He Grew His AI Startup From 5 to 2,300 Clients - The Content Strategy That Crushes

If you want your content to build real pipeline using social media, you're gonna wanna hear this conversation. Josh Connell had no brand recognition in the market, didn't have any industry relationships, and he had a product that most of his future customers didn't even know they needed. In one year, he went from 5 pilots to over 2,300 customers, and more are signing up every single day. Today, he is pulling back the curtain on how he did this Welcome, Josh. How are you doing today?

Good morning, Raj. I'm doing great. Thank you.

I want to get into how you actually got the idea for Impact Soccer. You spent years at Black Sky working on satellite imagery, looking down on the Earth, pattern movements of humans, and then you're sitting on the sidelines watching your kid's soccer game and a light bulb went off. What happened there?

You actually literally explained it perfectly. Basically, I was camera dad for a lot of those years, watching my son play. For Arlington's team here in the DC metro area and others previous to that and internationally and working on satellite imagery and automated processing of that data that we were providing both from a commercial perspective and from a defense and intelligence perspective.

Mm-hmm.

And I just thought there's huge gaps in what we see coming from the cameras that I'm literally sitting there operating and the data that is going to be useful for teams and clubs anywhere, including myself. And so I decided to put down the satellites and pick up a different shingle, if you will, and put the two of those acumen together. So my own experience in working the sidelines and of course working the metaphoric ones in the satellite industry.

Well, I've been a soccer dad myself and my kids play travel soccer too. And I know when you're on the sidelines, the parents are yelling at the kids and the coaches are yelling at the kids. And when they're much younger, the kids don't actually know who to listen to. I don't know if that gets much better when they get older, but usually, hopefully they're listening to the coach more. And so you have this idea, you're seeing blank areas where the kids should be running and you're thinking to yourself, there's a market for this or what? Because that sounds almost really niche when you describe it.

Yeah, it's probably just two steps back a little bit in terms of what you're describing, but that's where we ended up going. What is being analyzed on the field is only about 5% of the actual data in the film. So there's lots of things that are happening all the time, and you've got 22 moving objects being all the players plus the ball, plus the referees, plus the, the weather, whatever else is going on. And it's very difficult for people to interpret and extrapolate all that information out of it. So what, what we had was this almost an identical problem of what I was working in my work life. And, and then when we would look at those highlights, those moment statistics, whatever was being provided back, we realized there was just a huge gap in the amount of data that was actually being analyzed in order to tell us how good the players were, tell us how good the team structure was, what the shape of the, of play is, right? There's like lots of things that can get analyzed, but that weren't. So it was really just as simple as this isn't happening. We know that it's not happening because I'm literally using this stuff and I talked to other crazy soccer parents like myself. And one of whom decided, you know what, I would write a check for this. This is really interesting. I know this problem. And so that's how we began starting the business was around this concept of how do we solve this missing percent of what's not being analyzed and provide it back to anybody who has film and access to film.

Was that a niche that people were even thinking about? I need to know how off-the-ball movement gets measured or other things? Is that something that people are thinking, gee, I wish I had more information about it? Or was this one of those things where when you presented the idea or even maybe a quick mockup to them, they're like, oh, I need that thing for the individual, both players or parents or coaches or recruiters, agents, anybody looking at it, they understood intuitively, I'm not seeing everything.

Right. They didn't know that it was an explanation around, let's say, off-the-ball play or what you want to count it as. As since you were a soccer dad yourself, you get this. The players only touch the ball for about 2 to 2 and a half minutes per match. So out of a 90-minute full match, right, there's only a fraction of the information that you're getting on how they're doing. And so we're able to fill in that, the rest of that gap, not just with the stats that everybody expects to get, like shots and passes and goals and corners and fouls and 50-50 balls, but all the rest of it that's missing as well, right? Like, yeah, how are the players influencing the game? That's really where we're headed.

So let's talk about the marketing strategy behind this, because I think that's the most interesting piece of this puzzle. You went from 5 people, 5 pilot teams about a year ago, just a little over a year ago, and now you're getting teams signing up every single day. You got to the tune of 2,300 already. And what was the strategy behind it? Channel partnerships? What kind of bets did you make? Which social media platforms did you choose? And then we're gonna start talking about what kind of content you started producing for those.

Okay, great. As I'd like to and want to emulate, I've listened to a lot of your work in the past and that is not to shelf put you in any context, but we got very fortunate with some search engine optimization around specific keywords. And whether everybody wants to admit it or not admit it, Google is still the king of the hill in terms of search and all the rest of it. And while—

Yeah, it really is. Yeah.

AI and the ChatGPTs and Claude's and Gemini's are also important in that context, people still trust to go to a place like Google to find what they're looking for. And we've been very well indexed without spending any money for a lot of key phrases that are associated with what we do, which is using artificial intelligence, computer vision, machine learning, optical character recognition, a number of technologies in order to produce what we do for customers. And then to get indexed for those keywords because of the content we have on the website, because of the actual content that the customers are getting. And then I think what the customers are actually now doing with the content where they're taking it and sharing it and sending it. And so we've got this nice kind of bubbling inflow of direct traffic now that Google is rewarding us with for really important keyword phrases, ones like, you know, AI soccer analytics, for example, or soccer video analytics or soccer AI video analytics, whatever they might be, right? Some combination of those, of that phraseology. And we're beating companies consistently that have raised a lot more money than us. With literally an arrow website that GoDaddy gave us. We know how to do it. And a lot of it just has to do with also having a product that works. That's ultimately, I think, underneath what's also driving a lot of this is we're not telling people to share it and things like that. They just are because it's doing what we told them to do.

Josh, you said a lot here and I'm going to unpack a bit of it. And you talk about SEO and I am a big fan of it because it still works. You've got a $10 a month GoDaddy website, like you said. And so you're now getting a lot of traffic to the site because of the keywords that you chose and the content that you created around it. So let's unpack what that means. How did you identify which keywords you wanted to pursue? Was there actual research done on the keywords, such as the terms, the volume, the difficulty level, or was it just something that you were thinking about? Or was it something that you started hearing in conversations when you started sharing? What you were doing with other people?

A little bit of everything that you just mentioned, and without repeating it, go through some of it. We just started to write— I literally went online and created the website with the help of a designer to just get some things in place to really explain what we were doing and what we were trying to solve as a problem. And then over time, it's morphed into, again, keywords that we can track now a little bit more consistently. And through the content that we're creating. Whenever we talk to people, it's about analytics underneath it that were automated, that there's no humans involved in producing any of the results. And so that it's a very quick turnaround time and talking about as much of the differentiators as much as the specific keywords we want to target. Do we want to be number 1 for AI soccer? Sure. But soccer in US context means something different than in English context in England where they call it football, right? So there's some challenges even with the keywords that we've gone after. That said, it's provided us a nice open window with which to work with domestic people who, that's naturally what they're going to type in. So we're not trying to boil the ocean with going after the biggest keywords or the most important ones right out of the gate. It's let's build up what we have over time and maybe then we will get the kind of reward from Google and others. Out the other side that, that will then rank us. And oddly what's happened is I didn't, we, I don't know that we had a specific strategy for, for AI, like using Claude and, and let's say ChatGPT, but now for some of those same keywords, we are being indexed inside of them. So clearly they are using things like Google to feed their own beast in terms of their own results and trying to match what what is a very accurate sort of question-answer for their customers. Yeah.

And there are like specific techniques you can build into your SEO, such as putting in an FAQ on your page that answers the questions, because that makes it very easy for the AI bots to digest. And also lists work better also. But you said something interesting, and that is you're not going after the word AI soccer, which is people think that these big terms is what they wanted to get ranked for. I know accounting firms that, oh, I'd love to be ranked for the word accounting. I'm like, you actually don't want to, because you don't know if someone is looking, in your case, AI soccer, you don't know if they're looking for a video game or are they looking for actual analytics, which is what your business sells. And so your strategy of using a longer tail keyword, which is just tacking on more words, becoming much more niche for the term itself, gives you a significantly higher capacity to actually get ranked. And then—

not to get ranked, but also to, to convert. So our conversion rate, when they type in, let's say again, AI soccer analytics or analysis or whatever the phraseology or video analysis that they're looking for, then they get to the site and literally that is what we do. So it's very easy for them in this sort of one-click path to then create an account. We've also made it a lot easier to create an account where you can use Google as a registration, both to log in and to sign up.

Yeah.

And then it's one click, right? We don't need to reinvent the wheel for registering to become a customer. Some people do want to use their business accounts related to their soccer clubs or academies. And that's great because then we get even more detailed information, but we're not requiring it. And I think a lot of people a long time ago told me, oh my gosh, you don't want to have Gmail up there. It's not going to do anything or it's going to be, you know, lower quality. And it's no way, man, these people take this email address with them everywhere. Are you kidding?

That's true. Especially when they change clubs, if there's a coach that really likes them.

Yeah. Especially if they change clubs, right. Or they go somewhere else. Now they can take us with them. This is much more portable.

That's a really, that's an interesting tidbit there too. Let's get into some of the other strategies because SEO clearly is working for you. And I'm glad to hear it is because I know it works. It works for us. It works for so many people that we work with as well. Let's talk about some of your social media strategies. Now you picked Instagram as your primary. Location where you're going to start posting things. Describe to me how you chose Instagram and then what kind of material did you start posting?

So we, we chose Instagram and LinkedIn, just thinking that the two would be our primary go-to markets. YouTube was an, obviously is another consideration for us, but we have such large files. It's most people are not going to come in and watch a whole, you know, 2-hour batch, right? So we let, we kind of leave YouTube off to the side for the time being. Customers push folks that direction. But for Instagram, it's very bite-sized. It's short. There's an enormous audience there. The target demographic for us is a little bit younger than maybe most of, let's say, the coaches or parents and others involved. But it's also the one that spreads the quickest in terms of its, you know, sort of follow-on reach, sharing, hitting the likes, and the rest of the engagement is is very easy for people to, to dive in with. So the content that we started with was related to, in the beginning, just like, what are we doing and how are we doing it and who are we, right? Like an introduction, an introduction of the service, if you will. And it's kind of morphed into, come join us. There's lots of people who are coming in and signing up, right? Like you're not the only one. Within the sport, and I don't know if you remember this or experienced it, but there's a lot of this kind of lemming-like attitude for all sorts of things, whether it's buying the same camera that everybody's using or going to the same place to get jerseys made or finding a similar sponsor, you know, who could sit on the jerseys as well. There's a lot of that where they don't want to have to reinvent the wheel themselves. They just kind of want to follow along with what what a lot of other people are doing. And so that's been a big part of the tactic for what we publish on things like Instagram and elsewhere is come join us, all these other people have, look at the partnership we created, or in the case of a case study, hey, you probably look like New Jersey Crush, which is the one that we did a big case study with at the end of 2025. And then this is the type of content that's very personalized and a little bit more direct. To try and connect with those types of customers. And we've seen it been successful.

I know what you're talking about. When you first started posting, I remember seeing the post of the actual videos of players and open spaces. And I, not being a soccer coach, I coached when they were 5 years old, but not like anything that's required a lot of intelligence, that, that I didn't fully understand what the spaces were, but a professional coach would totally get that, Right. And so that was the audience you're going after. And I did see that now a lot of your posts are, we just signed up 500 teams, 1,000 teams, we just signed up 2,000 teams. And that almost creates FOMO, fear of missing out, because if you're thinking, wow, what are all these teams doing? And to your point, this lending effect really like kicks into high gear when you see that many teams signing up. And there's, is there a competitor out there that's doing something similar to you?

Sure. Well, it's interesting. Our frenemies, competitors, all the rest are morphing in this direction that we're headed in, at least on the analysis of the games themselves. So we do have a number of very big competitors in the market space, which I think maybe would scare some entrepreneurs or scare some investors or things like that. But to me, it signals there's a market here. We know there's a market here and there's actually quite a bit of money that are going into youth sports.

And when you say competitors, are you talking soccer specifically or just Youth sports.

Yeah. Youth sports at a higher level and then down to soccer itself. There's just a handful of folks in this space that are doing what we do or something similar to what we do. And without speaking, let's say negatively or poorly about competitors, we're the only ones that we know in the space that are doing it in a completely automated fashion and turning it around very quickly. So most of our customers get results within 4 to 6 hours. And in some cases even quicker depending on the length of the film.

That's pretty neat.

Yeah. And if you're at a tournament over the weekend, you could play 2 games in the same day. I don't know how you're gonna get data back from a lot of other resources out there other than ours. And I think it's also one of the reasons why, why we separate ourselves from others in the market specifically that are doing analytics or they've got people that are hand tagging and labeling the matches. That's great. But we're trying very hard to not go down that path and to make sure that we maintain this sort of 100% autonomous solution for folks.

When you look at the content that your competitors are posting and you compare that to what you're posting, what's the difference?

I think the difference is, again, it's easy to get lost in the weeds. We do some things the same and they do some things that we do. Where it's like, we're gonna give you the basic scorecard of the match. That's a very consistent thing that we run into where a lot of people will say, you know, how are you any different? And it's—

and this is in terms of what you're posting on Instagram, you mean? Yeah.

Correct. And then, and so we've decided like maybe actually the way to do this is to continue to just create FOMO till we get till some benchmark numbers. Once we've crossed into the thousands, which technically we're in right now, we don't really need to justify the, some parts of the FOMO. We can just say thousands of users every time we make a post. And that'll help differentiate us from some of the competitors that are out there.

Yeah. That's, let me get into your messaging. The, the positioning line that you came up with, I'd like to know how you came up with this because it's genius. Upload chaos, download clarity. Oh, that's, well, that nails it.

I'm gonna give credit to an investor, and I don't know that he wants to be named, so I'm going to leave him blank for now.

Okay.

It is linguistically a really good description of what is actually happening, and it's problem-solution encapsulated in 4 words. We were all the analytics with a comma, and then finally, that was our phrase for a long time, but we decided to swap it out because this is much better. It's exactly what's happening, right? Somebody gets a film, they're Presented with the— I have to analyze it. How do I do that? If I'm a parent, I've gotta go now in and go find the one sets of moments my kid was playing. If I'm a coach, I've gotta analyze the entire thing or an assistant coach, and I've gotta knock that out beforehand and come up with lots of results. So how do I do that? And there's some software packages out there that'll help you, but it's still a lot of work. And there is that chaotic component to it, which is I don't know where to start.

Yeah.

And then, yeah. And then on the delivery side, it just made sense to have something like, no, this is clean.

This is yours.

It's finished. You don't need to do anything. You can go pay your taxes or go get the mail or whatever you want to do in between, take out the garbage.

And the thing I like about it, it's got an emotional hook because it's not a product explanation, even though it does that in 4 words. But what it does, it's got this emotional hook that addresses a very specific pain point. That people can understand very quickly. And so is that something that you just have only on your website? How do you use that messaging? How do you use that tagline?

We've just started to really use it. Literally, it was loaded, I think, 2 to 3 weeks ago. And now we're going to start to move it into other areas on social media and elsewhere in order to keep hammering people over the head with it, right? You've got all this chaos. We're here to help you organize it and then give you a lot more understanding. Behind it. So that's kind of where this is going to go to in the, in the long run, which is with our off-the-ball strategy, how we're going to show that to customers. We have 5 stats that they can use right now. And then we're obviously going to be, we're going to be adding a lot more.

How does that affect, as you start to add more features, how does that affect the content that you put on your website and the SEO that you're getting? Describe to me what a typical article approach would be like. Do you just sit down and start pecking at the keyboard or? Is there a little more methodology behind it?

It's, I don't want to give myself that much credit that I have this giant method sitting behind me, but I think a lot of it has to do with how we allow and enable the sharing of the content itself for the customer so that they can take the information and they can republish it however they wish. But we start with like teasing people, hey, here's this new toy you get to play with. If you're a premium customer, you get all sorts of bells and whistles along with it. And it's an encouragement item to get them to obviously pay a little bit more, but also to give them more and to give them more reason to share. And so that's what we're then tracking afterwards. Like how popular are the items that we're giving them to create, then being sent around the shoehorn to bring other people back to the system and register with the platform or just even time on site and looking and saying, oh, okay, it was an off the ball play that was related to passing lanes as an example. And now they want to share that information more than they maybe want to share other information. And that can inform how we're doing search engine optimization specifically, let's say, or social media posts.

So you put together an article. Do you intentionally tag it appropriately with section headings, like keyword density, things like that? Are you doing that intentionally or is it just the content's so unique that it automatically gets indexed?

I think it's probably a little bit more of the latter than the former. Again, I would love to say that we're spending lots of time planning this out, but you remember what it's like running a startup and you know me underneath this hat, there's no hair left. So you've gotta, you've gotta balance your time appropriately. And for me, it's been, let's just get it, let's just get it in place related to getting the word out about what we're doing specifically. And let's let kind of nature take over a little bit. We're either going to see success or failure with public relations releases specifically, but we do make sure that we have a public relations release. It's then republished on the website. It's then on social media. There is a little bit of cadence on that planning part that you talked about that we're a little bit better at.

Yeah. And you're the guy that's managing all of this because you're, I don't think you have a large marketing team or anything like that, correct?

True. Although I'm very soon about to hand off portions of the big portions, if not the entire thing, to others in particular, because I can't do it all.

I can't do it all. It's too much, right?

It's too much. Yeah. And again, we've, I put out the same challenge to anybody coming in to take over, even for lots of companies that have approached us with marketing solutions in place. If you can beat me on social media. If you can beat me on indexing for a keyword and you can prove that you can do it, I'm all for it. I will be glad to spend the investor dollars in order to ferret it out. But so far, companies with literally tens of millions of dollars more than us haven't. And so we are very comfortable and very confident in at least what we've started with to date. And we'll continue down that path because it hasn't done anything but net us good results. And we haven't paid for any positions, just to be clear, on Google for sponsored links to date.

But that's, uh, organic is really one of the best ways to go. And now that Google is indexing a lot of social media, I think that's making it much more important to be on social media. And I love the fact that you're taking your tool and allowing it to be a viral component of your product marketing as well, where people who are using it want the clips to be able to post on their social. And of course that just boosts your brand recognition. So you get a really nice effect there. Let's talk about some other marketing strategies that you've deployed. Channel partnerships. So you recently announced a partnership with XBOTGO. And so what is that doing for you? First of all, how did you find them? How did you get them as a partner? And was some of your prior marketing useful in being able to land them, or was it more about your product?

It's interesting. So we got A combination of both of those things and then some luck. I—

it is the most underrated part of building a business.

Luck. It literally is. I would love to, again, espouse that this is all written down somewhere and it's all in this grand sheet that could be uploaded and I can look like the ultimate wizard of early-stage business. But what I wanted to harp on with the luck part is I was on LinkedIn. I was trying to find a camera company that would say yes to what we were doing. And, and so I knocked on all the doors and of course a lot of them were like, yeah, we're good. We're busy working on our own thing. And then, and then a handful of them now have come to fruition, not just the one that we announced, but we have two others that are already essentially agreed in principle. We just have to wait to publicly announce them. But XBOT was the first one that was really intrigued and they went ahead and did a test on all of our software, which I thought was great. Hey, you guys can stand on this high shelf for what you say you're doing and how well you're doing it. We've looked at all the other ones out in the market space and they of course are much further along in their life cycle as a business than we are. But they came back with the test results and we've essentially blew everybody else out of the water.

So let me get this straight. You reached out to them on LinkedIn? You found what, like a VP of something?

No, I reached out to the CEO. His name's David. He's a lovely guy. And I said—

What did you say to him?

Huh?

What did you say to him on LinkedIn? Because he didn't write.

I can't, I don't remember the exact phraseology. I could go back and look, but I basically just said, hey, I'm running this startup. We do automated analytics. We know that you don't have any for what you're working on. Would you mind if we help supplement what you're doing and maybe for your audience, or at least give us a test? And he was like, okay, we've been looking around for something like this for a long time, we're happy to rake you over the coals and see what you're made of. And they did that and they actually came back with this fully ferreted report that had graphs and an entire dissection of where we were doing well, where we weren't doing as well. And then they basically came back and said, look, you just, with flying colors, you're far and away above the rest. Timing, automation, all the rest of it. You're just way quicker than anything that's out there and very accurate. What do we need to do to carve something up together? And that was, it was as simple as that. Then all of a sudden I'm on a plane, we meet in California and we're having a lovely dinner with my CFO and them and the leadership team. And that was it.

That's fantastic. And what did this mean for you as a company? What did it bring to you in terms of new clients, business?

I think both new clients, business, and, and a lot of legitimacy, right? Technically they could be looked at competitively in some ways, right? Because they do. Automated ball tracking, so their software will find the ball and the camera will literally pan and move associated with it, which is incredible work. And it, but that's actually very helpful to us in terms of the, what we do for a solution as far as the analytics are concerned. And so that is a way for us to broad stroke a relationship together. The other thing that happened, and this was just fortuitous timing, was we found a case study in New Jersey. And then aligned ourselves with them and they were using Xbox cameras. And so we said, hey, look, we'll, we'll at a discounted rate, we'll give you our services. And then can we study what impact this is actually making for you, pun intended with our name Impact Soccer? And they said, yeah, we would love it. They got rid of a camera system that they were using or had been using for a number of years. They adopted our camera, or excuse me, our camera system, they adopted Xbox camera system, and then they adopted our software in relation to it. And then the goal became, can we save them money? Forget everything else. We, we don't know whether we're gonna save 'em time. We don't know whether we're gonna save 'em energy. We don't know whether we're gonna make it harder or easier. We think this should be a heck of a lot easier given what we do. And can we save them money literally that they could publish and I, we approached New Jersey Crush with the idea and they said, we love it. We'd love to do it. Let's do it. So we signed up and they signed up for something like 400 matches or 500 matches for the season to cover not just one team, but multiple teams inside of the academy itself.

Hmm.

And then we just had the coaches, hey, when the match is finished, either load it to YouTube or send us the file directly, copy and paste the link. Again, you wipe your hands and walk away. And when you get the results, tell us how it went. That's all we need. And at the end of this season, can we save you a certain dollar figure in wrapping together this glued-together solution? And it worked. We, our goal was to save them 50%. We ended up saving 56% for the entire year. And that's including the analytics, which from our side is, is great because it proves out we don't care what camera you have. We don't care what you're currently doing, right? You could walk up to the field and not have anything and have one of these. But at least you'll have the results that you have to have in order to make it all work for you. And that's what we did. And so that case study became a call to action, not just for, for us, but also for XBOT and for this youth market that's constantly being bombarded with offers and opportunities that aren't really solving a lot of their problems.

Let me break this down because when you go to a team like New Jersey Crush, sure. You mentioned 400 teams below that. So those are feeder teams. So those are, that's like the youth academy?

No, for each age group it was 400 matches.

Okay.

400 matches. So each team plays 10 or 15 matches per season.

Yeah.

And then if you add those up, let's say to the 10 teams from U19 to U9, all of them get most of the matches that are there. And then there's some excess matches that they could use for tournaments and things like that. So basically covered the entire academy for a year.

Yeah. You started out targeting youth sports. Now colleges are talking to you.

Yeah.

Pro teams are talking to you. Yeah. Each requires a very different messaging strategy. How are you dealing with that?

It's a great question. I think the hardest part, or one of the hardest parts that we bring or that we're trying to bring in terms of our messaging to all of those parties is we know you have a data problem. You got too much of it to analyze yourself. Even if you're Manchester United and you're running the academy program, I, I'm just picking on them, but I'm a Spurs fan, so I get to pick on other teams. We know that they have an entire academy of teams and players that go all the way up to that, again, the highest leagues in the world. They don't have the capacity to analyze everything that's in there or even go after recruiting for other players on other teams as well. So there's just an enormous amount of video data that never gets touched. As long as we can get that kind of starter agreement page, then we can craft how we're selling to colleges and universities, leagues, potentially broadcasters. That's where we're hoping to target next. And of course these very high-end professional teams as well.

That is a, that is a really interesting marketing strategy because to your point, scouts have to go out and take a look at the matches. They don't have time to go to all the matches, but if you got data that says, hey, you should really be attending these 3 matches because this player that we've spotted is going to be playing, that saves them so much more time.

Raj, if you're bored, you're welcome to jump on in here and help out whenever. No, it's exactly it. It's a time-money argument and then the time-money argument is actually amplified, I think, at the professional level. That's not for me projecting who I want to sell to on this podcast, but that is literally, it's a bigger problem and it's a more valuable one if they get right or wrong. Did you do all the work right? Did you analyze everything that could have been analyzed? And if the answer's no, and you make a million-dollar bet on a player and they weren't who he or she was hopefully going to be, Maybe it had something to do with the fact that you didn't get through the analysis of all of the video and all of the information you could have. And that's where we, again, are trying to gap fill the market.

And I think to that point, a player could just have a bad game. And if that's the game that the scout's at, that's it. Unfortunately, your future is not going to be in that direction. Whereas if they had the collective information from all the other games, they would have a much better insight. And that would also theoretically remove coach bias. Because oftentimes coaches channel a favorite player to a professional coach.

I think that one of the— you just highlighted probably the biggest marketing challenge and leap we have to make as a company is dealing with bias. I've done it this way for 25 years or 30 years. And, you know, when I do that, I know what's right or what's wrong.

And it's a very disruptive technology deals with that. Oh my God. I've dealt with it in every business I've run. And I know you have too. So it's not the way we always do it. I know much more because I'm experienced and I've got gray hair, right? Or no hair.

Exactly. And I think the hard part of that bias is, and this is just something coming from a SaaS software background of many years, this is for a sport, right? Like it's supposed to be fun and engaging and entertaining. And as much as it is about winning and losing, and in the case of something like soccer, People often forget there's also a third way, which is a draw. And that is a different dataset that is very difficult for people to get their heads around at times. And so what we're saying to folks, and this is hopefully something that also resonates with them, is we're not here to replace you. We are here to help you, and we are here to try and buffer what you're doing and make it better. And we just know that there's so much of this information and data that you don't literally have time to go through and do. Do diligence on your own, or maybe you're just getting the wrong information because the assistant coach is whispering in your ear about a favorite player that they have. Yeah, that has nothing to do with you. That isn't your fault, or even to a certain degree their fault. You keep playing the players that are out there based on what you have informationally. And so this is, uh, this is meant to level that information gap and understanding gap for anybody that has the film.

You have compared what you do to Moneyball. And Moneyball is that old movie where Brad Pitt and Jonah— Jonah— Yes. Last name, Grossman.

Jonah— Yes. Yes.

They went— it was a great movie all about using data. And that was what you just described is something that coaches resisted forever. No, we don't do it that way. And they came in and said, no, I think you can actually do it with stats. And so you're effectively doing this with stats. How is that messaging resonating? Do you use that messaging when you talk to people about what you do?

It is. And I think it's easy for them to understand because they've also heard it used as whatever equivocation for either other products and services that are out there already in the market. It's great because it's in sports and it's a movie that everybody kind of loves and enjoys. And even as somebody who grew up in New York as a Yankee fan, watching the kids from Boston finally win one. All right, fine. We give it up, but, but it proves the point, right? That there's a famous scene where I don't remember if it's Jonah or if it's Brad who's arguing with somebody else at the table. And they said, he's got like a pretty girlfriend or a big butt or whatever it was that they were arguing about as the reason that they should go after this player. And it's, oh my God, that still exists. That's really still a thing with a lot of people. And I think even if the Parents are the ones that end up, let's say, being the largest acquirer of our services. They want to get the information about their kids, right? It's super important to them and it's super personal. And it doesn't matter whether it nets out into, you know, recruited to a Division I school or a professional career. There's a lot of people who just really want to know that they're being seen and that they're being heard and that there is a chance and that there is an opportunity and a way to benchmark appropriately because the, The Brad Pitt scene happens all too often because people go, ah, it's just whatever, we'll go with what we know. And that's, that's not a great way to, to, to teach and to benchmark. And especially as you talked about the problem for professional teams. Yeah. I don't think you want to be doing that with people's invested dollars or ticket sales as a gamble. You need to try and ferret out the bias wherever possible. So going to watch the player is great. Going to watch the player all the time is impossible. So this is again, a, hopefully a solution that's easier.

Let me talk about your website for a second. You've got a lot of teams scrolling across the top, big brand names, and then you've got AWS and it feels a little out of place with all the other professional teams. Talk to me about that messaging, 'cause it carries a different signal than that's more enterprise technology, and then you've got other teams. How does that flow?

I think it's, I think it's again, hopefully providing comfort for people when they get to our website. So whether that's customers who come in, oh, okay, they're somehow involved with Amazon. Yeah.

Okay.

Whether that's partners, oh, these guys are serious. They're, they got some development money to build the next product. Great. They must know what they're doing. Right? Because I know that brand already, and there's a lot of this kind of FOMO brand association that happens. So that's the whole point of us publishing it is, of course, that we were given rights to do so. And we're really proud and excited about it. It's, this is very real. They see a pathway for us on our product roadmap that they want to participate in and happily give us lots of development credits and other resources that we can use to push the next version of what we have coming. So it's really exciting.

Let me pivot now to awards. You were recently recognized 2026 AI Star by DCA Live, which is a local DC area group. Congrats on that. I'm wondering though, your actual buyers are club directors, head coaches, youth academy managers, probably never heard of DCA Live. And talk to me about any kind of award PR recognition strategy. You can see from some of the gold I got back there, it's worked for us for B2B. How does that work for, for your line of business?

It works either way. It certainly works to help with repetition with something like, let's say, search engine optimization and getting ranked for keywords and the like, and just the exposure in general, right? The more eyeballs you have, the more of it turns into a funnel that hopefully turns into sales, marketing opportunities, cross-marketing opportunities and the like. So I was very excited to get the award. It's always nice to get recognition for what you're doing. And in that regard, I'm very happy that we can reuse it as another strategy for go-to-market and proving to anybody, hey, we're here, we're real. This isn't us telling you, it's third-party validation. I think that's very important. And it maybe helps take out bias from them about who we are and who we're not.

I found that is an amazing strategy actually to work. It works really well to build that credibility and brand recognition. Josh, tell me about what is not working. What did you try? What was a marketing bet that you made? Maybe it was a positioning line, a positioning decision, looked right strategically. Maybe ChatGPT said, attaboy, way to go. This is a great idea. Like it does. And, but it didn't pay off.

Sure. So we had an article on our website and I think it's still in there now that's essentially pointing the finger at not doing this. And while we were calling it out, if you will, to use sort of the nomenclature of the day, but it's not really a way to engender a lot of trust. I think it's a way to be very honest with people about what's happening and what's not happening. And so. The results from that particular post in particular, that was on social media, it was as a release, it was again on our website. We did all the things, the same things that we did before. It helped to drive awareness, but it wasn't really a teaching moment that we could either teach our customer, potential customers about, or ourselves, other than we learned, don't do that. Actually, that's not a great way to engender new business.

More detail. What was that exact thing?

I'm gonna have to pull it up because I don't want to get it wrong. And it was in our blog. The story was about the bus is boarding, basically like if you don't get on, you're gonna get left behind. And the long and the short of it was everybody's using AI or people are gonna start to use AI and we are a solution for you to do this. We're not trying to be negative while doing it, but I think the connotation came off the wrong way. For people, but this was more about saying you can't afford to mismatch analysis. It's very critical for running a soccer team or a club or even a youth one successfully, right? If you're not spending the time to do this, and most coaches just don't have the time or the capability. And so I think the negative portion of the article certainly outweighed the positive benefits of us saying, yeah, but this is how we can help and this is why it works. I think one too many people read the tagline that was a quote from Sir Alex Ferguson, who's a very famous coach. And it was, "Dynastic greatness rests not in tradition, but in apostasy, not in slavish replication, but in violent mutation." And I think people were like, "What are we doing? We're just playing soccer." And it maybe it came across the wrong way or that it was meant for an audience that's a little bit higher up. The latter where they have to do the analytics and the rest of it. And they're just constantly weighing pricing games or pricing strategies relative to us.

It sounds like that message was designed for the people who show up to games wearing a suit in the suites versus the players grabbing a beer and enjoying the game. Yeah.

And that's, and that, and it's the, and it's where it's funny. We go for our investor pitches. We try and tell the investors the biggest market that we're going after. It's not that there's anything wrong with those clubs at the top. We would love greatly love. If Barcelona, anybody is listening to this podcast, call us. We're happy to serve you guys. But that's not really who is going to get the biggest benefit from us because they're already at the top. And in the sport where you get teams that get relegated, they lose their position. My favorite club is about to maybe go through some things. They have no reason to share their data with anyone. They want to keep everything bespoke and inside and very tightly apt up. It's all the rest of the ones that are trying to get in, and that's the larger audience that we're going after.

Mm-hmm. Josh, I'm gonna flip over to a rapid round. So real quick responses if you could. You ready?

I'm ready. Rapid. Fine.

Rapid. What's the best decision that you've made in the last 12 months at Impact Soccer? Ooh.

I think being open to letting people interview us directly about what we're doing and how we're doing it, à la, you yourself and others. We've had really good third-party validation of what we're doing. And why we're here to do it, it's really simple. We're just here to help.

Sounds like you're enjoying it too. So I know you've always been very passionate about soccer. What's one software tool that you just would not give up because you use it every single either day or week?

Yeah, obviously G Suite we use for email and all the rest of it. And I think it's just very important to have a flexible platform for that kind of software and collaborative software creation. I'm going to say on the training of the data side, we use a number of things that are out in the market, TensorFlow and RoboFlow and things like that. Those are other ones where super important for us to have it. On the marketing side, because we're finally just about to start looking like professionals, I don't have anything to list for your audience, unfortunately, but happy that we're going to be, we're looking at a bunch of solutions.

Keep evolving that. What is the biggest myth about AI in sports analytics?

Ooh, good one. The biggest myth is that the art of, that it's artificial intelligence. Most of what people classify as AI is machine learning, is training data, is labeling, is all this kind of non-fun stuff. Artificial intelligence is really about taking all of that information after you've already produced it and then providing results related to it. So that's probably the biggest misnomer out there. And then people say, oh, okay, well, I still want to do it. And it's like, you gotta pay us, you gotta load your film, you gotta get the data right. You gotta do all the other stuff first before you really get to that. So a quick example is we now have a way for people to do predictive. I want to see expected shots, expected goals, expected saves, expected assists, any of the stats that we already produce, which are there about 15 of them?

Mm-hmm.

We can, but you've gotta load 3 films or more first. So that's where our AI and our model can come in and provide that information to you like a professional team would.

Mm-hmm.

That's, but that's a misnomer. Like I think people get cart before horse very often. Yeah. Or they just glue it all together 'cause it's easier to just say AI.

All right. And this question I like because you shared how you got one of your big partners. So LinkedIn or in-person events? Which one does your better customer come from?

The hardest part for, again, marketing people that probably hear this and the rest is we went to big events and we've been very fortunate to have partners to even join us and let us sit at their tables and things like that. It's digital, baby. We're a digital solution. Yeah. At least on the conversion side. And then people self-converting, right? Where they come in, they sign up, haven't talked to them at all. They register, they swipe their credit card, they start loading films. I love waking up on Mondays and going, oh my gosh, there's money in this Stripe account from X number of people that came in to go do that. It's, it's a very powerful thing. And because we're a digital solution, I think it's analogous and a lot easier for people that get it to connect and just do it themselves.

All right. What surprised you the most about your customers?

What surprised me the most? I think two things. One, The, for the customers who already understand what we're doing, how amazingly educated they are about it and how quickly they get off to the races. That's probably the big, been the biggest surprise. It's incredible to watch somebody come in, sign up, put their credit card in, load their first film literally within a minute. And they don't need us. They don't need anything actually. They're, they're gonna get their results in a few hours and they can go do whatever they need to do. That's pretty incredible to see this.

Yeah, very easy to use. I think that onboarding flow is critical to get them up and running fast. Yeah. So last question, what would you tell 30-year-old Josh if he were to start a company all over again? Because you've built a few companies and what would you give as advice to your younger self?

Stay in the gym. Stay in the gym. Don't go, ah, tomorrow or the next day. No, I mean that. I think it's the body-mind health thing is incredibly important. Making sure you take time away from the screens. We're surrounded by these things. Just put them down. Yes, I sell a digital product. Yes, it's automated. Yes, it's like magic. If you ask my grandfather, I know obviously he's passed away a number of years ago, but they would all say the same thing. They would be minds blown. But that should be the reason to get off of it and to take time to go enjoy the real world.

And I love you said that because you're building a tool for sports. So participate in sports or—

Yeah, I know we don't want our customers editing the film. Go back out into the field, dude. Go coach, go do this, go do that. Be outside. That's the whole point. We don't want to replace it with robots. We just want to replace the time you're wasting in front of it with what we have for you.

Josh, thank you so much. You shared a lot about how you're acquiring customers, and a lot of these things are a great playbook. And I love the very simple one of You just found the CEO of a partner you wanted to go after and you sent them a note and it worked out. And next thing you've got some pretty big customers. So fantastic. Good job, Raj. All right.

Raj, always a pleasure. I really appreciate it. Honored to be on the show.

Thank you very much. And we'll see you next time on Executive Signal. Thanks for joining.