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The world of support services for sports is booming. Apps like Strava, MyFitnessCoach, Sweat, and many others have pushed this market beyond the 10 billion annual market cap. All of them do one thing well: they really help people enjoy their favorite sport more.
And that is what Beyond Sports will do for the underserved market of martial arts. Our product, Beyond the Mat, is a mobile platform that aims to revolutionize technical martial arts training.
Augmented Reality & 3D
With the Beyond the Mat platform, Beyond Sports is starting with the fastest-growing martial art: Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, or BJJ, is the most complex of all combat sports. BJJ is best described to non-practitioners as two octopuses being entangled in a fight. That 360° complexity is also why this market is underserved: offering technical knowledge by using images or video is inadequate at best. The rigid 2D nature of images or video does not allow users to see all aspects. Only live training, where students can circle around two BJJ athletes lying in the center of a dojo, allows people to see the full complexity.
Augmented reality, or AR, is interactive, controllable, and can be experienced from any angle. This new medium’s characteristics allow it to be looked at from all sides, advance or reverse animations, and use it to create an educational platform that is best described as DuoLingo, but for martial arts.
What does great mobile AR look like? We'll let you be the judge of that:
The benefits of a new medium
By bringing innovative video-game technology into this market, Beyond Sports opens up a pathway to many new possibilities.
Duolingo-like education: AR and 3D visualization allow Beyond the Mat to turn every move into a multi-step exam with adaptable levels of complexity and detail. Technical education is turned into fun, bite-size daily lessons (5 to 10 minutes) that constantly test the user’s knowledge, allowing him to advance to more complex things only when he is ready.
Support for all languages: Just as with video-games, the AR medium allows Beyond Sports to offer education in any language. And by doing so, Beyond the Mat unlocks tons of non-English markets.
Unlocking the kids market: Being able to do short 5- to 10-minute daily sessions in all Western languages also means opening up BJJ education to all kids and youth around the world. A survey towards that group showed that more than 50% of parents would pay to subscribe their kid to such a support app.
Fix a customer's pain: To create the Beyond the Mat business model, Beyond Sports did extensive research and talked to both practitioners and BJJ educators. As both have a clear ‘pain’ they are looking to relieve. Kid & white belt practitioners face a massive challenge in getting to grips with this complex sport. And BJJ educators lose up to 1/3rd of their training time explaining moves and correcting students’ mistakes. Beyond the Mat’s approach to the market fixes both.
A free core offering: BJJ is a complex sport with tons of moves and variations. Yet, it also has a set of core moves that form the basis of everything. Beyond the Mat will be a freemium platform, offering a system that allows trainers to create their club, connect BJJ practitioners, and create a flow of lessons helping students get the basics right and maximize their time on the mat.
Convert to subscribers: This approach will create a broad layer of non-paying users that will be constantly enticed to hop beyond the basic free path, sign up for the €2 subscription, and unlock a wealth of personalized BJJ training supported by world-class gamification. The team behind Beyond Sports contains videogame industry veterans and experts in gamification. Mechanics like ‘one week free trial’ periods, friends lists that connect free users to subscription owners, and much more will be integrated to grow our subscriber base.
Everyone benefits: While Beyond the Mat is built to be used by both educators and their students, individual users within a club that does not use Beyond the Mat have even more reason to be happy. As they will be more technically prepared for training than all of their fellow students. Any BJJ practitioner that uses Beyond the Mat will always have a clear advantage over non-users.
Why this is stronger than a traditional app:
On top of the Duolingo approach, offering a wide array of languages and unlocking the BJJ kids market, the Beyond the Mat platform has even more underlying characteristics that make this venture much stronger than the average mobile app.
Beyond Sports has acquired an exclusive license to Tropos AR's leading mobile augmented reality technology. As a strategic technology partner, Tropos AR provides ready-to-deploy AR components that reduce development costs by an estimated 70%. Beyond Sports exclusivity deal covers all combat sports, so no competing entity can leverage Tropos AR's technology.
The deal with Tropos AR also grants Beyond Sports access to Tropos AR's offshore development capacity at reduced rates, nearly tripling the effective development output compared to Western European teams.
Moreover, by using AR instead of video, Beyond the Mat stores only lightweight animation and language files in the cloud—cutting cloud traffic costs by over 99%. This efficiency allows us to offer lower subscription fees while delivering a more advanced and immersive learning experience.
Beyond the Mat's secret weapon: gamification.
Not only does the team behind Beyond the Mat comprise of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu fanatics, several of those fanatics are also videogame industry veterans, and specialise in gamification. They will create a never-ending string of digital rewards (Both AR and non AR), that drive usage of the platform. Not only will users be motivated to use the service on a daily basis, they will also be rewarded for convincing fellow club-members to sign up.
"True 'gamification' is actually the anticipation of a reward. It is anticipation that triggers the brain's dopamine system and motivates people to take action. Our Tropos AR SDK technology contains ready-to-go Gamification and reward systems, that are on par with those found in PlayStation, Xbox or PC." - Sven Van de Perre - Gamification Expert
Because all BJJ clubs have a social media presence, and practically every club member follows those channels, today’s digital marketing tools allow us to precisely target BJJ consumers, as well as contact club owners directly.
Beyond the Mat’s marketing plan: The team built a database of all clubs worldwide and will strategically target club owners in regions that are dense in BJJ clubs and practitioners. Offering supportive documentation for club owners and trainers and special offers for practitioners to achieve traction. Once traction in a certain region is obtained, Beyond the Mat gradually scales down the extras as they prepare to target a new region. This allows the company to reinvest part of its² subscription income to acquire new users and gradually scale up the speed at which new users are added to the platform.
TAX SHELTER
45%
Investments in this company benefit from a 45% personal income tax reduction. Read more…
A remaining amount of €114,500 is available for the Tax Shelter benefit.
