Using Euro 2024 to integrate employees through the Sportigio platform

Sportigio offers an innovative solution that uses the passion for football to build bonds between employees. 

- Our platform, which successfully debuted during the World Cup in Qatar in 2022, allows participants to predict the results of matches, which translates into increased engagement and competition in a friendly way - explain Mariusz and Marcin Zwierzychowski. 

How and when was the company established? Where did the idea come from and what was the catalyst for the founding? 

The company was formally established in mid-2021, after a meeting with the first investor - Krzysztof Drzyzga, the head of Verestro. At that point, we already had our first customers and a working product. In 2022, the first major investment round took place, in which, in addition to WP2 Investments, the aforementioned Krzysztof Drzyzga and Zbigniew Jagiełło participated. 

The business idea itself has been germinating in us since high school. We have always been "on the web" and we ran our own websites, e.g. of the youth hockey club in which we played, about speedway and later hockey. We have noticed that sports clubs, of which there are plenty in Poland and around the world, are very neglected in the digital sphere, and that's something we're good at. After creating a platform for clubs, it all began to evolve in further directions - we noticed that it can also be particularly useful in business - for sports sponsors and others. It turns out that we have created a cool tool for broadly understood gamification and user activation.  

What is the latest functionality of the platform on which you build your competitiveness? 

First of all, functionalities and novelties for Euro 2024. What are they? 

- Prediction Contests: Participants earn points for correct predictions. The points system is transparent and motivates healthy competition. 

- Creating your own groups: New for 2024 is the ability to create your own groups, which allows integration and competition between different departments or branches of the company. 

- Quizzes and additional games: We also offer soccer-related quizzes, which further enriches the user experience. 

What is the attractiveness of this offer? What benefits does the customer find in it? 

We can talk about several factors determining competitiveness. 

- Increasing employee engagement: The Sportigio platform helps to easily and effectively engage employees in joint activities, which is especially valuable during large sports events that are experienced not only in Poland, but also throughout Europe. 

- Improving the employer's image: A company using our platform is perceived as modern and cares about good relations between employees, which translates into its positive image. 

- Time and resource savings: The platform eliminates the need to organize predictions "from scratch", for example in Excel sheets. Everything is automated and easy to manage. 

Examples of implementations: PKO Leasing, Puls Biznesu and companies of various sizes – from a dozen to several hundred employees – have used our service, which proves its versatility and effectiveness. 

What else is in the Sportigio offer and who is it aimed at? 

Sportigio also creates the FanApp application, which is a gamification platform for fans of football clubs on a daily basis, but it is also used in business. This platform has already been used to engage participants at industry conferences, gain invaluable data, and interact with the brand. 

Sportigio offers a simple yet effective solution that not only makes life easier for organizers, but also brings real benefits to companies. It allows you to build a positive image of the company and engage employees in real time, which is particularly valuable during important sports events that are the focus of the whole of Poland and Europe. 

In what model do you manage the company? What is the division of competences in your team and what does it result from? 

As it is in a startup, we have a flat organizational structure. I focus largely on IT and technical maintenance, Marcin on the entire organization and formalities, finances, and together on sales. Besides, everyone in the team has their own "share", but we discuss most of the important topics together. From the beginning, we have been outsourcing mostly IT, recently we have also been trying the freelance model in other areas of the business and it seems to be a sensible model. 

What are the company's development plans? 

Scaling and international expansion is our plan, to put it briefly. We already have a fairly extensive product, we can easily adapt it to the needs of different customer groups. We see that we are able to serve many times more customers than before, because we have a sensibly built technological and business model (subscriptions), the product can be quickly translated into many languages and taken out into the world. This is the most important thing for us. We also want to offer additional services to existing customers, because during cooperation it often turns out that they have specific needs in which we are able to help. Most often, it is about outsourcing online marketing and Fan Engagement in its entirety. We do not only have to offer the platform as SaaS, but also comprehensively serve customers, because they often lack human resources and time.