Case study Sports & fan experiences · 16 months
A hiring pipeline that took 18 months now closes in 6.
Founder content turned FanToPark's coach hiring into a channel you could forecast, across 16 months and 3,400 assets.
Challenge
Expansion was gated by coach supply, and coaches were found by hand.
It took about 18 months from first contact to a coach on the ground. Everyone filed it as a hiring problem and handed it to recruiters.
The gap
Nobody had heard of FanToPark yet
In the target cities, the real gap was awareness.
The business need
More coaches, sooner
Every new city waited on coach supply.
How we made it
The hiring problem was a content problem.
A coach evaluates the founders before the opportunity. So we built one funnel, four parts, one buyer: the coach.
Founders
LinkedIn and Instagram, carrying an operating point of view.
Brand
The proof layer a coach checks after meeting the founders.
Distribution
A page that builds reach in a city before FanToPark arrives.
Paid
City-targeted, coach-shaped audiences, running on founder content.
Production
~210 assets a month
Two capture sessions a month fed four surfaces. Founder time was the binding constraint, so every minute of it was planned.
Distribution
A paid channel you could forecast
Coach acquisition moved off manual outreach. When a city underperformed, it had new creative inside 72 hours.
Scope
Coaches only
Out of scope on purpose: anything consumer-facing.
What we got wrong
We built the brand page first
We spent four months on it. Coaches researched the people they would work with before the company.
Progress
What we learned, month by month.
Month 3
Posts about operating decisions beat sport posts 4x on qualified inbound, despite lower reach. We flipped the mix from 70/30 to 30/70: 3.5x applications per post, while views fell 22%.
Month 7
Cities with 8+ weeks of distribution-page content before paid converted at roughly half the cost. We built a standing eight-week lead into every launch: −38% cost per qualified coach across the next four launches.
Month 11
The second founder drove more qualified applications every single month. We made them the primary hiring voice: +19% lift with no extra spend.
Result
Month 1 against month 16.
Coach hire cycle
M1 · 18 monthsM16 · 6 months
−67%
Qualified applications a month
M1 · 12M16 · 94
+683%
Cost per qualified applicant
M1 · ₹4,100M16 · ₹1,350
−67%
Assets shipped a month
M1 · 60M16 · 210
+250%
Didn't move
Consumer ticket conversion stayed flat. It was out of scope, and it showed.
Where it's goingEvery city launch now runs on the eight-week template. Next, we're testing the same structure on the consumer side.