Trey Hicks and Will Newman bonded over their love for sports and became close friends growing up in the same neighborhood in High Point, N.C. Sports continue to connect the two through their B2B and B2C SaaS startup Cookie, even though Hicks now lives in Charlotte while Newman lives in Raleigh.
Raleigh-based Cookie is a mobile and web app with a niche focus on basketball that streamlines the services needed for the business of youth sports into one place.
“There’s a lot of fractured apps in the market that may do one or two of the big three things,” said Hicks. “We bring all of those meaningful and relevant concepts and functions into an application that is connected.”
Cookie’s services are centered on three pillars: events, clubs and recruiting.
Cookie recently rebranded from its earlier incarnation as Recruitify, which was focused primarily on the recruiting element. (We previously featured Recruitify in November, 2019.)
Hicks highlighted invoice streamlining, calendar automation and the app’s announcement platform as a few of the ways Cookie now meets the needs of all three pillars in one app.
Cookie’s software can look at different database relationships to determine when a player has left or joined a team, then use that information to automatically add or subtract them and their parents from that team’s calendar.
For clubs with lots of teams—and therefore lots of players, coaches and parents—this eliminates the need to manually input names, email addresses and phone numbers to calendars when a player leaves or joins a team.
Similarly, when a club needs to invoice parents for a payment or send out an announcement, users simply select a team to send the invoice or announcement to, and Cookie sends it to the parents and players associated with that team.
“[As a club director], I’ve got 500 people, and I want to send it to 75 of those people,” said Hicks. “I can just go in and select the team rather than saying, ‘I’ve got a list of 500 people. I now have to know what people I’m looking for, and I have to go through and match everyone who is in Team One and Team Two and Team Three. And then I’ve got to go through the parents as well.’”
Parents can then pay the invoice through Cookie, and Cookie collects 1.5 percent from each invoice.
Customer support, mobile experience are differentiators
If parents, players, coaches or club directors run into issues while using Cookie, they can contact Cookie’s customer support, something Hicks believes will set the startup apart from competitors.
“That’s something that a lot of our competitors lack and don’t really care about,” said Hicks. “You can have software all you want, but if you can’t support it and you’re not there for your customers, they’re going to go somewhere else because they need help. They need support. They’ve got questions. They need to talk to real people and not just talk to someone over email.”
Hicks also believes Cookie’s emphasis on its mobile experience will set it apart from competitors that use more desktop-based services such as Excel or Google Drive.
Cookie has clients across the country varying in size from clubs with five teams up to clubs with 90 or more teams, according to Hicks. The startup also showed growth, as year-over-year first-quarter revenue grew by 20 percent, according to Hicks.
Hicks and Newman funded Cookie partially through bootstrapping it and an angel investing round that raised $250,000. That includes a recent investment from the Triangle Tweener Fund. They’re still looking for funding to help maintain the startup and create more services within the app.
“It’s about value,” said Hicks. “So that’s what you want, to grow the value and the usefulness of the application. What that is done with is features and functionality. More code. More stuff. That’s what this game is about.”
