Welcome back to Who Are These Startups. Podcast shorts featuring founders of Canadian startups, hosted by the Startup Coach. This episode features Javelin Sports with Justin Ford.

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Javelin Sports on Who Are These Startups Transcript (Automated)

Javelin Sports on Who Are These Startups

The Startup Coach: Welcome to who are these start-ups podcast shorts, featuring founder interviews of Canadian startups. Welcome back to who are these startups? I'm your host and startup coach. Founder of Toronto starts one of the largest startup communities in Canada. And with me today is Justin Ford CEO and co-founder of javelin sports. Welcome Justin.

Justin Ford of Javelin Sports: Thanks, Craig.

The Startup Coach: Let's jump right into it. What does javelin sports. 

Justin Ford of Javelin Sports: So javelin sports is an organization whose goal is to make it easier to play sports. We operate with the core belief that sports are social. So we put most of our time and effort into focusing on building sport communities and then providing them good ways to communicate with each other.

Through working with sports players, organizations, leagues in this manner, we've grown a player base of over 30,000 players. And recently we've been kind of expanding on what we currently offered to also allow players to. Match with other players, one-to-one in their area to chat with them and that way, and then also even book places.

The Startup Coach: What is javelin sports startup story. So 

Justin Ford of Javelin Sports: we actually started as a group project that I was working on in my final year at university. I didn't actually think I necessarily wanted to go into entrepreneurship when I was younger, but through building out this group project, I guess I kind of caught the entrepreneurship bug.

I really enjoyed the work we were doing for that. I managed to speak with some of our clients and this was in the sports space. So it was a problem that I'm really passionate about solving. So everything kind of aligned. Uh, we launched in 2017 and since then have been kind of slowly scaling up what.

There's a number of different things that drive me. Initially, I started working on this once again, cause I just want it to make it easier to play sports. I played a lot as a kid, but after I graduated high school, I was playing less and less. There had to be some way to fix this issue. And there has to be other people who are facing my problems.

If you look at numbers, I think 27% of adults are actively playing sports. Whereas about 76% of them say they want to either start playing or play more. So there's this big gap. And we thought if we could build something that simplifies the process makes it easier to connect with people in your area, easier to find games, easier to communicate with other players.

Then we could truly increase sports participation rates around the world. With that being said, Toronto has really bustling startup ecosystem. I know you're one of the big drivers behind that. So, so thank you for all the work you're doing there, Craig, through speaking and meeting with a lot of these entrepreneurs and other founders, I started to see from an overall view, just how interesting and exciting the startup community is.

So I'm now viewing this as kind of the first of many, hopefully business ventures that I'm working on with just the intent of, of helping solve big problems through the use of,