The goal; quite literally
Co-founders Tom Bullard and Dino Kadric first approached the Business Development Team at Hethel Innovation back in 2021, where they attended a Build a Business In a Day workshop, since then and 5 mentoring sessions later, the business has been going from strength to strength!
Initially starting as a mobile app concept in 2018, Squad Assist was officially formed as a UK company in August 2021, a platform with a simple online way of managing and running regular games of football. Hethel’s Innovation Advisor, Rikke, mentored the pair throughout the development of the Squad Assist web application, which would aid 5-7-a-side teams to organise their games. Our main role as a mentor is to be supportive and constructively critical, asking important questions and providing guidance throughout the period, helping the business to make the right decisions and move forward.
We spoke to the guys about their experience on their mentoring programme and how things are going with the business since; here’s what they had to say!
What’s Squad Assist’s story?
We met at the University of Huddersfield, doing computer game related degrees. Every year of our degrees had a team project module, where you’re put into groups and told to build a game. We were put in the same team in our final year and 10 years later we’re still working on projects together.
The latest is Squad Assist, a website and app to help people organise casual football. We both play sport and know how time consuming it is to organise recreational games as an adult. Tom has been playing 5 and 7-a-side football for years and has seen squads use all manner of communication methods to try and get games on. A single place to manage all your games on just made perfect sense to us.
What have you been working on with Rikke from Hethel?
Rikke has been amazing. We feel incredibly fortunate that she’s part of our target audience and was able to provide so much feedback on the app, website, and our business. One of our mantras is “football for everyone” so she’s given us a female player’s perspective that we otherwise might not have had. Then on the business front, she helped us with strategy, pricing, business model, payment platforms, customer profiles, strap-line, marketing plan. We covered an awful lot in a short space of time.
What do you see in the future for Squad Assist, do you both have any goals right now?
We announced last week that we are launching the beta version of the app in October 2022. This will have the core features of creating squads, inviting teammates and scheduling games. The goal is to get entire football squads as well as people who play sport regularly to test our app and give us as much feedback as possible. From this we will make changes and improvements.
Once fully launched we will continue to develop the app and already have ideas for new features in the future that will take it beyond just organising games. Ultimately, we want to bring a premium experience to footballers worldwide. We speak several languages within the business and already have the infrastructure there to do localization for countries like Spain and Norway. Another avenue we’re excited about is sponsoring upcoming athletes who we feel share our values and support them in any way we can.
The beta is launching in October 2022, but you can sign up now at signup.squad-assist.com to register your interest and receive instant access as soon as it goes live!
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