Today we’d like to introduce you to Ben Weiss.
Ben, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I’ve been a fan of college football recruiting ever since I was 14. Growing up, I poured through the blogs trying to find out who the future stars of my favorite programs would be. After getting into college at Northwestern University, I saw that there wasn’t as much coverage of Northwestern football recruiting as there was for most other schools I followed. So I started writing on the Northwestern blogs about football recruiting, and soon enough had a weekly spot on one of the top Northwestern sports sites at the time — Lake the Posts.
Weeks before the start of my freshman year, I published an article that used analytics to break down Northwestern’s football recruiting class. As it turns out, that article wound up getting sent over to the Director of Football Recruiting for Northwestern football, who sent me an email inviting me to his office. And suddenly, one week into college, I had landed an *unpaid* job working in recruiting for Northwestern football.
After working on the inside of the industry for two years, I got frustrated with how inefficient the recruiting process was. We had a team of 6 staffers combing through thousands of players, all in order to find the 20 guys that would wind up committing to our program. We were only getting 15% of the players we extended scholarship offers to (a higher number than most), and only 0.5% of the players we actually spent time evaluating in the recruiting process. Ultimately, I realized a majority of the time and money spent in football recruiting was wasted chasing the wrong guys.
My sophomore year of college, I took a class taught by the president of my university in which I learned about how the admissions process works for many prestigious schools. I learned that they employ a statistical algorithm to predict which students are likely to matriculate in order to accept an optimal number of applicants and to optimize their yield rates. When I saw that this was being done in the world of general admissions, I realized that this could be applied to college football recruiting. Yet we knew way more about the players we’re recruiting from a football standpoint than admissions officers know about the general applicants applying to their school.
So, I worked with a guy in the Northwestern football office on gathering data on football recruits that Northwestern had offered in the previous few recruiting cycles and then linked up with a friend with strong analytics skills named Danny who started working on creating an algorithm that could predict how likely a future recruit would be to commit to Northwestern. After 6 months of testing, our algorithm had a 94% success rate, and we saw we were having an actual impact on how Northwestern went about the recruiting process.
Thinking we were on to something, Danny and I set out to find a team to help us build out a software platform. We were fortunate to connect with two talented computer science students that were our year in college named Dino and Gautier. We also got accepted into a summer accelerator program at Northwestern University that gave us 10-weeks and $10,000 to work on our venture. So the summer before our senior year of college, Dino and Gautier spent their summer building out Zcruit’s software platform, and by summer’s end, we had a prototype ready to test and 3 Division 1 programs ready to test it out with us.
Yet after several weeks, we realized that no one was logging in or using our platform. In the fall of 2016, we went back to the drawing board and came up with a couple feature ideas that we thought could incentivize usage and bring significantly more value to the product. We spent the next several months building those features out and planned to show our updated product and get feedback on it at the upcoming American Football Coaches Association Convention in Nashville in January.
I cold emailed coaches and leaned on my network and was able to line up meetings with 8 division 1 football coaches and recruiters for the Convention. We flew to Nashville, crashed on a friend’s couch, planned out our meeting and without buying passes to the Convention, met coaches at a coffee shop near the Convention center. While we didn’t think the product was market ready quite yet, we were encouraged by the positive feedback we received from the recruiters we met with. And fortunately for us, buzz from the Convention caught the attention of a USA Today reporter, who two weeks later published a full-length feature article on Zcruit. Suddenly, we had national attention on us, and football coaches and recruiters from all over the US expressing interest. We rushed our product to market, received our NCAA certification license, and made our first three official sales.
That momentum carried us into the summer of 2017 (the summer after my senior year), where we were able to get a full team of 6 to stay and work on Zcruit. That summer, we went from 1 product to 2 (we built out a news updates and notifications platform) and wound up going from 3 customers to 14, including adding schools in every Power 5 Conference. While the rest of my teammates took full-time jobs post-grad or headed back to school, I opted to work on Zcruit full-time. And in August of 2017, Zcruit received an acquisition offer from a private-equity backed company in the collegiate athletic recruiting space (named Reigning Champs), which wound up being the perfect growth partner for us to pair with. We closed with Reigning Champs in late November, and since then have been hard at work planning out the next phase of our product, growing our team, and expanding our reach. Less than a year after the launch of our first product, we work with over 20 division 1 football programs, including some of the biggest names in the sport and have an actionable plan for building a platform that can help all collegiate athletic programs recruit smarter and more efficiently. We’re excited to have the opportunity to innovate and disrupt this space and use technology and analytics in a way that no one has been able to before.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
It has definitely not been a smooth road and we’ve had a lot of struggles along the way. After we built out of the first version of the product, we got no usage. But instead of giving up, we innovated and pivoted our product in a way that would incentive people to utilize our platform.
After getting our initial wave of press, we were only able to capitalize and get 3 schools on board our platform. People that we’d been in contact with stopped answering our calls. To go beyond 3, we had to develop a new product and marketing strategy, and because we executed successfully, we were able to scale up rapidly.
I made the decision to go full-time on Zcruit when we had $15,000 in revenue. It was enough to support the business, but not enough to support myself. Making those tough decisions and persisting through the tough times allowed us to ultimately build a product that our customers really get value out of, and wound up getting us the exciting financial opportunity and support to grow our business the way we want to grow it.
Zcruit – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
Zcruit helps college football programs recruit smarter through predictive analytics. We’ve developed a software platform that accurately predicts how likely a recruit is to commit to a given school. Using our algorithm, we generate a “likelihood to commit” score for the over 25,000 players in our database, customized to fit each school’s unique recruiting profile.
Ultimately, we help college football programs recruit smarter in three primary ways. First, we have a “Discover” tool that shows schools a targeted list of the best players in the country that would be likely to commit to their program, as a great way for teams to start their recruiting search by targeting the right players right away. Second, we have a “Decision Making” tool that tells teams exactly where they stand with recruits, allowing them to allocate their time and resources most effectively, letting them know if they should be offering or evaluating different prospects at different stages of the recruiting cycle, and letting schools know what they need to do to improve their odds of getting a player to commit to their program. Third, we have a news update and notification platform (called Zmail) that tells schools all the relevant recruiting updates on players they’re actively recruiting and allows users to track the recruiting activity of rival schools or players from different geographic locations or position groups.
We are the only company that uses data and analytics to drive recruiting results. We’re bringing something pretty groundbreaking and revolutionary to the college recruiting space and I am excited that Zcruit is blazing the trail in doing so.
What is “success” or “successful” for you?
Success to me means, we’ve developed a product that every coach and recruiter uses daily to help them go through the recruiting process more effectively and efficiently. If we can help coaches and recruiters get back their valuable time and spend more time coaching and less time recruiting, while building even better rosters while doing so, then we’ve done our job.
Contact Info:
- Address: Zcruit LLC
c/0 NCSA
1333 N Kingsbury St. 4th floor
Chicago, IL 60642 - Website: zcruit.co
- Phone: 708-203-4242
- Email: info@zcruit.co
- Facebook: facebook.com/zcruit
- Twitter: twitter.com/zcruitfootball
- Other: https://www.linkedin.com/company/zcruit/
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