Since Yael Averbuch was young, all she’s wanted to do was be a professional soccer player. It never mattered to her that at the time of her birth, or even when she started college, there wasn’t a professional league for women in the United States. She eventually accomplished her goals and more: she won national player of the year at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and went on to have a wildly successful 16-year career both in the National Women's Soccer League and with the U.S. Women's National Team. She also helped form the National Women's Soccer League Players Association in 2017 and served as its director until 2020.
When she decided to hang up her boots and leave the field, at least professionally, she pursued an entrepreneurial venture of her own, a path she often likens to playing soccer and training at the professional level. After mulling over what business to start, she founded Techne Futbol, an app that provides custom coaching advice and drills based on the user’s personal goals. However, as someone with limited business expertise and very limited resources, she found it tough to find support for her idea at first. She struggled to get momentum and didn’t know how to approach venture capital funding, so she decided to build the business from the ground up.
She began by creating a simple, free, weekly newsletter in which she provided several drills and videos explaining soccer concepts that she felt would help her readers improve their game. The newsletter became a hit, quickly racking up over 100,000 subscribers. Averbuch used this newsletter as a proof of concept, not only to potential funders but also to herself. She knew that if she weren’t able to get soccer players to subscribe to a free newsletter, then she certainly wasn’t going to be able to make a successful app that required players to pay for custom training plans.
She then began the second, and arguably more difficult, part of her business journey, developing her Techne Futbol app and converting free users into paying customers. The development process was both long and expensive, but it ended in a product that the team was proud of. The app provided drills and videos the same way the newsletter did, but it also tracked progress and set up training plans for subscribers and allowed players to group themselves by club team and compete among themselves. Since then, Techne Futbol has been able to convert tens of thousands of users to their paid platform. Averbuch credits a great deal of this success to the mindset and mentality that she developed while training to be a professional athlete.
