Players and Startup Operators
Players and Startup Operators
A Look into Jordon Rooney and Damar Hamlin's New Venture
This week we're talking about athlete tech platform JABA and how they showcase the power of players & startup operators coming together in a new era of sports.
Let's connect on LinkedIn to continue the conversation.
Enjoy!
💡Big Idea
100’s of NIL technology companies are in the market to provide athletes, universities, collectives, agencies and with solutions to:
Connect athletes with endorsement opportunities
Provide athletes & their supporting teams with education to navigate the industry
Arm administrators with the software to manage regulatory and logistical aspects of NIL
Help athletes monetize their brands via digital and physical products
Provide fans & collectives with seamless ways to pay athletes within NIL compliance
An interesting development has been the convergence of the NIL market with broader technological advances.
For example, when the industry began in 2021, web3 was on the rise.
Many athlete builders, including myself, believed in the promise of web3 to unlock new levels of ownership for an athlete’s brand.
Naturally, this led to the creation of web3 x NIL platforms, like an NFT marketplace for college athletes.
Due to a lack of successful use cases for athletes and general market correction, the web3 x NIL collabs have winded down.
But athlete builders are still finding a way to connect the dots and innovate — most recently with AI.
And this time, the tech is meeting the needs of today’s players.
Enter: JABA.
🚀 JABA: The Athlete Brand Assistant
JABA is an interactive, personalized brand coach for athletes.
In action, the JABA platform works alongside NIL administrators to provide their athletes with 24/7 access to:
Assistance and best practices on landing NIL deals
Support with contracts and email templates
The latest creator trends on TikTok IG and YT
Content and caption ideas
The platform’s intelligence has been trained by “10,000 pieces of content, caption ideas, brand strategy and tips to assist athletes seeking brand deals while remaining NIL compliant” (via On3).
College athletes are met with a lot of education options — consultants, programs, workshops, and courses that will teach them how to build their brand.
But two years into NIL, we may be reaching the point of education fatigue, as athletes & their support teams are eager to simply get the job done.
JABA is entering the market to provide an execution-oriented brand building solution that is scalable, personalized, engaging to today’s college athletes.
At start, JABA is partnering with the following athletic departments:
Oklahoma
Penn State
Boston College
NC State
Utah
💭 Meet the Founders: Jordon Rooney and Damar Hamlin
Jordon Rooney knows how to build brands. In 2020 he founded a creative agency, Built Different Creative that transformed companies into digital brands. In 2021 he made history when becoming the first personal brand coach at the NCAA D1 Level with the Duquesne Men’s Basketball team.
That same year, he merged his expertise into Jaster, a forward thinking brand building agency for athletes. The firm works with football talent at the professional and collegiate level, including Damar Hamlin.
As NIL has progressed, Jordon has become a trusted thought partner to universities and collectives — teaches leading programs how to prepare their athletes for the digital age.
Damar Hamlin is a leading inspirational figure in sports.
Most recently, he was named the #2 Most Influential Player in the NFL by the NFLPA & Zoomph.
In the past year he has worked closely with Rooney to turn his personal story into a platform for advocacy on and off the football field.
As he shared with On3, JABA is a culmination of his learnings, and platform to give back to the next generation:
“It was always important for me to build my brand and platform, that’s why it was important for me to play a role in building JABA to give all athletes the resources they need to build their platforms. It gives you a personal brand coach in your back pocket and it’s super accessible to everybody.”
👀 What to Watch: Players and Startup Operators
Jordon Rooney’s progression from Damar Hamlin’s marketing representative to Co-Founder of a tech platform is huge 🔥.
We’re in a renaissance period of athlete-entrepreneurship.
Players have been building startups for a while across a diverse range of industries.
But what’s unique this time is the amount of athlete-focused solutions with scalability.
Historically, outside of fitness & performance, athlete-focused solutions have had a limited addressable market (the 1% of pro athletes).
But now, as the NIL market develops — the amount of athletes with problems that need solutions is growing by the day.
And who better to solve them than the people that have first hand experience into the consumer?
We’ll start to see more athletes in the Co-Founder seat, with the help of proven operators by their side to build for the next generation of players.
🫂 That’s a Wrap
Thank you for reading!
As always, let’s connect on LinkedIn to continue the conversation!
Kirby