After moving from England to live in Glasgow, CEO and founder of Find A Player, Jim Law, struggled to find people to play sport with at convenient times. He set out to create a match-up service between game organisers desperately posting pleas for players on Facebook and local participants. The result is Find a Player – a free app that lists more than 140 sports.

The app allows managers to find and invite players via existing phone contacts or Facebook and permits sports fanatics to search for games to join in their area at times to suit them.

Designed to make it easy for people to play sport regardless of where they are, Find A Player plans to license its database of users to sports venues that find it difficult to keep their pitches and courts filled. This will allow them to fill gaps in their bookings and generate revenue from pitches and courts.

“We want to make the whole administration process easier for organisers, particularly at facilities that are not currently running at maximum capacity,” said Law.

Using this model, sports providers, including local authorities, will pay Find A Player a monthly license fee of £50 for every venue in their portfolio which uses the app to find customers.

Law’s research in developing the app showed a strong potential demand, as he explains: “A survey I conducted showed 82 per cent of people who organise games struggle to find someone to play with and 88 per cent would be happy to play sports with someone they don’t know – while only 1.7 per cent currently do so.

“A total of 78 per cent said they would do more sport if they could easily find something to get involved witha and play with locally,” he said.

Award winning
Find a Player won the Edinburgh Apps competition in 2014 by providing a product to “increase engagement within the community, reduce inactivity and promote the use of Edinburgh City Council’s sports facilities”.

Following two initial versions, which both suffered development problems, Law was put in touch with start-up accelerator Entrepreneurial Spark. Developers from this network joined forces with Law’s Glasgow-based development team and in five months they worked together to build the third version of the app from scratch.

When users sign in to the app, they’re asked what sports they play. By accessing Facebook friends and phone contacts, the app does a smart search so when the user looks for a specific sport to participate in, it prioritises contacts over strangers. If the user chooses not to pick an existing friend, the app highlights strangers who play the sport they’re interested in.

Users can rate players on skill, fitness and reliability; they can schedule availability and set games to recur on a regular basis, while also providing an entire in-app communication platform for messaging.

Crowd funding the future
To secure funding for continued development of the app and to increase marketing activities, the team put Find A Player on equity-based crowdfunding platform Seedrs with the aim of raising £110,000.

“The app reached its target in two days. We kept the portal live for a few more weeks, raising a total of £150,000 before we tied it off – having reached the upper limit of equity we wanted to give away.”

With around 100 investors, whose contributions range from £40,000 down to the base share price of £19, famous backers include Owen O’Donnell (former chairman of the sports fantasy game FanDuel and the maker of Candy Crush) and Steve Oliver – co-founder and CEO of cash-for-goods exchange company Entertainment Magpie Limited.

“In terms of future development, we want to engage with government and sports bodies to provide opportunities for local sport players,” says Law. “We’re making sure the app’s functionality is optimal first in Scotland, before we expand to the rest of the UK and then internationally. We also have lots of contacts in sports governing bodies, so we have easy access to many sports venues.

“Obviously the key sports we’ll be targeting to use the app will be team games for which it’s essential to have the right number of players – for example football. However, it will ultimately be up to the users to determine how they work with Find A Player and how they rate the value they get from it.”