TeamBuilder

Hewitt Tomlin and his college roommate, both former collegiate athletes, witnessed a glaring inefficiency in the strength coaching industry. Their own performance coaches were managing programs for hundreds of athletes using Excel spreadsheets and printed paper packets. When they investigated, they discovered this was the industry standard—no digital solutions existed. "Software as a service wasn't as popular of a model" at the time, Hewitt recalls. With his roommate's programming skills and Hewitt's business acumen, they decided to build something for themselves. "The project evolved into a product and the product evolves into a company."

The founders built TeamBuilder without any outside capital, a decision they've maintained for the entire company's existence. They launched in 2013 and spent the first several years refining their core offering: helping strength coaches write individualized programs for large numbers of athletes while collecting performance data digitally instead of on paper and whiteboards. The software's key value proposition was clear: a single certified coach managing 300 competitive athletes could now create more personalized programming and track progress automatically through the app rather than manually reassigning goals for each athlete.

TeamBuilder's early customers were high school strength coaches—a perfect fit for the product. High schools that could afford a strength coach typically could only afford one, yet they had dozens or hundreds of athletes. This 300:1 ratio created exactly the pain point their software solved. "Massively" is how Hewitt describes this use case's strength. The sales process evolved into a two-pronged approach: first, a 30-minute online demo that directly showed coaches the time savings, and second, sales collateral designed for administrators and decision-makers using business language around ROI and efficiency.

TeamBuilder's growth has been fueled primarily by content-driven inbound marketing, not paid ads. Hewitt explains: "We focus on content generation, bringing people to our top of funnel...a lot of our content generation is done in-house, but also by our customers." Happy customers write blogs and do interviews, and TeamBuilder brands and leverages this into marketing. The company converts 25-30% of sales-qualified leads and adds 40-50 new customers monthly—mostly through one sales rep doing demos. Revenue retention is a key metric: without dedicated retention efforts, they'd churn 20% annually, but with a dedicated customer manager, they've achieved 90% revenue retention. Growth has been consistent: from roughly $500,000 ARR in October 2017 to $1,000,000 ARR one year later, nearly doubling year-over-year. Most growth came from new customer acquisition rather than expansion revenue.

At 10 employees, ~1,000 customers, and $1M ARR, TeamBuilder remains fully bootstrapped with no outside capital. Hewitt is committed to staying that way for at least the next 12 months. The next move is to expand beyond strength coaches at schools into a new market: helping trainers and fitness professionals sell programming online. He sees opportunity in what's currently scattered across Instagram and other platforms—a more structured market for traditional strength and conditioning programming delivered digitally. When asked about venture debt to accelerate growth, Hewitt remained measured: "The fire hasn't stopped growing" without it, and he'd only consider outside capital when the pain of slow growth became painful enough.