Five years in, there's one number we keep coming back to: 98.5% client retention.
Luck? Market timing? Good strategy? Probably a bit of all three. But we sat down to actually pull it apart: what's structural, what's product, what's people, and what we'd want to protect as we scale. Here's what we found.
Structural factors favor relationships
One industry, deep: Picking sports when we first started was a deliberate choice. We went deep on one industry rather than spreading thin. Sports is a massive industry, but the organizations we work with all share the same operational reality and pains around media management. What we learn from one customer applies fairly well to the next.
Long cycles give us time to earn trust. Enterprise deployments take close to a year end-to-end. A self-serve SaaS gets five minutes to prove itself. We get twelve months of touchpoints before retention is ever really tested.
Sports media has no downtime. A federation running a World Cup isn't waiting until Tuesday afternoon for a fix. Customers lean on us hard, and that intensity changes the relationship… for better, because we deliver.
The product is genuinely hard to leave
End-to-end media chain. A MAM, a clipping tool, an athlete distribution app, a stakeholder portal, sometimes a separate live ingest workflow. Leaving us means going back to four contracts, four onboardings, four interfaces.
Product stickiness: Customers centralize all their media onto the ScorePlay platform, such as PGA Tour who have migrated 8.5 million media files onto ScorePlay. Their team now searches across millions of auto-tagged assets and surfaces content they couldn't find before. Once you've done that, there's no going back.
We picked the hard problems early. Months of deployment, on-prem and cloud integrations, deep technical embedding. Hard-to-build is also hard-to-copy, and at the enterprise end of the market, there aren't many other companies doing what we do.
Customer Success, on purpose, early
Same world, same language. Most of our CSMs and support engineers come from sports or media (federations, broadcasters, production companies, clubs). They were in the industry before they joined us, and it shows the moment they walk into a workflow conversation.
We hired CS before the revenue justified it. Most early-stage SaaS companies build a CS function once they have enough customers to lose. We built ours before. That early bet has quietly compounded.
We find and protect the champion. Dozens of people inside a customer org use the platform, but one person makes the relationship work. Finding and supporting them is most of the job.
Customers are co-builders. A real share of what's in the product today started as a CS conversation. Gemma Coscia, who runs operations for FIBA Media's national competitions, has helped shape some of the features now shipping for the rest of our customers. That's the loop we're trying to protect: the day a customer's feedback takes three weeks to reach Product instead of three days is the day retention starts eroding.
What's next
We're proud of 98.5%. We're also clear-eyed about what it'll take to hold it past 300+ customers. Three things we're actively building:
Agentic AI to keep customers ahead of our own roadmap. The product has moved faster than we've communicated it. Live ingest, AI clipping, hybrid storage… a lot has shipped in two years and a meaningful share of our customer base isn't using the full surface area yet. We're building always-up-to-date knowledge layers, both internally for our CS team and externally for customers who want more control.
"Customers love how reactive your team is. They'd love even more to handle things on their own, in real-time, directly inside the product." Michael Ayers, Media asset manager at the PGA TOURCustomer function in new regions, deeper expertise. APAC is next: people in the timezone, close to customers, embedded in the local sports media ecosystem. We're also adding dedicated Deployment Engineers for the increasingly complex enterprise integrations, and Solutions Architects to design workflows that get the most out of the platform.
A real CS Ops function. Past 300 customers, gut feel doesn't scale. We want sharp visibility on what drives value: which features correlate with stickier customers, which usage patterns precede expansion, which signals flag risk before it shows up in a renewal conversation.
Talk to us
Customer? Future customer? Whether you love the platform or want to give us feedback, we genuinely want to hear it. Reach out at marketing@scoreplay.io.
And if you're curious about ScorePlay as a place to work, we're hiring across many roles so don't hesitate to reach out.
