The Backroom Staff - Founder: Andreas Gschaider

The Backroom Staff - Founder: Andreas Gschaider

The former detective changing how footballers train

“I love football. That is why I quit my job as a criminal detective to develop the football training of the future.” This is in Andreas Gschaider’s LinkedIn profile — so I had to speak with him!

Andreas spent over 15 years as a policeman and detective in Bayern. Today, he is the founder of B42 - a Munich-based sports tech startup building a platform to change how players train and how coaches organise and plan training. Over 300,000 players and 10,000 teams worldwide use B42 to improve their game, avoid injuries and achieve their goals.

In the last few years, I’ve spoken with hundreds of founders, rarely have I had such an authentic conversation. Andreas openly shares the personal motivations behind B42, the mistakes along the way and generally articulates the challenges of building a mission driven company in football.

The interview has been condensed and lightly edited for grammar and clarity. 

[ Can you touch a little bit on your background before B42? ]

I was born and raised near Munich. I always loved to play football. As a little boy there was nothing else for me besides hitting the ball against the wall and playing on the field. As I got older though, I didn't really know what to do. I was a punk and after a lot of mistakes I became a police officer and later a detective. It was not something I’d planned but I noticed that serving and helping other people is something I liked and could do as a police officer.

I was still playing football but as I got older I started realizing that I needed to do more than the other players in my team because I was only able to train once a week due to my job. I was looking for things to improve my game but I didn’t really find anything (good). Then, I had a really severe injury and for the first time in my life had a proper, professional rehabilitation, something I needed all my life.

(at this time) I started consuming Gary Vaynerchuk, Simon Sinek, you know, inspirational stuff. I really wanted to spend more time doing what I really care about, what I really love. I started coaching athletes and teams and began what became B42 as a side hustle. I never really wanted to start a startup!

For the first two years, I was doing it alone with my wife - she supported me with the UI/UX and creative design for the product at the beginning. Then, 5 of us started B42 ‘officially’ and it began to grow!

[ What is B42? How do coaches and players use it? ]

B42 is an all-in-one platform for coaches and players to organize their team, training and games. The idea is to transport professional know-how to amateur sports.

We created a soccer training platform that enables coaches to organize their team(s), monitor player and team performance and development and create motivation within the team.

Players use our performance app (free to download in the app store) to do performance tests, track their progress, follow training plans, focus on specific areas of their game and avoid injuries. Players can (more easily) see the impact of their work and see what works to make every season better and better.

The coach sees a team calendar and can organize their training and matches. In the training overview, coaches can see the current workload of their players and use this to prepare their training sessions.

After the session, you can automatically ask the players to rate or score the intensity and their own performance. The coach can rate the players as well. So in the end you can see, in August the best players were X, Y and Z.

[ The metrics - like intensity score - are self reported data? ]

Yes, correct. For example, when it comes to preseason, you really want to have a high load on the players. So after your training session, you get the feedback regarding intensity. If you have just a 6.5 or 7 out of 10, you know okay, I can still do more, they can train harder. If you are aware that they are at the top of their load. You should cool it down a little bit. That's basically the idea.

(additionally) Individual players can record and track their performance data, fitness and ball specific tests. The idea is that you ‘outsource’ everything regarding (individual) performance, development, prevention, rehabilitation so that it doesn’t have to be part of the training, enabling coaches to use the 90 minutes to train as a team and not focusing on individual weaknesses.

This platform is also available for professional youth academies, they can use our performance tests or integrate their own. The goal is for coaches and teams to have perfect organization when it comes to training and games.

This is all available for coaches and teams to have a perfect organization when it comes to training and games.

[ Why is it called ‘B42’? ]

We thought a lot about the brand, what should it be all about? For us, football was our life and we learned a lot of things through football. If you start playing football at a young age, you learn how to work together in a team. You learn that you will lose sometimes. It’s personal development.

And it’s (a place) where all different social groups come together. A kid of an architect and a refugee kid - you don't even have to speak the same language but you can come together and share values. I think that's really something that's important for society.

So we were thinking, who really created a positive impact, not only for sport but for society? One of our close friends already had the number 42 tattooed on his arm. I think Jackie Robinson is an amazing example, an outstanding example of how you can create a positive impact on society on really important issues.

And that's why we call us B42 - be the number 42. Be the guy, be the girl who believes deeply in not only improving yourself throughout sport, but also having a positive impact on your team, your club and on society. That's our purpose and the core of the brand.

[ Do a lot of people in Germany know Jackie Robinson? ]

That was really a problem, it's still a problem!

We could have named ourselves like ‘pro soccer sports zone’ or whatever, then it’s obvious what we do.

[ How did you ‘find’ this idea and start to validate it? ]

I never validated anything to be honest! I just created something that I really wanted to have, and I thought a lot of other players would love to have it as well, that was the basic idea.

(when I started) I had no idea what a KPI is or what product-market-fit is or whatever!

I found an 18 year old developer to help with the website but when we started creating the app, he said, I can't do it. We tried to do it with an agency but it would have cost €150,000 (!) but we didn’t have any money! So we tried on our own.

My wife created some designs and we were measuring it out with a ruler on the screen! So coming back to your question, we basically had no idea.

Still, at the beginning we created a really easy and usable single player product that was really highly used. We had thousands of customers paying for the month subscription - just focused on training. And then I ‘re-focused’ it and said, now we add rehabilitation plans, we add prevention plans, and what about a solution for coaches and so on.

In the beginning it felt easy, we didn’t know what worked but many of our experiments were successful.

At the time I was doing a different kind of content and performance marketing. I was making content about e.g. knee injuries. My articles had a lot of interaction and I simply put our product at the bottom so people who read the article were like, ‘oh, that’s really helpful, I should try their product’. We had amazing customer acquisition costs, some like 3, 4, 5 cents per download.

Then we got some money and everything changed. I could finally hire someone, a real performance marketer to do this. I hired an agency and was really excited. And they did it in a way that everyone else was doing. Our cost per download went to like €7 or 8!

[ Who created/is creating the training plans available in the paid plans? ]

We partnered with Oliver Schmidtlein, a top physio who worked with Bayern Munich and the German and American national teams. The training plans are created by Oliver and one of our team members with a sports science background. We also got professional help to create the content inside the app.

This creates another problem. We have a single player product and we have a B2B product. Two different user journeys. You need to make sure that every journey is optimized and right now our single player product has no clear focus because we can’t afford it. The software that tracks all the different steps and a person who monitors everything is expensive.

Most of our team focused on the B2B product and making sure that a coach who reads our social media content is interested and creates an account. Coaches can use the premium version for 2 weeks for free and then, we hope they see the value and buy the product! That’s the customer journey.

We are planning to properly ‘connect’ the products in 5 or 6 months time. The beauty is, every team has leaders or outstanding players who are basically always interested in becoming better and better. If a player uses B42 for their training, we hope they will speak about it with their coach and tell them about it.

We want to make sure the coach really gets it and the product is really easy and usable. We’re not there yet but that’s what we’re currently focusing on.

[ Why did you decide to focus only on football? ]

We talked about that a lot. I think, if we are not able to show product market fit in football, it's really dangerous to open up to all the other sports. Then you become the master of none.

I’d love to get really really good inside football and then open to other sports as well - that’s the idea - but we need to focus on getting really good first!

[ How do you think about differentiation from competitors to B42? ]

Yes, there have been a lot of competitors in Germany trying to create a similar product. It’s really difficult to raise the money to create a really tech heavy product with great UX.

Another problem is also that the DACH market, especially teams, clubs, and coaches are not really open, for digital solutions right now. It’s developing, and there’s no question that these kinds of tech solutions will be prevalent in the future but it takes time and we’re not there yet. So it’s a question of when and who (which company) will still be there. Globally, there’s not one solution that is really heavily used and has a great user base.

We had an idea to connect training and gaming - Adidas tried this too. Our ambition was to create a digital home for football to motivate, inspire and enable kids to spend more time on the pitch to improve their digital avatar - that could then be used in a video game. So instead of playing as Bayern Munich against Real Madrid, you play with your local club against the club next door.

I had a few talks with someone from EA Sports, I think they are also thinking about this kind of idea. We could use the data from B42 and our performance tests and build an SDK or API to make this available inside EA Sports. Then, a kid could start a career with their own player, who improves as a result of their real life training and hard work on the pitch. This could keep kids moving for decades instead of just sitting in front of the TV enjoying the couch!

Sounds easy but there’s a lot of development behind it.

[ What is your role at B42, what are you responsible for? ]

I'm the CEO and the founder of the company. But, I found out that I'm not really a manager! I’m not someone who has skills or a background when it comes to organizing and building structured processes for highly efficient teams. (instead) I’ve focused on finding the best players for our teams and creating attention around B42 and our mission.

Now, I’m head of marketing and sales and I’ve found a really experienced interim CEO who will hopefully go full time next year. Then I want to step down as CEO and hope Adrian can do all the (CEO) tasks in a better way! No one is bigger than the club - this is our basic idea and we want to make sure that we always have the best team on the pitch.

[ You’ve created quite a reputation for viral social media posts, especially on LinkedIn, how did you develop this style? ]

I started posting on LinkedIn as a ‘survival plan’. I was always thinking if B42 crashes - I'm a former criminal detective who can do no other job except a security guy at the supermarket! I thought if I write about what I’m doing, I can create attention and at some point it could help me find a job. That was my basic idea at the beginning.

Throughout the process, I recognized that it’s something that I'm really good at. My skill is in storytelling and creating attention about things I really care about. Something about my writing, my storytelling - people seems to like how I do it.

I’ve never had a framework or done any just for clicks - of course I love when people engage! - but I just started writing about topics that I truly and deeply care about and just started trying to survive. If you don’t pretend, if you don’t fake, people feel that. Authenticity always wins.

[ What’s the next goal with B42? What could the future look like if B42 ‘succeeded’ in the best way? ]

That's a really good question, a ‘north star’ is one of the most important things to have but I can’t give an honest answer right now because our vision is changing.

If you’d have asked me 12 months ago, I’d have said, we’re creating a digital home for football by connecting training and gaming to inspire young kids. That was our ambition. Now we are reworking it.

We want to create the football training of the future and really change the way footballers train enabling players, teams and coaches to train more effectively, avoid injury, reach their peak performance so they can play their best possible season every season.

Follow Andreas on LinkedIn and let him know you enjoyed the interview!

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