Equipe

WELCOME TO THE TURNSTILE

We're kicking off our newsletter for everything tech, data, and business around sports and live entertainment. For our first edition, we'll be diving into the realities of implementing AI tools for your front office. Too many organizations, especially in college athletics, lack the fundamental ingredient to make these tools successful. TLDR; it's the data.

Around Equipe, we've released Customizable Actions allowing for total control of actions within the Equipe platform and some exciting funding news.

- Aaron

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THE DREAM AI STACK

(AND THE REALITY CHECK)

If you’ve spent any time on LinkedIn lately, you’d think Claude is a five-star recruit about to suit up and play quarterback. Everyone is talking about the "AI revolution" in sports, and The Fourth Quarter recently laid out a blueprint for the "Ultimate AI Stack" if they owned a team.

It’s a tantalizing vision. We’re talking:

AI Scouting: Finding the next diamond in the rough by processing thousands of hours of tape in seconds.
Hyper-Personalized Marketing: Sending a "we miss you" discount for a bratwurst to exactly the fan who always buys one in the 3rd quarter.
Dynamic Ticketing: Pricing seats with the precision of a Wall Street hedge fund.

The catch? You can’t build a penthouse on a foundation of quicksand.

THE BOTTOM LINE: NO DATA, NO GLORY

Here’s our POV: These AI tools are the advanced plays for experienced players and teams, they can only happen by mastering the data fundamentals that come before them.

The reality is that too many sports organizations, especially in college athletics, are trying to run a pro "AI Playbook" while their data is still stuck in JV.

Why implementations fail:

Siloed Systems: Your ticketing data doesn’t talk to your concessions data, which definitely doesn’t talk to your donor database.
Dirty Data: If your fan names are "John Doe," "J. Doe," and "Johnny D" in three different systems, AI just sees three different people.
The "Garbage In, Garbage Out" Rule: AI is a force multiplier. If you feed it messy, incomplete data, it will just give you messy, incomplete (and expensive) mistakes at a faster rate.

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THE GAME PLAN

If a team wants to actually use the stack The Fourth Quarter describes, they need to stop looking at AI as a "plugin" and start looking at their Data Foundation Layer as the MVP.

In college sports, where budgets are tightening and the NIL landscape is shifting daily, you can’t afford to spend six figures on an AI marketing tool that can't tell your season ticket holders from your students.

Our advice: Before you buy the "AI Scout," make sure you know where your data lives, who owns it, and if it’s clean enough to eat off of.

The takeaway: In the race to innovate, the teams that win won't just have the best algorithms—they’ll have the best organized data. You can't run a trick play if you don't know where the ball is.

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💡PRODUCT HIGHLIGHT

ACTIONS ARE NOW FULLY CUSTOMIZABLE

For many sports organizations, unifying customer data in complete profiles is a huge unlock, but the real value is then understanding what those customers actually do. The challenge is every organization cares about different things, unique to them.

That's why we made customer actions in Equipe fully customizable. Equipe stores customer data in 3 core forms: identity, actions, and insights. Identity and actions form the basis of all data that integrates in Equipe.

Identity is easy. It just means data that identifies your customers. Customer actions are things customers actually do like transactions, engagements, and attendances. With Equipe, you can define the actions you need for your organization.

Want to know if a customer bought $300+ second hand tickets and lives in the area? Or used on the on-campus golf course the Friday before a game? Or is a first time donor under 40 that gave $10K+?

Now you can with Equipe.

🏢 FROM EQUIPE HQ

ICYMI WE RAISED OUR SEED!

We're proud to announce we've raised our seed round at $1.5MM, led by Game Changers Ventures. This funding allows us to double down on our product roadmap and people. Two new hires have been added to the team to accelerate product development and execute our GTM strategy.

Read coverage here from Sports Business Journal

🗞️ WHAT ELSE WE'RE READING

TIGERS, TV, PE OH MY!

Ilitch Sports and Entertainment is creating its own regional sports network in the Metro Detroit area. Meanwhile, Private Equity is taking meetings with the Big Ten and SEC schools to explore consolidated media monetization. The Athletic posted a deep dive into the financial situation of the Big Ten teams.

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🏟️ AI Playbooks are Stuck in JV