Our goal for this project was to increase athlete engagement during the summer months. Summer months are a low point in FieldLevel’s overall athlete activity metrics. In the summer months, many college programs are hosting summer camps, showcases, and prospect camps. On the flip side, parents and athletes all across the country are doing college campus visits. Our secondary goal was to learn how Events could weave into FieldLevel’s current product offering and what it would take to be a service that could contribute as a business line extension. We also had an objective to get an MVP version out asap so that we could take advantage of the upcoming summer months. We knew that we already had an existing pattern for the list and posting from our recent work on the Coaching Jobs project that would allow us to potentially build Events more quickly. One of the biggest questions that we had to answer was how we wanted to structure the act of posting events. Many other companies that host jobs generally have a “pay to post” or “pay per sign up” model. These were models we felt we didn’t want to emulate for two major reasons: 1) the implementation would be costly 2) we wanted our model to be unique and defensible. We felt that allowing organizations the ability to post camps for free would give us a competitive advantage in the space and allow us to take considerable market share. We decided to focus heavily on making sure that the free route was the route we wanted to take over a “pay” model. We believed that offering to post for free would attract more events to be posted and thus would drive athlete engagement higher and in turn, would increase our revenue sales. Over the next week, we spent our time primarily making discovery calls to college coaches and running revenue projections on the impacts of “free vs pay”. Eventually, we came to a consensus that running an experiment as the free model would help us learn more. We spent the next month building an MVP version of Events posting. We planned to launch in Baseball, Softball, Women’s Volleyball, & Women’s Basketball first and then open it up to the rest of the sports. The results of the test were extremely positive. We saw strong usage from our initial sports and we saw a big uptick in our athlete engagement numbers with a higher-than-average click rate for athlete weekly engagement emails. Most importantly we got great feedback from colleges posting their events on FieldLevel who would not normally post on competitive “pay” companies. Overall we got positive signals that this not only was going to give us a boost in athlete engagement but also that there was potential to take market share with our “free” model.