I want to make a device for helping tennis because the cost of coaches is really high. Can someone join me?
My name is Younes and I’m the founder of U-TRACK. In 2016 I got over 200K from crowd sourcing to make a device that can clip on the tennis racket to measure the performance of hitting and relay the information to the cell phone. I have played professional tennis for many years and I was always surprised by the lack of innovation in the sport that’s where the idea came out . A lot of people can’t afford having a tennis coach because the price range for a good coach can range between 100$ to 500$ an hour. So to be able to have a device that can tell you a lot of useful information regarding your tennis as an example regarding your (strokes, speed, accuracy, sweet spot) can be very valuable to every athlete no matter their level of play. It will help you as an athlete or player and give you a competitor advantage when you are trying to identify and improve a weakness. I’m looking for a technical co-founder who would be interested in working together and help me create a prototype and someone who believe in the project to make sports more accessible to a large audience
Best Answer
As a project, let me help you analyze the strength. You want to help people with a wearable traction device or a motion sensor that does a lot of good things for young tennis players. Technically I am a sensors guy, and I can tell you it is very difficult to achieve.
Looking up, your ceiling is low because you are talking about people interested in tennis. There are a lot of people interested in tennis but it is only a fraction of population and a fraction of their time, once or twice a week. So VCs won't fund anything. VC only fund something that EVERYONE does MULTIPLE TIMES a day. If no funding, you are on your own money. The research and development ramp time is 1 years. The rough cost is 10-20K if you want to be low budget, but the other person needs some kind of payroll arrangement, if you find someone.
Looking down, your biggest competitors are right when you type "tennis coaches" on google. There are many people playing with 60 40 dollars/hour coaches. This does not mean your idea is no good, it is just that there is already heavily entrenched competition. If you go into local tennis center to ask someone to introduce your device the local coaches will view you as a competition and write you off right away, no matter how good your thing is.
If your device company or product service is established, in the future, you will face heavy competition from everyone. USA, China, every country. You can understand that.
Basically, IF ONE HAS UNLIMITED MONEY, ONE CAN ACHIEVE ANY DREAM and launch any kind of company to do anything. But if you are short on cash and rich on dream, you won't have money to hire or buy technology. If you hire someone to do research, he/she will ran away from you. If you buy someone's technology, others can also buy other technology.
So I volunteered to help you analyze why a perfect aspirational idea may meet ALL KINDS of hurdles during execution.
Basically, IF YOU HAVE AN ORDER FOR YOUR DEVICE, make it. If you are making something and try to introduce it, like what "Lean Startup" advocated, please stop trying. The era of "you make it and they may come" is over now. The world only needs tissue papers and frozen pizza, nothing else :-)
The Complexity is beyond MVP level work - you need someone to develop algorithms for the sensors and stuff - not easy and perhaps not even possible.
So please keep thinking. Kill bad ideas as fast as you can. Good luck.
Other points
BASICALLY YOUR IDEAS HAVE FOUR FATAL FLAWS.
1. The market is small
2. You are perhaps not a market insider, you have never been to a tennis pro expo or something, correct?
3. You are using the "make it first and then sell" approach
4. You are not a technology builder, so hiring a "guy" to do the work is something you can not even evaluate. 5. Your idea is new. A new device is very far from becoming a business. A single product company can not become a strong business.
Your next question is "so what CAN I do?", which is a really good question A LOT OF wannapreneurs have.
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