[Startup Interview] Sven Willemsen, Founder, Sportaneous
15-03-2018 12:02:00 | Editor: Bob Koigi | hits: 7407 | Tags:

Dutch MediaNetwork makes an interview series with startups as part of our Startup Competition.

The best startups receive an invitation to speak at the Cross Media Congress 2018 on 25 April in Amsterdam. We speak with Sven Willemsen, founder of Sportaneous.

What is Sportaneous?

Sportaneous BV is a creative sports marketing management agency. We are at the cutting edge of sports management, media, marketing & technology.

In addition to sports marketing, Sportaneous is a multimedia sports & health channel consisting of an online platform sportaneous.nl, hardcopy magazine and social media channels.

Sportaneous is thus a content-driven platform for healthy sport-minded people who are looking for inspiration in sports niches like: Ninja Warrior, Obstacle running, Calisthenics, Crossfit, Bootcamp and Alternative fitness.

Besides this, Sportaneous operates as a sports management agency for a select number of top athletes in the niches: we represent and manage all their media business and increase their influencer capacity together with them.

Why did you start Sportaneous?

Our brand philosophy is based on creating a win-win for niche sport and commerce. On the one hand we want to give niche sports more attention, the community, and make sure athletes can flourish financially towards independency.

On the other hand, we want to offer brands and organizations innovative possibilities. To this end, we envisage to eventually develop a synergetic ecosystem for value creation, in which (among other things) the total media value of the sports and athletes increase and therefore become seriously attractive for brands.

Our focus pillars:

Strengthen sports & health brands and offer interesting alternative PR

Provide parties media development, partnership-deals and distribution

Launch and support progressive, innovative sports-related initiatives

Top athletes can be and remain top athlete through media and business support in the broadest sense. Commercial representation.

How and where is Sportaneous located?

Sportaneous is currently located in Harderwijk in the very centre of The Netherlands in a former old soup fabric (California Creative Industries).

From whom is Sportaneous?

CEO Sven Willemsen is owner of Sportaneous BV.

How is Sportaneous funded?

Sportaneous is funded by private funds.

Who are the customers of Sportaneous?

Sportaneous has propositions for a few specific target groups. As a sports media publisher and platform we are focused on the progressive and sporty young creatives and challengers.

For business we are focused on sports & health brands and we act as PR-wing, marketing (online to sponsoring and events) and / or distributor of (inter) national sports products in the Benelux market. We also recently started to work with our target group of elite athletes.

These athletes in turn include the influencers for the brands we work with, as well as they capture the sports locations they train at. In that way we have a Touchpoint network for brands within various sports niches, in particular Ninja Warrior, Obstacle Running, Crossfit, Calisthenics and Alternative fitness.

What differentiates Sportaneous from other companies?

In a short period of time, we have built up a (media) network of interesting partnerships within various niches. We work closely together with former top athletes such as Yenny Luu, Perry Oosterlee, Vera Zijstra and Wouter Jongeneelen to properly represent the various niches or stay sharp.

We work with high potentials on a project basis, lean & mean. We can scale up very quickly on projects without loss of quality. This enables us to serve our customers 360 ° with the same hub.

We have cleverly coordinated a multiple palette of coherent and tested propositions and substantiated them with expertise, experience and efficiency in the corner of sports branding, marketing & sales.

What does Sportaneous need to grow?

We now have a relatively slow growth model, but we would now like to convert this into more accelerated growth: the opportunities are there! A first injection round in terms of money would help.

We want to use this for accelerated media platform developments in the field of technology and in particular new commercial functionalities and community growth. In addition, intensively incorporate new commercial and strategic partnerships and further train the core team and expand internationally in favor of new business.

What are the (international) ambitions of Sportaneous?

We want to move quickly to a European media platform and be a representative for sports & health brands (products & services) who want to reach (parts of) Europe via Sportaneous and athletes (or partner agencies) who like to be represented or assisted at European or even worldwide level.

What will Sportaneous put down in 2018/2019?

We will primarily focus on platform enhancements (upgraded version), media channel and content expansion and in terms of tech and communication we want to ground internationalization.

Launch new alternative top athletes internationally with promising sponsorships. We start with Perry Oosterlee, the number 1 Ninja Warrior of the Netherlands. He travels this year from Vietnam to Indonesia and Switzerland to represent the Netherlands during important TV competition moments.

Develop new and relate to existing sports initiatives and brands and make sure we grow together. Recently, for example, we entered into a strategic partnership with a start-up Endrse.com.

We also would like to further explore new international (license) partnerships and intensify these commercial relations where possible.

www.sportaneous.nl

 

Are you also interested in a Startup Interview in this series, please send an email to Max Vlugt - max@nederlandsmedianetwerk.nl