VRTL founder Courtney Jeffries describes herself as a “recovering sports executive.”
“That was my entire career before I threw it away to chase down my startup dreams,” Jeffries told TechCrunch.
After playing softball at the University of Washington, she spent almost 20 years working in marketing and sales for teams like the Oakland Raiders and the New York Rangers. But while Jeffries was leading fan retention initiatives at Madison Square Garden, she noticed a glaring opportunity.
“My whole job was to focus on extracting the lifetime value out of the fans, but quite obviously, there’s an over indexing of attention on fans in the building,” she said. “The majority of fans are outside of an arena […] and there’s no platform, no way to scale in-person experiences that we know will trigger their loyalty.”
By 2022, Jeffries launched VRTL, an enterprise platform for entertainment companies — from sports teams to record labels — to capitalize on virtual fan experiences.
“It’s a very versatile platform that combines livestream, video chat, and then our proprietary suite of fan engagement experiences to drive those loyalties,” she said.
What makes VRTL, which pitched onstage today as part of the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024, different from any other video chat or livestream service is not only that it gives clients valuable data, but also that it has proprietary fan engagement tools.
One popular feature allows celebrities to sign autographs virtually for fans — for example, a soccer star might sign a .gif of an iconic play, personalizing it for each individual fan. On the management end, holding a virtual meet and greet is a lot less costly than an in-person one, which requires venue rentals, security, and staffing, not to mention that it only involves local fans.
“Why can’t we just do this on a Zoom?” Jeffries said. “Sure, you can, but Zoom is optimized for office work. It isn’t optimized for fans.”
She added that when organizations have hosted pilot events on VRTL, they have a 60% conversion rate to become paying customers.
One such customer is the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons, who use VRTL to host meet and greet events between season ticket holders and former Falcons players.
“They’ve created this monthly experience that if your birthday is that month, they have an exclusive event for you with former players that are hosting, yucking it up for about 25 minutes, sharing the war stories, and then they go sign autographs for these fans,” Jeffries said. “Sometimes they sing ‘Happy Birthday,’ and it’s the easiest thing you’ve ever seen. But all of these fans love it because it’s for them.”
VRTL sells annual contracts to its clients, which are tiered in price depending on the kinds of events they want to host. Customers have unlimited use of the platform, and they’re allowed to bring in sponsors, too.
The Falcons aren’t VRTL’s only big-name customer. They’ve also done deals with the Jacksonville Jaguars, the Minnesota Twins, ESPN, Atlanta United FC, and others. For the Jaguars, VRTL helped the football team cultivate a fanbase in London, where the team has played four games over the last two years.
When the entertainment and sports industries have been following the same playbooks for so long, it can be a challenge for new ideas like remote fan engagement to break through. But Jeffries isn’t worried. She’s seen these juggernauts change their ways before.
“When I worked for the Raiders, I was there the day that Twitter launched. Everyone was like, ‘What the hell, no one’s going to communicate in 140 characters,” she said. “It is now unheard of for a team or league to launch without a social media manager… within my career lifetime, this has happened.”