Nil Gaudet: Compusport Created an Innovative Sport Management System

CompuSport created an innovative sport management system. Tournaments and leagues used to be managed manually, we automated almost each manager tasks to reduce errors and time needed for a professional management. Communication with players is also ensure from a mobile app.

From CompuSport foundation, our system has been used to manage more than 16 million games played by about 1 million players in 85,000 brackets/charts. We are the North-American leader in the pool and dart competitions. Our system is used by the main national associations for their world championship in Las Vegas and from many states association championship all around USA and Canada.

Our mission is to be the innovative leader that make sports event management simple and meaningful for all users. Our promise is to simply changing the game in term of sports event management.

Tell us about yourself?

I worked for about 22 years at the university as technical coordinator in a research center specialized in mining environment. My main task was to link the theory and practice directly on the field. In a research center it’s all about innovation, the way we are analysing any situation came from our work experience.

As a pool player, I organised many tournaments and was also playing in a league. At that time no system was available to answer my needs. I started working with a co-worker that was a programmer to facilitate the management of tournaments. Our research background helped us in our development by using small tournaments as laboratory. To work full time in my passion was a dream, another programmer from the same university joined us. We made it happen after 4 years of working both jobs.

If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?

When you decide to leave a great full-time job to realize your dream and create an innovation you take a big risk. It’s important to be ready to lose your quality of life for a period of time. The goal is to improve your future quality of life, patience is needed as bigger your dream is, the harder and longer it is to reach.

When your passion becomes your job, it’s the best, you never feel like your’re working. If I was able to talk to myself (at the foundation of CompuSport), I would say: Always keep time for your family and friends, a good balance between work and personal time is always positive. You can go much further when you plan everything correctly.

The second thing I would tell myself is, in every hard situation you will learn. You can’t grow up without challenges. Be innovative, it’s always the best time to surpass yourself.

What problem does your business solve?

Before CompuSport, the management of tournaments needed a lot of people. For example, about 15-20 people were needed to manage a pool or dart national association championship. Now, it can be done by 1-2 people more professionally. Each task is now automated or facilitated, online registration, automatic scheduling, award management and communication with players is now easy an automated.

Another issue in the industry is the player skill level evaluation. Many players are trying to play in lower divisions to win awards. We automated player skill level evaluations based on game results.

What is the inspiration behind your business?

Our inspiration is coming from the fact that great and fair sport competitions are helping the development our sport. We believe that everyone in the sports world, from Associations to players, should be able to flourish and perform at their best in what they’re good at without worrying about logistics.

Managers now have access to many tools to help complete their tasks and focus on the improvement of their own events by answering their player needs.

Players can feel as a professional in their passion. They can access their multiple stats and videos and share it on social network.

What is your magic sauce?

We worked directly at many National Championships with their direction teams helped us understand and know their needs. This allowed us to create new tools to solve their issues. We have taken advantage of everyone’s experience to develop our expertise and become recognized specialists.

We are always working as a partner with sport associations, our different expertise help both groups to grow. In all associations, managers of local leagues and tournaments are involved in the proper development of competitions. Those managers are also working in partnership with CompuSport for their local events.

Our business network is including many users, national association directors, local managers and players.

What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?

We already offer an excellent product in terms of sports event management. Our management system for tournaments, leagues and sports association tool, supplemented by our player auto caliber management system, ensures fair competitions with exemplary professionalism.

Innovation is an integral part of our DNA. In the last 5 years, we have been working on the development of a new technological innovation. We obtained Canadian patent and are waiting for USA patent for an innovative product in billiard industry. This new product is a camera located over the pool table, by images recognition linked with our system. It is computing each ball trajectory and location on the pool table. From our mobile app, players have access to much more stats and videos of their performances, to improve their games. This system will completely automate billiard tournaments and leagues. Our goal is to become THE standard in the world billiard industry.

The management of billiards and darts is more complex because it involves a high number of players and playing surfaces. We have developed different packages accessible to players and the automatic evaluation of the caliber of each player. This whole system adapts very easily to other sports and does not require much development. We are therefore in a perfect position to easily multiply the number of users.

What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?

Our biggest challenge is the Covid situation. Many events have been canceled, many bars didn’t survive, our industry faced to a wall. Thankfully for us, rules were not the same in every state, some customers were able to continue but it affected the number of players.

We had to modify our priorities on some projects and work on different developments to increase our short-term income. We took the opportunity to develop new tools available to players. We now offer packages allowing them access to so many more options. By increasing our revenue per player, we will be more profitable when activities return to normal.

Our new technology (cam-light) will help us continue to grow in case of another similar situation arrives because this product won’t be just available for tournaments and leagues. Players will be able to use it from home, share their videos or do some virtual competitions.

How do people get involved/buy into your vision?

The way we developed our market and involve people is by having a partnership that we developed with billiard and dart national associations. We worked together to improve the quality or their championships and reduce their management costs. This way we have the same vision on the development that needs to be done to ensure that it’s answering their needs. They are the ones who bring us players to buy their own personal package. Specially with the new project, they are very closely involved, we want them to have advantages on their competitors and it ensures our product launch.

We would like to sell our new products directly from Amazon to facilitate the exportation in all countries.

We would like to develop new partnerships with many other National Associations in Europe, Australia and later in South-America & Asia.