⚡ How is this Start-Up Reengineering the Human Side of Sport

Morning Innovators ⚡ In less than 5 minutes, we’ll cover…

🥳 The best funding opportunities, events and jobs in the Start-Up world this week
📰 This week’s biggest news stories in the Start-Up world
🧠 How this Start-Up is reengineering the human side of sport
🏆 How simplicity kills competition
🎬 An AI co-pilot helping you cut down video editing time

✨ Last week’s most clicked link, was this link taking you through to LvlUp Ventures who are looking to back 50 early stage companies before the end of the year across their sector agnostic Seed fund and their consumer packaged goods fund.

Happy hustling,

Rich

🎤 Opportunities + Events

🌳 Baobab ventures have just raised a $15m fund to back global, pre-seed + seed technical startups - contact the team here!

🇪🇺 ROI Ventures are looking to back 3 b2b Pre-Seed startups in Europe with €100,000 tickets - get in touch here!

🌍 Endgame Capital have raised a €10m fund to back business first climate technologies - submit your pitch here!

We now have a community of thousands of Start-Ups and Founders, here are the hottest Start-Up job opportunities from the Innovators Uncensored community on our very own Start-Ups Job Board!

💼 Start-Up Jobs

👷 Full Stack Engineer, Tano
🎬 Creative Strategist, Stocked
🎨 Lead Product Designer, DevAlly

📈 Revolut confirms $75bn valuation after secondary share sale. Sifted

🧐 Former Mr. Beast content strategist is building an AI tool for creator ideation and analytics. TechCrunch

🚕 Uber and WeRide’s robotaxi service in Abu Dhabi is officially driverless. TechCrunch
 
🎓 NatWest signs spinout partnership with major universities. UKTN

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Competition brings out the best in us, and that’s exactly what it did to NYC sandwich shop, Counter Service. After a 5 Guys moved in next door, they wanted to make sure that passers by would skip 5 guys and head straight to Counter Service.

So, how did they do that? The made it so painfully obvious what they were selling, that you’d know from a literal mile away.

As a result, people have flocked from far and wide to see the huge sign given its recent social media fame - and have been trying the sandwiches in their masses!

How can you beat out your competition through simplicity?

Each week we highlight our favourite tools - either something we’ve been using in our businesses, or tools that our Start-Up community have recommended.

FireCut AI is a co-pilot for Adobe Premiere Pro that automates boring tasks (cutting silences, removing repeated takes, adding captions, detecting chapters, etc.) so you can focus on the creative stuff and get to your first cut quicker.

ATHLEET: The Startup Bringing the Human Side of Sport Into Focus

In a world where team sports are increasingly data-driven, ATHLEET is tackling the blind spot almost every coach struggles with: the 70% of performance they can’t see. Mindset, wellbeing, confidence, motivation, team culture - all the intangible elements that make or break athletes long before tactics or technique enter the conversation.

ATHLEET gives sub-elite coaches simple, actionable visibility into the mental and emotional side of their squads. Players log short daily reflections, mood updates, and wellbeing signals. Coaches receive clean, digestible insights that help them understand their teams, support them better, and develop healthier, higher-performing environments.

It’s built specifically for the level of sport where resources are scarce, but human development still matters deeply: schools, clubs, academies, sub-elite teams. The goal is ambitious yet grounded - to make the mental side measurable, accessible, and genuinely useful for everyday coaches.

A Co-Founder Story That Started With “I’m Not Ready”

Damiaan didn’t set out to become a Co-Founder again. In fact, he actively wasn’t looking. He had a stable role in B2B SaaS, a baby on the way, and zero intention of diving back into the startup deep end after a previous sports-tech attempt a decade earlier.

But one night, browsing WorkInStartups “just for fun”, he came across a post for a Co-Founder at ATHLEET. The idea hit a nerve. He emailed saying he wasn’t Co-Founder material right now, but he was happy to share lessons from failing the first time.

A call with Aled (ATHLEET’s original founder and an ex-pro rugby player) and Sam (the now-CTO) changed everything. The chemistry was immediate - what began as an informal monthly chat snowballed into weekly calls, then daily conversations, and eventually a realisation:

They should stop pretending this was a side project and build it properly.

It was serendipity more than strategy, but sometimes that’s how the best founding teams form.

Scrappy Beginnings: From Free Users to the First Stripe Payment

ATHLEET’s earliest users weren’t customers - they were unpaid beta testers pulled in through Aled’s rugby network, Instagram outreach, and a whole lot of LinkedIn elbow grease.

The first paying customer came through the kind of Founder-led hustle every bootstrapped startup knows well. They messaged coaches relentlessly, offered free access, then followed up with:

“If you want to stay on, there’s an early access fee. Here’s the Stripe link.”

And then waited.

When that first payment came through, the team had the universal early-startup realisation: someone just paid actual money for something we built from nothing. A moment equal parts surreal and addictive.

Scaling the Hard Way: Pivoting, Rebuilding, and Letting Teams Grow Themselves

ATHLEET’s path to product-market fit hasn’t been linear. They’ve rebuilt large portions of the product based entirely on coach feedback - sometimes encouraging, sometimes brutally honest.

Two dynamics have pushed growth forward:

1. Organic team expansion
Coaches invite squads → players add reflections → squads grow themselves. The product naturally spreads within a team.

2. Referrals
Coaches talk, and ATHLEET quickly learned word-of-mouth in sport travels fast.

The real milestone has been seeing signups from teams the founders didn’t personally engage with - the early signal of a product becoming self-propelling.

What ATHLEET Learned Along the Way

Damiaan’s biggest lesson is simple:
Talk to users far more than you think you need to.

His first failed startup was built largely in a vacuum, and ATHLEET has benefitted enormously from avoiding that trap. Though in hindsight, he believes doubling down on user conversations even earlier would have saved them months of iteration.

Hindsight makes everything feel obvious. In reality, clarity only emerges once you’re knee-deep in the mess.

Bootstrapped, Lean, and Held Together by Determination

ATHLEET has been completely bootstrapped for two years. The team spent roughly £10k up until their first recurring revenue and have kept operations lean - paying for essentials only.

The real cost hasn’t been financial but personal. All three Founders have taken on extra work, made lifestyle adjustments, and found creative ways to stay afloat.

It hasn’t been glamorous, but it’s made the company almost abnormally resilient. In Damiaan’s words:

“We know we can survive almost anything.”

Raising in a Tough Market: A Reality Check

ATHLEET is currently raising, and like many early-stage companies in 2025, they’ve discovered the market is far tougher (and far slower) than it looks from the outside.

They started with VCs and sophisticated angels, assuming SEIS/EIS would make things straightforward.

It didn’t.

Investor criteria kept shifting:

• “Come back when you have revenue.”

• “Come back when you have more.”

• “Come back when you have traction at scale.”

So they pivoted to value-add angels - ex-athletes, Founders who understand the mission, people within the sports ecosystem. This has been far more fruitful.

Tools like Scribe Labs helped get them in front of the right people, but the fundraising grind remains real.

Biggest Challenges: Moving Targets & Building a Team From Scratch

ATHLEET has faced two major challenges:

1. The moving target of traction

Every time they reached a milestone, investor expectations shifted. Progress is slow, requirements keep rising, and staying mentally steady has been a challenge.

2. Forming a founding team as strangers

The team met online. They came from different backgrounds, had families, jobs, and responsibilities - and building trust from scratch takes time.
But the fact they’ve stayed aligned, communicated well, and held themselves to the same wellbeing standards they preach says everything.

They’re building a wellbeing product, so they’re trying to live that mission internally too.

Lessons & What Damiaan Would Do Differently

Key Lessons

• Build with your users, not for them.

• Discomfort means growth - embrace it.

• Imposter syndrome is usually just accelerated learning.

• Pivoting clarifies your mission, not contradicts it.

• Quality conversations with customers beat perfect roadmaps.

What he’d change next time

He wouldn’t trade the journey - the chaos, breakthroughs, pivots, and slow belief-building have shaped the product into what it is.

But next time?

He’d try not to jump off a stable income cliff before spotting the next ledge.

Next week I’ll be highlighting another awesome Start-Up, as well as sharing all the usuals including funding opportunities, Start-Up news, plus plenty of awesome tips, tricks and tools.

P.S. Connect with me on LinkedIn…