Startup Interview with Andreas Kitzing, Sponsoo CEO

HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background.

After studying at University of Hamburg and London School of Economics, I worked as a management consultant and project manager. During my studies I founded a small startup where students can have their final grades calculated. During my MBA at the University of Cambridge, I came up with the idea for Sponsoo.

What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do?

As already mentioned, the startup is called Sponsoo. We are an international marketplace for sports sponsorship. Clubs, athletes, associations and sponsors meet on our platform to make the sponsoring process more efficient.

What is the origin story?

During my MBA I first got the idea for Sponsoo. Then I founded Sponsoo with two friends - based on the vision of enabling tens of thousands of amateur athletes to be sponsored.

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

We have a very young team. I love that everyone is very committed, flexible and motivated. And yet we have fun at work every day, which is very important for team-building. Of course, we are also enthusiastic about many different sports and have business backgrounds, which makes us perfect to solve this problem.

If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

Probably working on another startup haha. I just love the atmosphere that is there in startups. All are extremely ambitious, innovative and want to create something new every day. And what's more, most of the employees are quite young and enjoy their work. But maybe I would work again at my favorite club, Hamburger SV, where I was previously active.

At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?

We have different key metrics. On the one hand, of course, we look at the number of registered sponsors, athletes, clubs and associations. It is almost impossible to create a balance here, but it is quite normal that there are more athletes, clubs and associations than sponsors. The deals concluded on our platform and the turnover that we generate monthly and annually are also important. We can see from the two key figures how much our product is accepted and used.

What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

The most exciting thing so far is that we grew mostly organically on the athlete side. Overall, we have over 90% organic traffic via social media or google, for example.

What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why?

Two out of three founders are software developers. To be honest, we never worry about technical progress. We always see an opportunity in doing things more efficiently. These are, for example, smart contracts. We make the offer to customers that performance and payment are no longer separate from each other. In addition, this technology enables exciting new contract models to be created and customers to be linked in real time in a data-oriented manner. We think this is the future. But at the same time we can see that the market still needs some time before it fully accepts this new technology.

What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform?

I have already read many different stories on HackerNoon with great enthusiasm, because I am interested in the topics covered around software development, new technologies, Bitcoin and blockchain. The possibility that everyone can publish their own story is what makes the platform so attractive and irreplaceable. This is exactly why I would like to share my/our story about Sponsoo as well as my thoughts on new technologies, such as smart contracts in our industry.

What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself?

Invest all your money in bitcoins! But spread it across many different providers as some of them get hacked on a regular basis.