Market Entry for NIL Sports Business Clearinghouse
PATHOS had the unique opportunity to develop the nation’s first digital platform designed to protect athletes navigating the Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) space. The Athlete National Sports Business Clearinghouse, created in collaboration with AdvanceNIL, serves as a comprehensive solution to protect high school, collegiate, and professional athletes in the navigation and selection of qualified service providers and sponsors.
We began by working closely with the AdvanceNIL team to understand the legislative shifts and the resulting needs for a clearinghouse solution. With a vision to build a user-friendly and interactive hub, we decided to design the platform to service three primary audience groups: athletes, families, and schools; sponsorship organizations; and AdvanceNIL administrators and contributors.
Once the initial brainstorming sessions were complete and an MVP decided on, we followed our our typical process of creating a low fidelity prototype, layering in branding and bespoke graphics in the high fidelity prototype, and then building out the beta version of the site. As we were working against a tight deadline in an effort to preempt the NCAA’s efforts in this space, in parallel, we were creating and setting-up AdvanceNIL’s HubSpot to act as a data repository for the directory and their own proprietary clearance processes. This involved creating properties and flows to ingest, filter, and organize incoming data from sponsors and service providers, setting up alerts for team members, as well as concepting APIs for strategic partnerships.
The “static” portion of the website containing information for athletes, sponsors, and service providers was built in WordPress and Elementor to allow for ease-of-use for website administrators and content editors. The “dynamic” portion of the website containing the profile and business directory pages for athletes, and the onboarding flow for sponsors and service providers was built on the back of the Laravel PHP framework with additional key players being Livewire and Bootstrap 5.
HubSpot was chosen as our data repository as it was structured in a user-friendly way, and doubled as a CRM while Stripe was used to process application fees through a custom-built form wizard in Laravel. AWS and Twilio provided critical services for queue handling and email alerts.
All of these ecosystems were integrated together via custom APIs to create an automated, seamless, and efficient platform for athletes, providers, and administrators alike.
