Home›Launches›Dropback
45

🏟️ FanCave: Fans offer top college recruits to play at their school

We power the recruitment marketplace for college sports.

Luke Bogus
Dropback
 
https://www.dropback.com
#finance#hr_tech#operations#sports_tech

Hey! We’re Nick and Luke, and we’re excited to share FanCave.

TL;DR: FanCave is the recruiting marketplace for college sports.

FanCave is the first platform where fans can offer recruits money contingent on enrollment at a specific school. This only became possible on March 1st — rapid regulation changes paved the way for (1) athletes to get paid and (2) a collegiate “free agency” to be compliant.

We’re live today! Target, offer, and win over top recruits @ https://www.fancave.me

🏟️ Problem

Just two years ago, the NCAA—the governing body of college sports—allowed athletes to earn an income beyond their scholarships through the NIL (name, image, and likeness) Policy.

What started as college athletes making money through brand endorsements and custom merch, quickly divulged into universities inducing top recruits to come to their school through massive contracts.

How? A bylaw loophole that created ‘Collectives:’ big-pocket donors pooling their money, using this pool to entice top recruits to play at their school. Top schools rapidly adopted this, yet the same regulatory gray area that made collectives ‘legal’ reflects the gray area in which they operate:

  • Not Inclusive: Collectives restrict membership to specific athletes in select sports (top 1%)
  • Not Athlete-Friendly: Predatory terms include short-term contracts, payback clauses, and forced exclusive NIL rights ownership
  • Not Fan-Friendly: Collectives control allocations and only let donors donate to ‘the general fund’—with no transparency

Recent (March 2024) regulation changes pave the way for a new free agency of college sports, but today’s status quo—collectives—aren’t built for scale, lack athlete trust, and leave fans behind.

That’s where FanCave comes in.

🏆 Solution

FanCave is the first platform where you can directly offer recruits money on the condition that they play for your favorite college sports team.

We’re building the recruitment marketplace of college sports. Fans directly decide the future of their teams, and athletes fully monetize their recruitment safely and transparently.

  • Target: Strategize with your fanbase to target your top recruiting prospects
  • Offer: Pool offers to win top targets—tracked per-fanbase and per-recruit
  • Win: Recruits pick the winning offer. If it’s not yours, you get credited back.

Be a top recruiter, rise up the leaderboard, and win team-specific prizes—all while building the future of your favorite college teams!

FanCave is live, today, across 43 states @ www.fancave.me

🤝 Team

We (Luke and Nick) are lifelong sports fans who met at the University of Nebraska.

  • Luke previously led product at a Series B healthtech company, and prior was a Product Manager at Microsoft.
  • Nick has been building consumer web and mobile apps from scratch for years, most recently scaling a live sports chat app to 1k WAU.

While our post-grad jobs took us cross-country, college sports always brought us together. Combining regulation changes with sheer sports passion, we couldn’t sit on the sidelines any longer: we’re finally building what we wish we had as passionate college sports fans.

🙏 Asks

Try it today @ https://www.fancave.me

See All Launches ›