2013 January - Company from Aarhus reached the top of the App Store
Originally written by: Niki Ranch Nielsen
Published: 02 January 2013 at 15:23
Originally published by Aarhus Stiftidende
The entrepreneur behind SportMember has experienced major success with the launch of his virtual club house for smartphones, where players and coaches and manage the various members before, during and past matches.
The majority of good ideas develop from a practical problem.
Such a practical problem was experienced by Frank Bjergø from Aarhus, when he in 2004 played football for pleasure with his casual kick-a-bout team.
As in many other sports clubs and smaller societies of happy amateur level sport participators, his team struggled with coordination and communication between player and coaches.
“Sometimes we were 5 players attending practice, and other times we were 13. It was impossible to coordinate anything” Frank Bjergø remembers from his time as a football player.
Frank Bjergø therefore decided to solve this problem.
Back then he was finishing his further education at Copenhagen University, where he researched cooperation through networking, and his Ph.D. project became the start of a smaller revolution within the coordination of team based sports.
Soon after the homepage for SportMember was born. A free tool, which was programmed to improve the frustrating e-mail communication, while simplifying coordination of activities in all types of sport, through an advanced calendar and participation system.
The virtual clubhouse soon became a great success.
Sport participators flooded to the homepage where they immediately created teams and player profiles.
Today SportMember is, with only 100.00 registered users, the largest social sports media in Denmark, and the entrepreneur has definitely not been relaxing.
Since the launch, new features have been introduced regularly, which has meant that the users of today can use SportMember for everything between a comprehensive statistical tool that keeps track of goals, red and yellow cards, to a membership payment function.
”It surprised me, that the demand was so great. But it’s nice to be confirmed, in that were doing something right” Frank Bjergø says, who a couple of years ago quit his job to concentrate 100% on the development of SportMember.
Today the website is driven by the founder himself from an office community in Aarhus, where he together with a few passionate employees continue the development of the concept.
In the middle of December, SportMember for the first time, launched an application for smartphones, that consists of the major functions that are found on the webpage.
”It is something, that our users have demanded for years”, Frank Bjergø explains.
But even though the launch of the app seemed as an obvious step, not even the founder had expected the reaction that the small mobile program received.
Around 2.000 people downloaded the app the first day of it’s launch, which sent SportMember to the very top of the sport category in Apple’s App Store.
”It’s crazy, when considering that the app is simply the same concept but on another platform. It came as a major chock, and I’m still shaken by it’s unpredicted success”, Frank Bjergø comments.
Currently around 3.000 people have downloaded the application, and Frank Bjergø along with his employees are currently working hard on the release of the next version, which is planned to contain even more features.
Meanwhile, the biggest organisations and sponsors on the Danish sports scene, are beginning to show interest for SportMember.
Frank Bjergø has amongst others written sponsorship contracts with ‘Carlsberg’, ‘Danske Spil’, and the telephone company ‘Call Me’.
And he is not afraid either to state that for 2013:
“We expect to reach 200.000 users”, he says.
Link to the original article: