Some of the most useful perspectives in SportsTech come from people who have experienced sport from several sides.
Elena Lipilina brings that breadth.
As an athlete, she understands what participation demands. As a founder, she has built a recreational women’s basketball league and founded Visible Sports to help address the difficulty of finding relevant sporting opportunities. Her advisory work now helps other founders explore how to bring their innovations to market.
That experience made her a particularly valuable guest for this Building SportsTech conversation.
I wanted to understand where she sees business opportunities in women’s sport and what founders need to learn before pursuing them.
Elena connected opportunities in professional performance with needs in recreational participation, drawing on examples across equipment, technology and the communities that make sport possible.
What I appreciated most was how she brought those opportunities back to practical decisions: understanding a specific person’s needs, building something that fits their life and identifying who can fund its adoption.
For founders exploring this space, her perspective offers a useful starting point:
Which unmet need do you understand well enough to build a business around and who would actually pay to solve it?
Below, I draw five practical lessons from our conversation to help you examine your own opportunity.
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1. Choose a specific customer before choosing a product
Elena separates two areas that founders can easily group together: professional performance and recreational participation.
They involve different goals, buying decisions and constraints.
A professional club might evaluate a product through its contribution to performance or the work of its staff. A recreational participant might want to find a suitable team, feel comfortable joining it or stay active as her needs change.
Even within those groups, the situation matters. A teenager considering leaving sport and an adult looking for somewhere to play after moving cities are facing different decisions.
Elena’s own work began with a practical access problem. People struggled to find relevant sports opportunities, while community clubs struggled to reach potential participants.
That is a useful starting point for discovery because you can investigate an actual experience: what someone searched for, where they got stuck and what they did next.
For a founder, I would narrow the opportunity until it fits this sentence:
“We help [a specific person] do [a specific task] when [a specific situation makes it difficult].”
If you cannot fill that in without using a broad category such as “women” or “clubs”, you probably need more conversations.
2. Test the workflow before you automate it
The flag football apps offer a particularly useful lesson because Elena understood the sport and still missed a constraint.
Her proposed solution required behaviour the referee could not accommodate during a game.
Before building your own version of that mistake, ask someone to walk you through the last time they performed the task. Where were they? What were they holding? Who else was involved? What happened when something went wrong?
Then observe the task if you can.
A product can improve the recording of information while making the person’s job harder at the moment they have to record it. That trade-off matters.
My practical test would be to put the simplest usable version into one real session. Watch whether the person reaches for it without being reminded, where they hesitate and whether they return to the old method.
A demonstration proves that your product can perform a task. A real session helps you discover whether someone can use it while doing their job.
3. Investigate opportunities beyond software
One example Elena shared was a sports bra presented at an event she organised, with research and development behind its construction.
It broadens the question for founders. An opportunity in SportsTech might involve equipment, clothing, services, participation or the way a sporting experience is organised.
Elena herself first built a recreational women’s basketball league around a need she had experienced: wanting somewhere to play outside professional competition.
That is a business-building starting point too.
Before deciding that your opportunity needs an app, ask what you could deliver directly. Could you organise the activity, help a club recruit participants or manually connect people with suitable opportunities?
Those are possible experiments, rather than models Elena claimed to have validated. Their value is that they can expose the work, costs and customer decisions before you commit to a larger product.
Visible Sports also illustrates why the delivery model deserves scrutiny. Elena described moving from a marketplace towards advisory and media work after struggling with the resources required to build the platform and attract users.
The underlying need and the model you can sustain are separate decisions. You need evidence for both.
4. Find the budget as carefully as you find the problem
Towards the end of our conversation, Elena returned to a question every founder in this space should ask: who controls the money?
A participant may benefit. A coach may recommend the solution. A club may want it. The budget can still sit somewhere else—or be too small to support your model.
I would write down three people before preparing a sales pitch:
The person who uses the product.
The person responsible for the outcome it improves.
The person who can approve payment.
Sometimes they are the same person. When they are different, your discovery needs to reach all three.
Then test the economics. If your target were €10,000 in monthly revenue, a price of €50 would require 200 paying customers; a price of €500 would require 20. Neither calculation proves demand. It tells you which acquisition and service assumptions you need to examine.
Elena also cautioned against taking a polite promise to pay as proof. I agree. A useful next step is a specific offer, a price, a start date and a clear decision.
Ask for a commitment you can observe. If the answer is no, find out what stopped it.
5. Decide what capital would help you achieve
We also discussed AI-assisted development and bootstrapping.
Elena sees scope to revisit ideas that previously demanded more development resources. Her experience with the scoring apps also shows why getting something built does not settle adoption or distribution.
For founders, the financing question should follow the next milestone.
Could you test the need manually? Could initial customers fund further development? Does the product require research, specialist equipment or work you cannot finance from early revenue?
These questions will lead to different funding routes.
In the conversation, we explored the possibility of building a smaller, sustainable business without outside investment. That is a strategic choice, with its own demands on revenue and costs. Venture funding brings a different set of growth expectations.
Before raising, be able to explain what the money would allow you to prove that you cannot reasonably prove with the resources you have.
What I would test in the next 30 days
Elena’s closing advice was to speak with people involved in the sport, build a relationship with a small core of users and think carefully about who pays.
Here is how I would turn that into a practical month:
Week 1: Choose one segment and interview five people about a recent experience. Ask what they actually did and what they already spend time or money on.
Week 2: Observe the workflow and identify the buyer. Check whether your proposed solution fits the setting in which it would be used.
Week 3: Test a small intervention with one club or group. Define the behaviour or outcome you want to observe before starting.
Week 4: Make a concrete paid offer. Record the decision, the objection and what would have to change for the opportunity to move forward.
These are my suggested experiments, drawn from the conversation. The aim is to earn a clearer decision about what to build next.
The question I would leave with you is this:
What evidence would make you confident enough to spend the next six months on this opportunity?
Watch the full conversation with Elena, then choose the assumption you need to test first.
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