. But also college level sports in the US, and even high school level sports, they’re more serious about their athletes and they tend to be much more focused on achieving high levels of performance. Whereas maybe Ireland in Irish early stage, younger athletes don’t tend to have that competitiveness focus early on.

So, we just looked at that and said that it’s an easier market for us to to capture a first. We’re an early stage start-up. We have to focus. We have six people so we can’t go out and tackle every market. We need to be very, very focused on what we do. America, particularly the high school and the college market, is where we’re focused now. But as we grow, as we succeed, as more people come on board, we look to expand that and roll out more content for different types of athletes, different sports, different age categories and so on.

CC: A lot of plans in the future there and very ambitious. So, let’s say we’re five years down the line and we’re sitting back here. Why would you like to be saying to me about Champion’s Mind? Where would you like to be?

DK: The minute that you choose to go down the venture investment route, you’re agreeing that at some point the company’s either going to do one of two things. It’s going to be sold to somebody else or it’s going to float on the stock exchange, because ultimately people invest money in to get that money back at a multiple of it. So one of those two options.

CC: Which one are you going more toward?

DK: Both of them work for me. Put it that way. So if either if either of those two events have happened in the next five years, that’s very much the goal in terms of what we’re trying to do. It’s to build and scale something as quickly as possible and then you find the right acquirer, whether that’s a public flotation or whether it’s more likely to be a trade sale to a larger sporting company. That’s what I’d love to be able to do, is come back and say, hey, I’ve had my exit, I’m able to sit back and relax and maybe start looking at the next generation of companies, whether I’m founding them or whether other people are founding them. That’s my goal.

CC: Onto the next start-up.

DK: Exactly.

CC: Well, last and most important question, do you think this app is the solution to breaking Mayo GAA’s curse and getting them to an All-Ireland victory?

DK: No comment.

CC: Dave, thank you so much.

Dave Kearney and Cait Caden for the podcast with The Currency. Photo: Bryan Meade.

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