SportsLink
SportsLink is the matchmaker between sports and business.
By connecting these two worlds with the SportsLink platform, they create new commercial opportunities and help ambitious athletes realize their sports dreams.
SportsLink is a place where companies, federations, and athletes can create their own Crowdfunding, Campaigns and even earn money through Affiliate programs.
Goal
The goal was to create a completely automated platform that would protect every user, both companies and athletes throughout the collaboration process and where almost no human interaction would be required.
Each user would have their own profile where they can show themselves in the best light possible.
SportsLink also wanted to ensure companies have a chance to work only with validated athletes, therefore the vision is to have automation that automatically finds how many followers each athlete has on every social network.
Crowdfunding is also an important part of the project, something like Kickstarter, but based on an athlete where each athlete could start their own crowdfund and earn money for their journey.
Last but not least, the goal was to connect the SportsLink platform to HubSpot and send automated emails on almost every action on the platform.
Challenge
A few of the biggest challenges that occurred during the realization of the idea were the following:
- How to ensure that both parties in the collaboration are protected?
- Find payment providers that support crowdfunding
- How to automatically get the athlete’s follower count from social networks without being blocked?
- Planning the delivery of the fully working platform in a really short deadline?
- Create a custom UI/UX to fit the platform’s nature.
- Connecting SportsLink platform to the HubSpot
- How to create an environment where client designers can create their own landing pages?
- And many more.
There were a lot of other challenges that occurred along the way, but they are nothing compared to the ones mentioned above.
For every mentioned challenge, we managed to find a solution in the timeframe we had available, and before implementing it, for each solution, we had to prove that it was the right fit for us because we didn’t have enough time to afford any failure or/and wrong decision.
Because of the tight deadline, we planned the project’s roadmap really carefully so we could develop multiple features at once and thus be finished on the agreed deadline.
Taking more time for detailed planning helped us develop every solution before even starting with it.
Solution
As always, after you investigate all of the possibilities and everything there is to know about some domain, the solutions are really simple in the end.
How to ensure that all parties are protected during collaboration?
Implement an escrow system. The escrow system will hold the amount of money in the wallet which the company will pay to an athlete for the agreed work. This amount of money is paid out automatically when the athlete delivers the agreed content.
How to find payment providers that support crowdfunding?
Contact every payment provider, agree to a meeting, discuss the possibilities, summarize a lot of different payment providers that are supporting the payment process then decide.
How to automatically get the athlete’s follower count from social networks without being blocked?
That one was not easy, social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok have almost perfect solutions for blocking the crawlers. Why do we say almost perfect? Because we found a solution to bypass the protections.😎
To bypass the social network protections we had to create an independent application separate from the SportsLink platform whose main purpose was to get the social network follower count for each athlete and send us the results.
Sounds simple? ****Not actually, in the background it uses AI which mimics the real user and then captures the required information.
How did we create an environment where SportsLink’s designers can create their own landing pages?
SportsLink designers were proficient in using WebFlow, but there is no way for the client to independently create WebFlow landing pages without developer help.
As we always seek in direction of the client’s independence after project completion, we didn’t want to opt out of anything that didn’t support that goal.
Therefore we connected WebFlow to WordPress, yes you’re reading that right, and WordPress to Laravel, and with some server configuration now these three systems co-exist in one perfect symphony and the SportsLink team can create new landing pages care-free.
And what about Connecting the SportsLink platform to HubSpot?
To start off with what’s HubSpot? HubSpot is an enterprise-level marketing platform capable of doing automation anyone can imagine.
HubSpot was introduced in the SportsLink platform when there were more than 1,500 active users on the platform, so we had to find a way to sync all of the existing users from the SportsLink platform into the HubSpot. This synchronisation allowed SportsLink team members to have full control over all automation in HubSpot.
Yes, in the end, all of the solutions may seem easy but have required tons of research, planning, and even more expertise.
Result
As a result, SportsLink is an almost fully automated platform, the only action required from the SportsLink team is to validate the Campaigns and Crowdfundings with a button click from the email.
With features such, as two different payment providers for an escrow system for secure collaborations and with payment providers that support crowdfunding.
A solution to retrieve the athlete’s follower counts from social networks, the platform ensures the protection of all parties involved.
Additionally, the integration of HubSpot has allowed for seamless automation and control over marketing campaigns.
As a result, SportsLink has become an almost fully automated platform, minimizing the need for human interaction and streamlining the collaboration process.
