TeamSnap Revenue: $18.9M Reported for 2018, and a CEO Who Forecast a Flat 2020

TeamSnap has published revenue for two years. Reporting to the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC) for its Inner City 100 list, which Fortune publishes, the company gave revenue of $12,313,903 for 2017 and $18,878,076 for 2018, an increase of about 53%. Fortune’s company pages label both figures “2019 Revenue.” The list’s methodology pages, however, base the 2018 ranking on revenue from 2013 to 2017 and the 2019 ranking on 2014 to 2018, and that’s how we date them. We found no published figure for any later year.

The CEO didn’t add to those numbers. Asked on July 1, 2020 for the previous year’s figure “or a range,” co-founder and CEO Dave DuPont told Nathan Latka: “We don’t usually talk about revenue.” He gave a growth rate and a forecast instead. Since his previous Latka interview in 2017, he said, TeamSnap had grown about 45% a year on average “in users and revenue.” For 2020, with COVID having stopped organized sports in March, his forecast was: “We expect our revenue this year to be the same as last year. So not 50% growth or 45%, but the same as last year. But given everything that’s going on in the sports world, I count that as a victory.”

That was an expectation for a year that was only half over when the tape was made. It was not a result. This recording doesn’t say whether 2020 actually came in flat. TeamSnap hasn’t published revenue for 2019 or 2020 anywhere we could find, so there’s nothing to check the forecast against. The rest of this piece covers what the tape does show: how TeamSnap charged, how many people used it, and how it furloughed half its staff in nine days.

TeamSnap revenue: what DuPont said, and what he didn’t

The exchange was short. Latka asked what TeamSnap had reached the year before. DuPont declined, then offered “a little bit of a teaser”: about 45% average yearly growth since 2017, and a flat 2020. Neither number came with a base. A growth rate that blends users and revenue and has no starting figure can’t be turned into a dollar amount, so we haven’t tried. The published figures offer only a partial check. The one year on record, 2017 to 2018, grew about 53%, which fits an average near 45%, but a single year can’t confirm a multi-year average that also counts users.

We also have to correct our own earlier work. A previous version of this article put a precise ARR figure in its headline and said DuPont “held it flat through COVID.” Both claims were wrong. The figure came from revenue rows on TeamSnap’s GetLatka profile that had no recorded source, nobody said it on this tape, and those rows are no longer on the profile. “Held it flat” turned a mid-year forecast into an achievement. The only revenue figures this article uses are the two TeamSnap reported to ICIC.

You could try to rebuild a number from the parts DuPont did give: active users, team size, trial conversion and price. His own answers show why that fails. The 30% he quoted is the rate at which trials convert to paid, not the share of all teams that pay. He also said team subscriptions were “not the main part of our revenue” any more. A total built that way would just be an estimate of a figure the CEO chose not to give.

How TeamSnap charged in 2020

TeamSnap launched in May 2009 as a communication and coordination tool for single teams, on what DuPont called a “classic freemium internet model.” In 2020 a new team still got the premium version free for 21 days and then picked a plan. One of the plans was free, so the trial had no hard stop. “We don’t force you off and say, pay us or you’re done. It’s pay us if you want to continue to use the premium features.”

Our conversion to paid from the free trial is about, and this has been consistent for a decade, 30%.

Dave DuPont, co-founder and CEO, TeamSnap, July 2020

Latka checked the math out loud: if 1,000 teams start a trial in a month, about 300 are paying by day 21. DuPont said yes. The person paying is typically the coach or team manager, who is sometimes reimbursed by parents. Plans came in annual and monthly versions, and DuPont said “for simplicity” that pricing ran $10 to $20 a month for the whole team. Bigger rosters move to a higher premium tier (“We have teams with a thousand players”), but he said the expanded-roster feature still costs no more than the $20 he’d quoted.

By 2020 the bigger business sat above the team. “Increasingly, we’re selling TeamSnap to the club or league,” DuPont said. The club adopts it for every team, coaches and parents pay nothing, and TeamSnap adds services a single team never buys, like season registration and game scheduling. “Much more money changes hands at that level than at the team level.” Looking back on years of cheap team plans, he called the trade-off worth it: “yes, it was more difficult to build revenue using the model that we did. But at the same time, we built customer trust and affinity and a large user base, and we made a decent amount of money.”

On scale, he corrected himself mid-answer: “monthly active users is 5,000,000. Daily active users is 1,500,000, and you can do the math, but the average team has about 40 people on it.” Dividing gives about 125,000 teams’ worth of monthly users. That division is ours, not a count he gave, and it’s rough, because one person can be on more than one team. Latka’s introduction gave a bigger reach figure: nearly 20 million “administrators, coaches, players, and parents” relying on TeamSnap. That line is the host’s, read before DuPont spoke, but it matches TeamSnap’s own Inner City 100 entries, which say its apps help over 20 million organizers, coaches, administrators, players and parents.

Selling to leagues, and the cost of winning a paying team

Selling to clubs, leagues and associations is “a classic business to business sales model,” DuPont said, and TeamSnap had a sales force for it. A second group called on brands, because TeamSnap had started selling advertising and commerce on the platform as usage grew. Asked how many quota-carrying salespeople there were, he counted them up: “Altogether, about 15.”

For a single paying team, DuPont measured acquisition cost in time, not dollars: “our typical CAC time to break even is six or seven months.” Latka turned that into cash, saying “So you’re paying like 60 to $80 to get a customer,” and DuPont agreed: “Exactly. To get a paying customer.” The dollar range is Latka’s. At $10 to $20 a month, six to seven months of payback works out to $60 to $140, so Latka’s figure is the low end of what DuPont’s own numbers allow.

March 2020: planning for a 50% drop

DuPont didn’t size the cuts around a runway target. “We didn’t think about it that way, Nathan,” he said. In March the working assumption was that the business would fall “on the order of 50%” through the summer and recover during the fall to 70% participation. The actual hit was smaller: “about a third initially, and then we climbed up from there.” Activity dropped quickly in mid-March, “flattened out and has climbed ever since.” He said part of the reason was that member organizations kept using TeamSnap to run online workouts and keep in touch with players even with no games on.

The decision took a weekend. Around March 13, he said, it became clear something had to be done. He “grieved over the weekend” and put the plan to his executive team on Monday the 16th, and “nine days later, we furloughed a good portion of our company.” His instruction was to cut once only: “I’ve seen this movie before. It’s not going to get better right away.”

Round figures, we furloughed about half the people in the company… That was about 80 folks. And that was one of the worst days of my life, by the way.

Dave DuPont, July 2020

TeamSnap furloughed people rather than laying them off so it could bring them back. By July it had brought back “about 15% of the folks we furloughed,” with more to follow, though DuPont said it would be “extremely conservative” about that. The team was then “a little over 80 people.” About a third were engineers, and about half were in product once product managers and designers are counted. These round numbers don’t quite add up. Half the company being about 80 implies roughly 160 people before the cut, and adding back 15% of 80 would put the team near 92, not “a little over 80.” Treat all three as approximations, which is how DuPont gave them (“round figures”).

Funding was the one firm number he gave. Latka remembered $43 million raised “as of two years ago,” and DuPont updated it: “we’ve raised 48,000,000 to date.” Latka asked how a flat year went over with the board. DuPont said investors were “delighted with our performance. And many people, many of our existing shareholders thought we were done.”

After the tape

TeamSnap’s 2018 Inner City 100 entry reads: “While Dave has no interest in being acquired, the company is planning to go public in the next few years.” Its GetLatka profile now lists Waud Capital Partners as the owner and DuPont as a former CEO. We have no sourced date or price for that deal to report. The two figures reported to ICIC, for 2017 and 2018, are still the only published revenue we found, so whether the flat 2020 forecast held remains unknown. The interview page dates this recording July 1, 2020, which fits what’s on the tape: furloughs in late March, sports starting to come back, and the fall season still ahead.