The start…
I started this business together with two friends that I grew up with back in 2022. We’d been talking about it for a while. I had a need to have continuity between my playing season of building something for the future.
The goal was selfish. I wanted to build something that kept a thread between the off-seasons so I could stop going home to work as a substitute teacher every year.
Our first focus
Initially we trained general population (moms, dads, people with injuries etc). Mainly this was due to my friend who owns a gym in Minnesota and is a physical therapist. He’d already built a clientele and wanted a hybrid approach to their training.
We did this as our first step to driving revenue back in 2022.
The birth of Euro Athletes Academy
In 2023, after being not getting the traction I wanted with the business I made the choice to launch EAA. Markus Huber helped create the name after a lot of discussions on instagram, and he even provided one of the initial graphics for us.
At the time I was also training with AJ. Me and AJ had played together since 2018 in Dresden and were living in Poland for the past year and a half. Thanks to AJs amazing reach and time we put in together we created the first steps of EAA as a training program.
At first we had used just a standard @gmail.com emails, but I distinctly remember being in a restaurant with Moritz Heisler (former owner of Leipzig Kings and currently working with Vienna Vikings). I showed him our instagram account and the contact email, immediately when he saw the domain @gmail.com he said it looks cheap and unserious.
Naturally, the next step then was to get a domain and a website to present ourselves more professionally and in a serious manner.
I’d spent about 2 weeks and close to 6 hours a day because I’m shit at design on building something that resembled a website. I definitely overcomplicated everything cause I thought there was a need to be “unique” in the design.
It was only late that I realised that most websites follow the same structures and flows, people like it when they can navigate to products and recognise easily where to go on a website.
The website at this point has probably gone through about 5 complete overhauls to bring it to where it is today.
The tools we we use for our business
I’m a huge fan of automations, flow, and the vision I have is to do the bare minimum for the maximum results. An essentialist philosophy to training and business. My dream is to let athletes be as independent as possible, but feel that they have the support from me when they need it.
Anyway, here is our stack:
Mailchimp (for marketing and email automations)
Zapier (for connecting different apps, triggers etc)
ManyChat (for automations, collecting leads and more on Instagram)
TeamBuildr (for delivering the actual training experience with videos and all necessary instructions)
Squarespace with google workspace (website hosting, and everything else that google provides in the form of AI, email and more).
My business partner Joakim is a much more tech savvy guy and amazing with numbers, statistics so we try to divide our work into myself handling the customer facing side of things as well as content while he handles everything on the backend.
