 This is StartupStoreFriend. SwingVision started as an app that leveraged the Apple Watch to help tennis players improve their game. Players could now track their swing movements, hits, and scores. But after working at Tesla, Swapno, the co-founder of SwingVision, realized there was a lot more they can do with this simple idea. By mounting an iPhone on a court and through motion tracking within the app, they can now offer automated scoring, line calling, recorded match highlights, and so much more. In this episode, we talked about the impact of having SwingVision featured on the Apple Keynote, coaching players with AI, and last, between you and me, we also talked about Diego paying a little extra to have the speed of his serves register faster than they actually are. I'm a user of the product and a big tennis fan. You're a big tennis fan, I imagine. Oh, for sure. That's my main sport, yeah, and I follow the professional tour as well pretty closely. Well, I wanted to have you on was two reasons. One, I used to be in tech a long time ago at a bow tie company, right? And we launched an app and it was like this try before you buy feature. And at the time, an iPhone screen was the size of a bow tie. And so that's why it was a bow tie company. You just let people like put the phone up to their neck in the mirror. And it was like this high res image. Even though the camera was 3.2 megapixels, it was like a high res image. The concept was try before you buy and it was cool. And then we got all this press around like fashion meets tech. And then all of a sudden we thought of ourselves as an app company. And then we ended up becoming a bow tie company. That's how it happened because we had people were like, oh, what a cool way to get a bow tie. And so in your journey, it's almost it's similar. I would imagine where it's like you have this like your background obviously is in tech. And so it's like, okay, what is the technology that we're creating? And then how can we apply it to something? At the very beginning of it, what was that like for you? What path were you going down around? Like here's the tech. Well, it was interesting for us. Actually, there's just a problem we were trying to solve, which was for me fundamentally, I just wanted data on my game. That was like the simplest thing. Like I just I play tennis match. I lose. I want to know why I lost. What do I need to work on for next time? That was like the fundamental problem. And so it was interesting because we didn't really know like what tech we could use to solve that. So initially when I first started working on this, I was in grad school out in New York. And the Apple watch had just come out. So like my initial idea was like, oh, I have this like computer on my wrist now. Maybe I could get some data from that. And so the initial version of the product was actually just an app for the Apple watch. So it didn't really do anything with your phone. But we would use the sensors in the watch to like analyze your swing. So you could tell you like how fast you're hitting what type of shots are you hitting. Am I hitting like more forehands versus backhand things like that. And then we also added like the ability to keep score manually so you could like use the touch screen to like input the score. But over time what we found was like people wanted things to be automated. They don't want to have to like manually input the scores. Right, totally, yeah. And so over time we realized, okay, so this is still the problem we want to solve. But we actually need to evolve the technology to make it like more automated. And how can we do that? Well, you can't really do that with a watch. You have to use the phone. You have to use the camera. And so then it switched into computer vision as a solution basically. So it's interesting like we weren't super like hinged on any particular technology. We were just stuck on this problem that we wanted to solve. We tried to solve it with this other, this initial technology, which is like pretty good, but still kind of rudimentary compared to what we ended up making, which is a lot more impressive. So what does the camera unlock from a tech perspective versus like the Apple watch? Yeah, so the camera, the thing is, well, first of all, you can see all the players, right? So with a watch, like I can only see you. And then with the watch, you're also restricted to just your swing motion. With the camera, I can see the entire trajectory of the ball. How are the players moving on the court? What's actually happening in the entire scene? And then that lets you do things like line calling, which is like the most popular feature now in the app. So, you know, it just opens up a lot more things. You can just do, you have strictly more information if you think about it. And so you can just like track more data and you can just provide more benefits to the customer. And how long were you guys like building this out or at least like maybe in beta, or at least getting to the point of like, okay, can we take this to market? Yeah, well, so the initial watch app we were probably working on for like a year while I was still in grad school, just like a side project. And then we finally released it. And it was still just like a hobby on the side. It wasn't anything that we did full time. So my co-founder Richard and I were just working on it. And then later on after I finished grad school, I worked at Tesla. I was there full time. So I still wasn't doing this full time yet. What were you doing at Tesla? And at Tesla, I was working on their autonomous driving team, autopilot. So that's where I started to get more, I guess, experienced in computer vision. And I was specifically working on object tracking. And so that's when things started to click for me. I was like, oh, I could use some of this to track like the tennis ball with an iPhone camera. And so that's when we decided to switch to using computer vision. And so that took us about six months to make the first version. So I left Tesla. My co-founder left his company. We started working on this vision full time. This is like summer of 2019. So three years ago. And then within six months, we built a kind of working version. And at that point we had an experience that we knew like we just need to release it right away. We're not going to wait to perfect this. Yeah, smart. It just needs to go out the door. Yeah, break it. And so we just released it at the end of 2019 right before the pandemic hit. But it was right to release it early. Yeah. Because that helped us get like a lot more feedback and data. And did you guys at this point, you're not looking for funding, right? We did get some funding. Yeah, we got some funding. It was mostly friends and family. Actually, my neighbor ended up investing a little bit. And then that's also only got Andy Roddick and James Blake to invest. So they invested in that initial kind of angel friends and family around. How did you meet them? What was the connection there? Yeah, that was pretty cool. So a friend of mine from high school played professional. So he ended up going pro. He was ranked as high as like 600 in the world. So, you know, it did decently well. And his physio knew James through like another company they worked on together. Okay. It's called cramps away. Like takes away your cramps in like 60 seconds or something. Oh, interesting. Yeah, it's pretty interesting. So it's like, like Stan Orenka actually used this when he beat Novak Djokovic in the US Open final in like 2015. He was like cramping up and he used this solution. So anyways, a physio. I want to know. Yeah. It's crazy. I want to know more about it. It's interesting. Yeah, it's weird. I think it's a very skeptical that it works, but like apparently people have used it and it works. That's a good story. Stan wins. Yeah. Stan wins. That's the best endorsement. That's great marketing. Yeah. So this guy's physio was the doctor at Kaiser in like NorCal who made the solution. He like came up with the whole thing. And then James was an active endorser of the product because after retirement he started doing like marathons and he was cramping up. And so he found a need for the product. And he's like, wow, this works. I'm going to start endorsing it. So that was a connection there. And the physio was also an active user of our watch app at the time. Okay. So that was the connection. So fan, loyalist, friend. Yeah. Exactly. So I worked out. So he's like, okay, I'll make the intro to James because I was like, I'm trying to get like somebody in the tennis space to like pack us. Yeah. So I went to San Diego, pitched James. At the time I was at Tesla still and I told him this was my vision which was like, we've been trying to solve this problem for a long time. Now we know what the solution is. It's using the iPhone camera. And he just loved it right away. And he was really impressed because he felt like even the pros could use this. Which is, I was surprised because if you're a professional player, as you probably know, like you have Hawkeye, you have all this amazing technology in the matches. So like, why would you need this? But he was saying it's because once you're off that stadium and you're practicing all around the world, you don't have any technology. You have no data. And that blew my mind. I was like, oh, that's a good point. Like you actually probably don't have that data. Especially something that's portable that you can carry with you no matter where you are in the world. Exactly. Or like one of your coaches could easily, yeah. Yeah. Your coach doesn't even have to be there. Yeah. Exactly. So like your coach could just like literally bring their iPhone, just set it up and like record your practice session. And like, you'd get all the same data you get in your match. And so that blew my mind. So he was like really sold on it from that perspective. So he ended up investing. And then he invited me out to like this exhibition match that he was playing in Texas. And he's like, hey, Annie Rock is going to be there. John McEnroe is going to be there. Jim Carrier is going to be there. You can meet all these guys and maybe try to convince one of them to also invest. So I went out there with him there. I got to meet all of them. Basically like pitch the whole idea and everything. And then Andy was the one who was the most interested. And so he was the one who ended up investing as well. So when you roll this out, what's your strategy there aside from just like making it public on the app store? Yeah. You know, are you going to local tennis clubs, events, tournaments? Like what's that like for you guys? Yeah. That was something that we started doing more recently, I would say. Like I think initially when we launched, the idea was like, let's just put on the app store and let's maybe try to get featured on the app store because we'd been featured once before for the watch out. How do you do that? How do you do that to get featured? Is it super random? Or is there like someone you know in a department and you're just like, take a special look at this. Yeah, it's a bit of both. So the first time we ever got featured was actually for the Apple Watch Series 4. So when the Series 4 was announced, if you went on the actual website of Apple's like Series 4 page somewhere along the screen, if you scroll down, it would show you like great third party apps. And so it showed like the Nike running app and like a surfing app and then Swing Vision. And was that huge? Like would that really materialize? That was pretty big for us. Yeah. You saw a massive bump. There was a big bump when the Series 4 came out for us. We got like a lot of traction, which helped with all these conversations with James and Andy. This all happened like at the same time, which is great. But you know, ultimately it wasn't like that big of a spike. I knew that we had to move to like a different model. But what was nice was it established incredibly with Apple that like now they know us. There's like multiple people there who know about us on their PR team, on their marketing team, on their editorial team. They're paying attention. And they're paying attention. And so after that point, I could just reach out to those same people and be like, hey, we're working on this new thing. It's going to use computer vision. It's going to use your iPhones. It's going to be amazing. And so we could kind of feed them sort of like, this is what we're going to work on. Now at that point, it's up to them. Like I've done what I can, but you know, at least we have put our name out there. And then we always focused on just having like really good design in the app. Just like great usability, like, you know, make the app as if like Apple made it just make it feel like user friendly, easy to use. And so that's what we always focused on. And so there's like tons of tennis tracking apps out there. But I think we have the best interface by far. And so, you know, all those things like help you get noticed. So, you know, yeah. And then when you do launch the app, you get featured. Some investors, they don't want to be public in any capacity. Right. And so it's Andy very much like, because I see him talking about it. Yeah. He'll go on shows and he'll talk about it. Yeah. Obviously he's active on social media to some extent too. And so he seems more than happy to be a fan and an investor. Yeah. But that's sometimes not always the case. And so do you ask him, do you push them, James or Andy? Yeah. It was interesting. Like do you ask for a, are you like please like do yourself a solid, you know what I'm saying? Yeah. It's like help me help you. Exactly. No, it's actually really easy with them. I'm just like, I try to be conscious of their time because at the end of the day, they're just investors. Like they don't have like a ton of equity in the company or anything. So like I'm not going to treat them like an employee. So I just, you know, let them know, like, hey, we had this opportunity coming up. It is a way for you to get involved. If you could give us some of your time, it'd be awesome. I'd never like tried to pressure them or anything. And then in the early days, when you first launched it, we knew the app was like really sub optimal and like not working that well. And so we didn't really ask them for anything actually at all. Like we didn't want their name to be attached to the product until it had like some traction. So we kind of kept it on the wraps. We didn't tell anybody for at least a year that they were actually involved. And then once it started to do a lot better, we started to get good reviews from customers, good retention, things like that. Then I was like, okay, this is actually becoming real. It's doing well. Now you guys can start promoting it. Like I think I feel comfortable having you guys attach your name to it. I feel the confidence it's going to actually work out for everybody here. So, you know, that's kind of how we did it. And I think they were appreciative that they didn't want to just put their name on anything, right? Yeah. They want to know it works well. Yeah. They want to know it works well and they're just not, you know, because ultimately like they're not that familiar with the app themselves, right? They just like the content they invested in it. So they're kind of trusting us to like make the call at the right time. And then so when you launch you're a little pre-COVID and then COVID hits. And then from what we see, everyone's saying like kind of skyrocketed in terms of playership and as a sport in general. Did you see that also? Yes. But initially it was pretty terrifying because in March, initially, March 2020, all the courts closed. So everything was locked down because we were just like, we don't know what we're going to do. The whole world was just like confused. The ball had COVID. You couldn't touch my ball about writing something, my name on it. Exactly. I was like, this is a dumb shit. Mine's pen two years, pen three. Yeah. I was just thinking about the other day, I was like, this is so silly. We also had like this MIT professor come on that was studying COVID and he's like it's an airborne illness. Right. It doesn't live on services. You know, we felt like we were like conspiracy theorists because this guy told us all the science. Right. Yes, it exists. It's real. The CDC and the news was like still, you know, like people were bleaching them. Think about the fact that some humans were out there spraying each other with bleach before they went in their homes. Yeah. Terrified to kill each other. Yeah. I guess everybody has different risk tolerances, but yeah, especially when you do not have much information. So March had the courts closed. So that was scary for us to get to zero. And so then we're like, oh my god, what are we supposed to do now? Like when are we going to open up again? We actually like did a little bit of a pivot and started making some drills in the app that you could do at home. Oh, nice. So you could like put your phone on the ground and like swing the ball in the air. These are like targets that appear on the screen or you could hit against the wall and like it would count your shots and stuff. So we actually started to work on that for a little bit and that did fairly well. But then as you just mentioned, like by the time was like summer things started opening up again. And then it was like the latest thing to play. And so then then we started to see a big, big growth. But really for us, it was like September of that year when the iPhone came out that year. That was probably iPhone 11 I guess. We got featured in the keynote. That was our first time getting featured in a keynote. Huge. And that's where like we started to see a big lift. Did you know beforehand? Like are they asking for content? They won't tell you why but I'm assuming they're asking for materials. In this case, we didn't know beforehand what it was for. All we knew because also it was weird because they didn't have the iPhone section. I guess they also released like a low cost iPad at the same event. Yeah. So that's where we had no idea. I was like, there's no iPad release. Maybe it looks better. The bigger screen. Interesting. Okay. And so they're just like we're trying to film some content like we want to add some. Can you guys add some things into this build of the app? And we're like, sure. And we had no idea what they're going to do with it. And then we just saw in the keynote. We were just like all going crazy. Yeah. That was a little bit sad because like maybe in a normal time, I would be there on stage or something. So we missed out on that. You and Drake. And Tim Cook. At least they don't like tune in like, hey, you might want to watch this. No, they don't even tell that because they don't want to give any hints. I know they're very, very secretive. Yeah. So that one. They were. Exactly. They were super secretive. So last year's was different. Last year, the iPad keynote and the iPhone keynote, we were a lot more involved in that one because we had to go out and talk about it. So that was like, I kind of knew, but, but even there, they didn't confirm anything. They're like, well, we might keep you. We might cut it. We don't know. And it's like, you don't know it to the last second. Like they still don't confirm until you like watch it because they kind of want to be surprised. So from being featured, what is that spike like? I mean, that spike is, you know, it's like, maybe on the initial keynote itself, it's maybe like a 10 X bump and like daily downloads. And then it kind of sustains for a bit for like maybe a week or so. Then it starts to like come down a little bit, but it's still, you can see that it's like a little bit higher than it was. Your baseline has changed now a little bit. Yeah. And that maybe lasts like a quarter, I would say, but that's a significant amount of time. Yeah. And the exposure is huge. Yeah. The exposure is huge. And then Great time to raise capital. Great time to raise capital. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, all of that works out nicely. Yeah. Off the back of that, then we raised like another round at the beginning of the following year and all this stuff. So that was really helpful. Like a seed round, Yeah. Smart. Earlier you mentioned you're looking to raise the Series A, right? Is that coming up? Yeah. That's coming up for us. We're still trying to figure out with the market and everything right now. I know there's like a lot of investors are just kind of sitting it out waiting to see what happens, but I mean, we feel like we have, we have kind of the traction to do it today if we wanted to. I think we're just trying to figure out what's the right time and to, you know, it's going to suck up a lot of my time obviously to go fundraise, right? So I just want to make sure I'm sending my time wisely, but we have good runway and I imagine it's mostly tech, right? Mostly tech companies or VCs. Yeah. It's going to be kind of your classical VCs that are mostly based in Silicon Valley. There's some like sports focused ones, which are pretty cool, like sports tech focused as well. So we're looking into some of those too, but we'll see, you know, kind of market will deem what happens, I guess. Yeah, dude. The way I look at this recession is like, yeah, you know, we'll hit pause on some investments, but it's more of like we're just going to take a harder look. Yeah. I think that's what it is. We've done a really good job with our like hack and everything and we just made sure we're growing responsibly. We're not just like burning cash for the sake of burning cash and like growing as fast as you can. How did you decide on your subscription price? So for people listening, you know, there's an offering. It's a monthly offering. Yeah. I think it's like 120 bucks, 150 bucks a year or something like that. And I always wonder on how do these apps calculate what someone's willing to like, is it a best? I remember I met the mixed panel CEO. This is a long time ago and he's like I started at a dollar and then I someone said no. Yeah. I was like, oh, thank you. That's legendary. You know, it's like, okay, that's too simple. But when it comes to apps, it's hard, right? It's like it's a different market. There's tennis people. Yeah. Some could argue they have money, but how much? It's more expensive than Netflix. Like I don't even know how you like. It was really hard for us because I mean, I feel like what we've built is so different from anything else before. Like this isn't just like Airbnb for something else or something. I can't describe my app that way, right? So I had nothing to say. But initially we just sent out a survey right around the time that we were going to launch the first version of the video analysis product and we asked people like if we built an app that could do these things like how much would you pay per month? And so the answers ranged across the board. But we typically saw like 10 to $20 and we were like, oh, that's pretty good because like, people pay like 10 bucks from Netflix. I guess now Netflix is like 20 bucks. But back then, it's like 10 bucks or whatever. So we were like, OK, that seems reasonable. So initially we started at improvements, it got like a lot more accurate. We introduced the line calling. We're like, okay, we're providing like a lot of value here. I think we should increase our prices. And we asked our customers again, we did some surveys, if we added like automated line calling, if we like automatically kept score for you, like what would this be worth to you? And then the answer started to go up. They're like, oh, I'd pay like 20, 30 bucks a month for that. So I was like, okay, that's interesting. So then we said, okay, maybe we should plan for something that's gonna be around 25 bucks a month, but we'll give you a steep discount if you get annual. So it should be cheaper. So we said, let's do 150 for annual now instead of 120. So we did an increase last year in April from 120 to 150. And then we've kind of kept it that way since then. So now we have annual plan 150. We have also now introduced a monthly plan because a lot of people ask for an actual monthly plan. So we have introduced a $25 a month monthly plan, but most people do the annual. It's like 95% to the annual. Are you seeing like in the data is the hard part getting people to come back? It's like, so there's this thing of like, what you're really doing is helping people improve, right? Right. But at the end of the day, not everyone wants to improve every day. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Mentally, they don't wanna lock in. That's right. It's the hard part of like, all right, Chad used it for January. Right, right. And in February, he's like, fuck this, like he just doesn't use it anymore. Are you seeing anything? And then they come back, like the pattern of human improvement. Yeah, well, it's been interesting. We built it with that in mind, which was like, I wanna improve my game, right? But a lot of people now are just using it for the purposes of like entertainment. Like they just love seeing highlights of their match. Yeah. And they just wanna share that with their friends. It's so true. And once you get into that, you wanna do that every time. Yeah. If you play a match and you forget to record, like, I missed all those shots that I hit today. I wish I had that highlight reel right now. Right. So I think then it starts to get a lot more sticky. That's true. And so what we're finding is the biggest hurdle is actually just convincing someone to do that first recording, because you do need some equipment. You have to like buy like a stand or something to like mount your phone. But once people record, what we're finding is the retention is really good after that. So once you get them to record like one or two times, then they're like sold and they're recording constantly. Because of the highlights, the stats, I mean, improvements obviously is still a big part of it too. What about batteries? Is that another hard challenge that you're dealing with where it's like, where the matches last so long. It's a two hour match, right? Yeah. It's a two hour video to some extent. The camera is really paying attention until it drains it. Yeah, it does drain it quite a bit. You know, we recommend people like charge fully. What's pretty cool is in the latest iOS that came out last year, you can now set it up so that your phone will automatically turn on low power mode when you're using swing vision. So that's really helpful because low power mode actually increases the battery another like 50% or something over what you would normally get. So now you can comfortably record like two, two and a half hours, no problem on like the latest like 11, 12, 13. Yeah, so that's it's been become less of a problem. And that's something where we think of the future. Like five years from now, this just becomes less of a problem, right? As battery technology improves. I mean, do you ever think about it? Like, I mean, obviously this is probably not important, but it's like integrating this like share on social feature where it's like an immediate TikTok with a song. Yes. And it's like a winner, like you hitting a winner, boom. We have thought about that. Put it on TikTok. And we do want to go into that area. And one thing that's also cool is just making gifts of like, Totally. Your winner, four hand winner or whatever. And just share that to send that to all your friends or your friend who just beat, you know, so. Almost like video gaming it, right? It's almost like the highlight, but it's you and that's cool. Exactly. So that's a big thing for us is just making content easier, faster to share. We're going to be doing a lot of that next year. And then speaking of video games, like a big area for us now is also going to be live streaming. And we want to make this eventually almost like a Twitch where like you could stream your game. You can be like providing commentary in between the points and things like that. So like if Andy Roddick is playing, you know, a practice round or whatever. Exactly. He can like hit a shot and then turn to the camera and explain it. Yeah. So that'd be kind of fun. At our club, they live stream the tournaments. And so this would be the move. Nice. Yeah. All of these entrepreneurs that come on the podcast are looking for a competitive edge. That's what we partner with Athletic Greens. I ditched my vitamin C packets. I was previously drinking in the morning and I've never felt better. It's noticeably giving me more energy in an optimized immune system. This is not my first go around with multivitamins. I used to take these capsules and they made me feel bloated and disgusting. And I stopped taking them after about two weeks. When I tried AG1, none of that happened. I felt good. I felt all of the benefits with none of the negative side effects. I'm a big believer in this over capsules. It completely replaced my multivitamins. Whether you're on the tennis court or in business, you need to win. Put AG1 into your lifestyle. It's great for recovery, clarity and alertness. You're gonna start hitting winners, both in business and on the tennis court. Let's go. For less than $3 a day, you can reclaim your health with convenient daily nutrition. It's just one scoop and a cup of water. That's it. No need for a million different pills or supplements. To make it easy, Athletic Greens is giving you a free one-year supply of immune-supporting vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first purchase. All you have to do is visit athleticgreens.com slash STS. Again, that is athleticgreens.com slash STS to take ownership over your health and pick up the ultimate daily nutritional insurance. I wanna dive into the usability of the app a little bit more. So you as a tennis player, you have this app and you get all this data about your game and everything. We had Brad Gilbert on the podcast and his whole thing is know your opponent and exploit their weaknesses. So if I'm playing a match against Diego and afterwards I want to dissect not only my footage but can I use the app to dissect what he's doing so the next time we play each other I can find some advantage that I can get ahold of? 100%. So we literally were just doing user interviews last week and this was the most common thing people told us which was I choose English and to look at their opponents. So I'm glad that they're doing that. It looks like they're listening to Brad Gilbert. But basically yeah, it's so cool. Like you can go into the app and say like show me all of like Diego's forehands that he missed or like all of his serves that he missed. And like I can easily see that instantly. And so I can look at like what patterns is he struggling with? And so then I can like figure out like, okay, that's how I gotta play him. And something that we're gonna release later this year which is gonna be super cool is like she show you a playbook of where you should serve and then where you should hit the next shot after you serve to maximize your chance of winning the point against this particular person. So it's gonna be like personalized gameplay. God damn it. And so like at this point, once this comes out, like if you're not using swing vision, you're gonna be losing a lot of matches because like everyone else is gonna know what's up. It's crazy. On USTA matches, they started like a doubles USTA matches now like the guys will be like, oh, do you mind if we record? Oh, that's awesome. So I've started to see it being used like in real play. Would you ever be able to upload? So let's say Diego and I have never played each other. But I wanna upload some footage of him so that when we play, I'll be able to. Is that it? $100 a month. Yeah. The next question is what would you pay for that? Right. That's right. Well, that's funny. We do have the ability to upload because people typically will like, sometimes they'll record with like their GoPro or like the Android phone because we're iOS only right now. And it'll upload the footage. So technically you can already do that, but I hadn't thought of anybody doing it that way. That's pretty funny. I could go look up his like YouTube videos or something and like find his old matches. I mean, now at this point, like there's so many more people using it, you can just find them in the app. Sure. Just go to their profile. You can like see their videos and stuff. So there is a big social aspect to it. Yeah. It hasn't been fully, I feel like fleshed out, but it's there. Like you can use it for that purpose if you want to. And you can scale it. Has your game improved dramatically since you started the company to where you are today? I do feel like I'm playing a lot better than I did back when we started the company. And then I just feel like I can improve faster. I feel like every match I played, there's like something different that I did wrong, but I can just find that out faster now. I think I feel like I've solved that problem I had back in the day, which was like, what am I doing wrong? Because when you're playing a match, you can kind of feel it's like, oh, my server's just off today or my forehand's off today. I don't know what's wrong, but something is wrong. If you go back and look at the video, it's like so obvious. And so you can say like, show me all my servers that I missed. And it's like, ah, that's why. That's been really helpful to understand like, okay, I need to just be like turning my body a little bit more or like my toss was a little bit off or, you know, it's like little things. But yeah, I think the app's helped me with that. What I would love is eventually the app could just tell me what I did wrong. What level you're in. Oh yeah, that's true. Right now I'm figuring it out myself, but if I was maybe like a more beginner player, I wouldn't really know like how to diagnose. So I think that's like the next thing for us is like. Some sort of, yeah. Yeah, have the AI actually provide the coaching. I think. Turn your body. At the end of the day, it's a complex game, but there's only so many adjustments you can make. So it's like, you know, I think we could automate a lot of that eventually. When I ran sales teams, I would film them. And so this whole thing of like, it's weird to tell someone that, like, cause no one believes that they're not, like if you were awkward in a meeting, you don't believe it. You're like, what are you talking about? Cause everyone's so in there, they don't want to met, they're so in their head, you know? You have a different memory of what happened basically. Yeah, like it's like, you never asked the client for X, Y, Z. They're like, yeah, I did. And so then, and so like, I would just train people and I would video. The first two weeks is all video. That's so funny. And I'm like, you see, you do this weird twitch. Why do you do that thing? And then like, before you say something, you do this. And it's like, you're in the client's face for no reason, like, why are you doing that? Right. And like, you're sweating here. Why are you, like you're awkward. Why are you sweating? And the whole thing is nobody enjoys it. Like every sales person I ever had, they hated it. But then by like the end of week two, they were so much better and the camera was gone. And they knew, they got, I mean, instant feedback. And so when I saw SwingVis, that's what I thought immediately. I was like, oh, this is like you're recording people's performances and now you don't have a scapegoat. Like, cause in my head, I feel like I'm hitting the ball like an adult. And then I watch myself on the video and I'm like, who is that? Like what is that person doing? And so the feedback of it really helps performance in general, in anything, right? Recording yourself, even on this podcast. It's like, you're like, oh, what am I doing with my hands? Right. And then you figure out, then you move on. That's what I like about the app. That's my base. I mean, yeah, you summarize that so well. That's exactly what like coaches love the most because they run in the same issue. Totally, yeah. They'll do a lesson or their student will play a match and they're like, you weren't doing this, isn't this? And they're like, yeah, it was. I'm like, let's look at the video. You're not doing it. So it's exactly what has you said it. What are some of the corrections? I know when we use the app, Yvonne was like, oh no, I serve way harder than this. Like Yvonne swears he serves 100 and something miles per hour. And I'm like, dude, this is funny. This is poking at like the ego, you know? I'm like, I don't know if the technology, you've never ever served with this mile per hour thing. But you think you've served. Right, everybody has just, yeah. Where's the reference coming from? You're imagining the screen at Wilmelden popping up at 140 miles an hour. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But was that like, are those things that are hard to figure out with the technology? That's pretty super straightforward. So speed is actually the hardest metric for us to do. And it's probably the least accurate to Yvonne's credit. Don't talk about that. Because we're using a single camera. So when you have like that single vantage point, it's just, it's hard. Death perception is just hard in general. And then speed is even harder because it's like the change of death over time. So that's really hard. So that's really challenging for us. I think it's something we can solve eventually, but it's been hard to get that accurate. We focus more on like where the ball is landing because that gives you like line calling and things like that, which we felt like it was a bigger problem. But I mean, everybody loves seeing their speeds on swing vision. Everybody wants accurate speeds. So I know that's a big improvement. You should just bump it up. You should just add 10. Yeah, we probably could just do that. Just do that and make everyone feel good. It would help the social aspirator. I would share the shit out of it. I paid extra for more miles per hour. Oh, it's a bonus feature. Yeah, good. Well, I'm thinking on Strava, one of the most competitive aspects that makes the app is like KOMs where you can compete with everyone. And you can see, so like with this mile per hour or whatever it might be, you could set up a leaderboard that- Biggest serve in LA. Yeah, exactly. And you could do local, you could do regional, like whatever it might be. I'm gonna do it by club. That'd be cool. Or at least LATC. Exactly. You're the people that you're playing with all the time. So now, Yvonne's like, hey, on the app, I'm number one. And then everyone else is coming up and trying to compete with him. Yes, that is very high priority on the roadmap for us, leaderboards. And as you said, it's gonna start with clubs. So we're gonna have like club-specific leaderboards. Let me know, let me know. That'd be cool. You're gonna have to have like at least five or something people at your club playing to actually unlock the leaderboards. Oh, great. To encourage you. But LATC has enough people, I'm sure. We wanna work with brands as well to offer prizes, maybe Wilson's giving away a Rack-Aid or whatever, and Strava's done that really well too. They've done a great job. Oh, smart. Like if you're like top dog at LATC, you get like a hat. Yeah, exactly. Which is easy for the pro shop to do. Yeah. It would exactly be like done or a water bottle or something. Exactly. Even a discount. A yellow jersey. Yeah, I did a contest on Strava where it was like I climbed the amount of how tall Everest is over a month. And as such, I got a discount on a jersey from a company that did like this specialized Strava Everesting Challenge jersey. And so like it's all the incentives, but it helps everyone along. Is pickleball on the roadmap? Or is that already possible? That is on the roadmap as well. And a lot of people have been using it for pickleball and it already kind of works, which is kind of funny. Oh, nice. Because it's really just a smaller court at the end of the day. Right. A lot of the shots look pretty similar. Okay. So it works decently well, but that's gonna be our next sport. We'll be pickleball next year. So we'll have it in beta and Q1 actually. And is there anything, so like with Strava and some of these other apps, like Map My Ride, one of the interesting thing was they were able to sell their data to cities to tell the cities where people would bike, right? And it's just interesting like, I would have never thought of that revenue stream. Are there interesting plays with your data? It's like this IBM calling being like, oh, we could create, I don't know, right? Or like, this is interesting. So the Australian Open created an NFT. Right. And so in doing that, it was like spots on the court and every spot was a ball. And if the ball landed on that spot or was a winner, you as the NFT holder of that particular spot got something, some sort of utility. But there's a lot of data, right? Everything's like becoming sort of data centric. Is there interesting avenues that you have? Well, it's funny you mentioned that example because I actually have a meeting with Tenants Australia next week about doing the same thing with SwingVision at a smaller event. They're not gonna be able to afford Hawkeye for the shot positions. So they want to use SwingVision to create those like ball points and then create NFTs out of it. So we might actually get into that space. Keep me posted. I bought one of those just because I was so intrigued. Oh, you did, I have this funny. Yeah, because I was like, it was interesting. It was more of like I'm just paying for user research and I want to see where this is gonna go. Yeah, that's interesting. And it was cool. It was really interesting. Yeah, I still have it. But they do offer a lot of benefits to every single other major when they're done or all these things to open. That's right, yeah. So it's interesting concept. I mean, I think that could be cool to go. In terms of like governments and stuff, I feel like the most helpful thing we could do there, and this is a long-term thing, but as you have more and more people using the app and like public courts and private courts, you can just understand usage of courts, right, facilities. I think that would be really helpful for local governments to understand where we should be investing more money in tenants, where do we need to go out and upgrade the infrastructure or something like that. So I feel like that could be kind of interesting. On the other side of it, is there a play for you where you can think about acquiring like these tennis scheduling apps, like Play By Point or something that are really doing, right? And then that way, you're sort of all in one. You know what I mean? I do think that that would be pretty cool because one other problem we've wanted to solve, which is another kind of, I don't think anyone's done a good job with this, is just like finding someone to play with at your level. Like that is so hard to do. Everybody rates themselves, makes up numbers, like inflates numbers, whatever. Some people decrease the numbers because they just want to win more. Like it's just weird. People do weird stuff. It's so weird. And I think we have the best data. Like literally, I can tell you how fast you're hitting. Like how more granular can you get than that, right? So like I feel like we could match people better than anybody in the world. And I think the key to making that experience really nice would be having a booking platform. Because that's like, okay, tomorrow at 6 p.m., book the court for me, find someone for me, just deal with it. It's like Uber, right? It's just like, tomorrow at 6 p.m., done. And then like book it. It'd also be good if it could like instantly integrate with UTR. And so that way you're also, you're actually getting better. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You guys should make sure your rating's actually going up. What's UTR? So UTR is basically like a, so there's USTA and UTR and they're just rating systems. But UTR is out of 16. And so like a Nadal is like a 15.8 something. Whereas like, let's call it like a really good junior tennis player could be between a seven and a 10. And like most D1 students are like a 10 UTR. But you can start as low as like a three or two, right? So it's this, but it's this thing where it's like, it's almost like a handicap in golf. It's you, the more you play against players. So if you beat a five, let's say you're a six UTR, you beat a five, cool. It'll go up to like six point, well maybe 6.06 or something. But if the five beats you, then the five jumps up a lot more and then yours would decrease. That makes sense. Yeah, and so it's basically just, but it keeps everyone honest because the USTA is basically one, two, three, four, five. And that's kind of it. Whereas UTR is like to the decimal and it's out of 16. And so if someone told me a UTR, I'd know exactly. Much more precise. Way more precise. Yeah, it's a lot better. But it's also this thing of like, people don't like uploading because if you get embarrassed in a match, everyone's like, oh my UTR, my UTR, my UTR. Everyone's like worried about their UTR. Yeah, it's been interesting to see that. Especially the juniors, they like UTR because it's so granular, but then it's like there's a lot more pressure for every match all of a sudden. So it's interesting. But yeah, I think that's in the right spirit. I think we need more rating systems like that. And then as you said, I just want to be able to play and then see that reflect in my rating eventually. And then when it comes to marketing and just like social media strategy, how do you view that as an app? Obviously Apple's helped tremendously when Andy talks about it on camera. That's also helping tremendously running ads against that. It's probably smart. But how do you view just the stickiness, I guess, of the power of social and just amplifying that message? Yeah, it's been interesting. I mean, so we've had the most traction probably on Instagram and YouTube. So you have an Instagram page where we'll just post highlights from our app. So we'll just pick a random person that played a really compelling rally and then just like clip that, post it. And that's gotten very interesting because now we get more and more people saying like, oh, they'll actually send us a rally. He's like, hey, can we get featured? Like I hid this tweener last week. Like, can you guys feature that? So we got that happen, which is cool. So I think that's going to start to happen more. I think it's just about demographics. So like Instagram's probably younger. YouTube's going to be kind of the older demographic. So we have a lot of people who post on YouTube. For them, I think it's more about instruction. A lot of, I'd say kind of like adults use YouTube to just like learn how to improve their game. Whether it's like learning how to hit a kicks or like whatever it is. And so there's a big community of tennis players on there. And so we've been trying to put more content on there that's more instructional related. And we're going to be doing a lot more with that next year. Or even partnering with like Patrick Monaglu or whatever his name is. Yeah, exactly. Or maybe Brad Gilbert, you know? Yeah, exactly. So I feel like there could be something cool there. You look at the SwingVision video and they go like, oh, Diego, you're not turning your body. Exactly. Like I would think it would be so cool to get a celebrity to just like review matches on SwingVision. Brad would do that. Like that'd be sick. Brad would totally do that. Yeah, like so. Because you have the data. And he loves talking shit, by the way. He loves talking shit, by the way. He's the best commentator. He's so good. He's so good. Even when he was here, I was like, are you from Boston, dude? Like you are mad about something. He's just like angry and with it and funny. I relate well to that type of energy. So it works for me. But not everybody does. Yeah, we'll have to make sure it works with our brand, but I'm sure it will make it happen. When you look to the future and you're thinking like big picture, I know that you mentioned that you were looking at incorporating, you've already started incorporating pickleball into this. But like this technology, in my mind, could it be used for other sports such as like cricket, baseball, golf? Like are you thinking about down the line incorporating and bringing more sports under the swing vision umbrella? For sure. I mean, I think that's like the dream for us is to be like the next Strava, essentially, right? And doing this for like ball and racket sports, which no one has done, basically. So I think there's a big lane there. I think we're the farthest ahead in that lane. So I think now it's just a matter of like, with the resources we have, what should we tackle in terms of like biggest market and also just technologically, like what's the easiest to go to. So for us right now, because we saw this problem in tennis, like racket sports are just really easy for us to go into initially, just cause like we know that problem so well. And just fundamentally, it's easier because you have fewer players to track. You have this kind of like fixed court size. You can see everything with one camera, which I think is just really nice for like scalability. So, you know, a sport like golf, which is just one player technically that you need to track, but they're kind of moving around the course. It's like a little bit trickier. You have to set it up every time. Set it up every time. It's great for like the driving range, right? But I think like if you're playing an actual game, it's maybe a little bit more friction. So we're trying to find sports where we can kind of be, you can use a product both for practice and actual gameplay. So like racquetball or squash would be pretty. Yeah, those might be a little bit higher priority. Although those are like slightly smaller in terms of player base, but like table tennis for example, right? Huge in Asia, right? Massive sport, also big here. And then badminton, massive sport. So you know, sports like that, I think are very compelling because it's like we can solve it easily. Massive market, a lot of players. But I think baseball is a really cool one because you do have a lot of players, but mostly actions around kind of home plate. So I feel like you could do something there. Volleyball is another interesting one as well because not that many players and you can see everything with one camera if you just put it kind of behind or something. So I think there's like some other sports that we're thinking about, but initial focus, I mean, we're still pretty small. So it's still, it's still a racquet sport. You have to focus on tennis first. Yeah, like I don't want to, you know, dilute our resources yet. Stick to tennis. Yeah. I would love to stick to tennis. Stick to tennis, yeah. Plant your flag. We spoke to the TheraBody, TheraGun founder. And when we spoke to him, they were just starting to sponsor athletes. Like they were brand, and they had just sponsored Colin Morakawa, the golfer. And then he like won the U.S. Open like immediately after the sponsor. That's so cool. Which is insane that he did that. Like the timing of the sponsorship. Perfect for the brand, essentially. But do you ever think about that? Yeah, for sure. Where it's like these juniors coming up. Oh my God, yes. That's like our goal. That'd be so cool. Like the next U.S. Open Championships was like powered by Swing Vision. That'd be amazing. Yeah, that's the goal eventually. I think it's like a high budget thing to do. But I think we're going to get there, you know, maybe after a couple more funding rounds. But we have started seeding the app to a few pros. So some pros have started using it and their coaches are using it with them. So that's been really cool to see. They're finding value. I think you have to just figure out like the sponsorship angle so they can actively promote it. You could even, so this is interesting too. So it's almost like it's a different kind of sponsorship where just like Twitch, right? So if I have a gamer on Twitch, I'm a gamer that makes money. If I'm a YouTube creator, the creator makes money. In this setting, it could be like your pro that Swing Vision sponsors can literally make money. I could see that, actually. That would be cool. It's gonna be like learn from the pro. Like I'm in my app, I'm messing up my forehand. And then it's like watch this quick video on this guy, this pro. And then it's all in the app. And then that, and then he can get revenue. I could see it. Well, I mean, if we're really going to the Twitch model, like I feel like if I'm Serena, for example, right? I'm just doing a practice match with Venus or something ahead of the US Open. Like I can stream that match. I can provide commentary and I'll get like millions of views, obviously, right? And then you just make a bunch of money for that. That's hard for you, isn't it? Like that would keep me up at night. The problem of like, do I just do this? Or do I go Twitch model? Yeah, it's interesting. Have you spoken to Justin Kahn? Have you spoken to him? No, I haven't. I haven't met him. That would be interesting though. But I mean, I think if it's a model that like any consumer can do, but it's just they're able to take the most advantage of it. I think that makes sense to me, right? There's probably a way there to make it work. Cause that's like uncaptured media. Like all these pros are practicing hours a day. Like everybody would love to see like Serena or like Federer's practice sessions. That's how we have everyone loves Indian Wells. So you can see them. Exactly, like there's no reason why they can't just stream this from SwingVision and make it like a Twitch experience. Anything would be great. It's like, you don't know where this would go, but you can feel like this would actually be very compelling. And it would change the game. You could do that in any sport. Yeah, you could do that in any sport. You could do it with LeBron. I think there's something there. I think there's some things that kind of need to click in terms of like 5G connectivity and like upload speeds and all that. So it's like a little early, but it's almost there. It's like around the corner. You can see. You'd definitely break it, but yeah. Yeah, you'd break it. Yeah, that's exciting. But it's around the corner. It's coming. Like it's not far. All right, brother. Thanks for coming on the podcast, man. Yeah, I really appreciate the time. Yeah, thank you for having me. Tell people where they can download the app and do all the good stuff. Yeah, it's just on the app store. Super simple. SwingVision should be the first result. Tim Cook's favorite app. Yeah. Yeah, if he's on 10 squared, that's definitely what he's using. Thanks, brother. Thank you, thank you both. Hey, you. Yeah, you listening. Thank you so much for making it to the end of the episode. Make sure to follow us on Instagram, subscribe on YouTube, and we cannot wait to see you next week for another great episode. Cheers.