DOJO+

The positive impact of martial arts on every community is evident. Every lesson, every training teaches you more about discipline, respect, honor, and friendship.

DOJO+ plans to go after the underserved $5B martial arts market in the USA and redefine how a sensei manages your business and retain your students. 

Our platform connects Martial Arts schools and the community surrounded by this environment.

🧬 Fighting is in our DNA

Even before communicating or walking on two legs, humans started to fight. It's our survival instincts as a human being. Nowadays, we have many apps focused on Running (Nike Run Club, Map My Run, Runkeeper, Adidas Runtastic) and other apps like Strava in the Running, Swimming, and Cycling category that can help you to track your activities. Although nothing well-done in the Martial Arts industry.

Some companies tried to create a solution for the Martial Arts category but failed in many aspects to get traction. After long user-experience research, we designed a perfect balance to engage users in the Martial Arts community and enhance this bond to combat sports.

Around the world, we currently have more than 400 million people who practice at least one type of Martial Arts daily. 

As humans being, fighting is in our DNA 🧬.
We get it and we like it.
–Dana White UFC President

And among 18 to 34-year-old fans in the United States, Martial Arts events are more popular than either the NHL or even NASCAR. It's considered the world's fastest-growing sport. Our goal is to provide digital solutions to this untapped market.

🌎 Same World. Same Problems.

Traveling worldwide and training in multiple facilities only confirmed similar gym owners' daily challenges to manage a Martial Arts school.

But being a skilled Black Belt in any Martial Arts does not guarantee business success. 80% of schools are mom-and-pop gyms struggling to succeed as businesses and using solutions not addressed to their size or type. 

🛠️ So we are building DOJO+

Building a customized set of tools for Martial Arts schools are essential to engage students and manage the business. This motivated us to create the DOJO+ platform.

DOJO+ will provide tools to sensei's to manage their Martial Arts school. And enable them to collect gym membership, manage inventory, communicate with students, manage belt promotion, and much more.

Our first step is to launch an app that enables anyone to start tracking your Martial Art training and connect with teammates around the globe. In the next phase, we will allow gyms to manage members, payments, and inventory. We are setting the path to growth for each Martial Arts school in the world.

Right now, we already developed 60% of our app for iOS and Android, and all API ready to use in the following features.

💵📱 Making money in a Freemium model 

Our primary revenue stream will be a fee added to every membership processed in DOJO+. Our goal is to reach 200K users signups by the end of 2021.

Many other features in DOJO+ will be free to use with a paid option to superpower any tool. We believe using this model will speed up onboarding new schools and, most importantly, be present in any Martial Arts gym around the globe.

As we aggregate the Martial Arts community in DOJO+, multiple new revenue streams will be present. We plan to create a marketplace of products and get a commission on every sale; commercialize advertising spaces on the app; a subscription fee to exclusive content and online seminars, and several other transaction incomes. 

DOJO+ can become a hub for many revenue streams, and we will scale this as we grow. (These projections are not guaranteed)

🏫 And acquiring users with a school-by-school playbook

We created a database with more than 4,000 Martial Arts schools containing all information we need to enable each school in the DOJO+ app. We'll keep adding everyday new schools to the platform and allowing the students to share their activities, like any other sports tracking app (e.g., Nike Running or Strava).

DOJO+ will always be free to students as a performance tracking app, and this allows us to create a heat 🔥map to define which gyms to approach and sell the monetization set of features.

Last year we created a simple form to pre-sign up students, and as a result, we built a list with 18,000 people in Martial Arts interested to download the DOJO+ app, eager to share their achievements and belt promotions within the community.

😊 The Social+ Dilemma

More than two years ago, we started our roadshow among potential investors. Many people questioned the social component that we added to the DOJO+ ecosystem, and some seemed very hesitant to believe this idea. However, in December 2020, Andreessen Horowitz, a renamed venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, California, started to share the concept of Social+, which is a significant validation of our idea.

The article Community Takes All: The Power of Social+ written by the Investment Partner D'Arcy Coolican, approaches how many fitness-related digital products are solo experiences that fail to capture the community of their analog equivalents. It is an interesting point considering that working out, especially Martial Arts is an essentially social experience.

In the same article, Coolican defines CrossFit and SoulCycle as more like cults than products. Compared to Martial Arts, if you had any chance to visit and chat with people in a Jiu-Jitsu school, in a few minutes, you'd understand how Jiu-Jitsu means to this community. Jiu-Jitsu is a religion, a lifestyle, a fraternity. And this is the same feeling shared among other Martial Arts.

And the good news is none of our potential competitors cracked the code yet, and DOJO+ is in a position to be the first engaging and genuinely global Social+ fitness product.

In our belief, in the past few years, most investors were looking for business model opportunities targeting a wide range of people like Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, or Postmates. This vision to focus only on a segmented group of people in a highly engaged niche is becoming more evident for 2021. Famous venture capitalists similar to Andreessen Horowitz (known as "a16z") are looking for platforms with high network effects, and DOJO+ is making the building blocks to this environment.

💜 You Can't Teach Heart

Like any other kid, our funder Juno has been practicing Karate & Judo since an early age. But only in 2012, he reconnected again to the Martial Arts atmosphere, starting doing Jiu-Jitsu with the famous sensei Marco Barbosa in São Paulo, Brazil.

Inspired by Jiu-Jitsu culture, in early 2015, Juno started to design some concept sketches for what became the DOJO+ app and ecosystem. Juno also designed the actual DOJO+ logo at the same time and, to protect the DOJO+ brand, he used blockchain technology to register on the internet network. Since 2019 DOJO+ brand is registered, under the international Madrid protocol, in the USA market.

By the end of summer 2018, Juno moved with his wife from Brazil to Miami - Florida, to work as a Product Designer in a startup. After one year, he decided to follow his passion and vision for DOJO+, and the first step was to establish the company and begin the Pre-Seed investment round.

➡️ Family ➡️ Friends ➡️ Fans ➡️ 💰 💰 💰

Following the usual startup manual, you should start talking with family and friends first. But moving from another country and building a network to fund an early-stage company just added an extra layer of difficulty to Juno initially. So he needed to address two things:

1️⃣ The conversion rate between Brazilian Real to US Dollars before the pandemic was around 3.5. And after the pandemic is hitting about 5.8, it means a not attractive investment to Brazilian investors, most of Juno's business network, and friends.

1. 2️⃣ Not having family members living in America, Juno had to skip a family-round investment and start a DOJO+ roadshow for Pre-Seed funding among friends and his brand-new business network in the USA.

🗓️ Our first season

In October 2019, DOJO+ raised the first check, around $35 thousand, to build the DOJO+ platform. We were very excited about this accomplishment and invested this amount in creating back-end and apps for iOS and Android. This investment allowed us to build 60% of the features planned.

Our meetings with investors looked promising at that time, and we decided to build a complete app to launch. And then the coronavirus pandemic started and forced us to stop the fundraising and consequently the development.

Although we have resilience, an overused jargon in the business world, but something you learn earlier in Martial Arts classes. You understand how much pressure you have to deal with in life and how to overcome it. In Jiu-Jitsu, we like to say that when you hit the ground, it's when you start winning.

🦠 Goodbye, 2020. Welcome, 2021. 🍾

During this unprecedented era of uncertainty and challenge, it was almost impossible to raise money for an early-stage company. Some potential investors lost much money at the beginning of the lockdown. Some others preferred to wait to understand what will happen to the market and the Martial Arts industry. 

This pandemic created a long hold in our project, but in 2020 mid-October, we started reaching back to some prospective investors, and fortunately, we began getting great feedback about DOJO+. But restarting this process to raise funds through family and friends takes us considerable time and energy than expected.

After meeting with so many loyal Martial Arts fans on the mats, we want to let everybody invest in DOJO+. In December 2020, we decided to set up WeFunder as our central platform to raise capital and build this relationship with our fans not only as users but also as investors.

We want to raise $50 thousand to complete and deploy our iOS and Android app on this first campaign. Following this, we will start a new campaign to raise enough funds to build the membership collection system and other monetization features.

🏆 We are unique to Collision 👀 and WeWork

In February 2019, DOJO+ joined the WeWork Labs program in Miami, which allowed us to connect with Miami's tech ecosystem and all Labs globally.

In early January 2020, DOJO+ has been selected among hundreds of startups to join Toronto's Collision Conference 2020 as one of the ALPHA program's startups. We were the only company in the Martial Arts field among 800 candidates.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic Collision Conference was canceled, and we lost the opportunity to pitch DOJO+ to more investors in 2020.

🔮 What the future holds for DOJO+

We envision the DOJO+ brand in the same way Richard Branson created the Virgin brand, creating unique customer experiences, challenging the status quo, and champion people and the planet. 

DOJO+ brand will operate in three business sectors: Digital Services (Technology), Apparel, and Food & Beverages.

1️⃣Digital Services: providing digital solutions to connect Martia Arts community and innovating how a sensei manages a school.

2️⃣Apparel: we want to be a high-quality apparel company for Martial Arts and blend technology into garments.

3️⃣Food & Beverages: nutrition and hydration are crucial at any level; we want to provide the best products to dojos.

Our next steps are building a team in engineering and marketing. Add more monetization features to create new revenue streams, and grow a fan base around the DOJO+ brand.

We're on a mission to change how a sensei manages your business, connect the Martial Arts community, and create value for our investors.

Oss!