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Every season, sports teams sell tens of thousands of jerseys, hats, and giveaway items…
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Bill Riesner shared thisYour merch provider knows more about your fans than you do. And they're monetizing the gap. Fanatics' Audience Network lets brands target fans based on purchase behavior, using data generated from your merchandise sales. The NFL built 250+ attribute fan profiles. FC Bayern München pulls from 50+ systems into unified "Golden Fan Records." Most teams? Merch in Shopify. Fan data in a spreadsheet. The two never meet. Full breakdown → https://lnkd.in/gxKQTeGE
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Bill Riesner reposted thisBill Riesner reposted thisApps get deleted. Jerseys do not. The average sports team app has a 30-day retention rate below 20%. Meanwhile, fans wear team gear for years. If you are building your fan engagement strategy around an app, you are building on the most fragile foundation available. If you are building it around the merchandise fans already own, you are building on the most durable one. vonga.io
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Bill Riesner posted thisFanatics processed 40 million e-commerce transactions last year. Revenue hit $8.1 billion. But that's not the interesting part. Fanatics launched FanGraph, a unified data layer stitching together purchase behavior, browsing patterns, and preferences across 100 million+ customers. They know which of your fans buy jerseys every August. Who orders two sizes (one's a gift). Which zip codes over-index on premium items. You get a purchase order and a check. That data asymmetry is the single biggest blind spot in college and pro sports right now. Your merch provider is building fan profiles richer than anything in your CRM, and you're not in the room. Five questions every AD should be asking their merch partner before the next contract renewal: 1. What fan behavioral data are you collecting from our transactions, and can we access it? 2. Which of our SKUs are being purchased as gifts vs personal use, and what does that tell us about our fan segments? 3. How are you using our fan purchase data to benefit other clients or your own marketplace? 4. What does our geographic demand data look like, and are we using it to inform retail and event strategy? 5. If we ended this partnership tomorrow, what fan data walks out the door with you? Your merch deal isn't just a revenue share. It's a data relationship. Make sure you know what you're giving away.
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Bill Riesner shared this85% of YC's latest batch is AI-first. 56 companies are building autonomous agents. Not copilots. Not chatbots. Agents that do the work. The copilot era lasted 18 months. We're in the replacement era now. This is going to hit sports front offices faster than people think. Picture this: An AI agent that monitors your entire sponsor portfolio overnight. Cross-references fan engagement data against sponsor objectives. Flags at-risk renewals before your partnerships team even gets to the office. Or one that analyzes 500 potential sponsors against your fan demographics and generates ranked outbound lists with personalized pitch angles. While you sleep. The teams running this in 18 months will out-pitch, out-measure, and out-renew everyone still doing it manually. The tech exists today. It's just unevenly distributed. Is your front office preparing for AI agents, or still figuring out ChatGPT? #ArtificialIntelligence #SportsTech #Sponsorship #FutureOfWork #SportsAI
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Bill Riesner shared thisWhy does your $50M sponsorship portfolio have worse attribution than a $500 Google Ads campaign? Sports has a measurement problem. We've been selling proxy metrics for decades. Impressions. Reach. "Brand recall." Meanwhile, a DTC brand running $500 in Facebook ads knows exactly which creative drove which sale, down to the zip code. Nielsen says sponsors who can measure actual fan engagement renew at 2.3x the rate. But most properties still hand over a PDF with logo placement counts and call it a wrap. The gap between what sponsors expect and what properties deliver is widening every quarter. The teams that figure out attribution first won't just retain sponsors. They'll steal them from everyone else. What's your property doing to close the proof gap? #SportsBusiness #Sponsorship #SportsTech #DataAnalytics
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Bill Riesner shared this"Most sponsorship decks fail because they open with the team's story instead of the sponsor's problem." The 5 elements every winning sponsorship deck shares -- and most miss at least 3. Full breakdown → https://lnkd.in/gNfaCmSa #SponsorROI #SportsMarketing #Partnerships
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Bill Riesner shared this74% of sports executives say fan data is vital for future growth. But most teams are stuck at stage 1: collecting names and emails. FanCompass mapped out a fan data maturity curve. Most organizations can measure basic behaviors -- ticket scans, app opens, email clicks. Very few can predict what a fan will do next. Almost none can personalize in real time. The gap isn't awareness. Everyone knows data matters. The gap is infrastructure. The systems that connect what you collect to what you do with it. The teams closing that gap right now are going to have a 3-year head start on everyone else. #FanData #SportsMarketing #CollegeSports
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Bill Riesner shared thisI run a company with an AI team. Not instead of people. Not as a gimmick. As a genuine operating model I didn't plan for and now can't imagine working without. Here's what it actually looks like. I have four agents. Each one has a name, a role, and a workflow. Scout researches prospects, writes outreach messages, and keeps our CRM updated. Kit drafts blog posts and LinkedIn content. Brick builds and ships product features. Bob orchestrates everything, QCs the work, and talks to me. They work overnight. They don't miss things. They don't forget context from two weeks ago. And when I wake up in the morning, there's a briefing waiting. This week: 100 connection requests staged and ready to send. A blog post drafted, QC'd, hero image generated, and scheduled. Three platform features shipped. All while I was asleep. The output is more than I could produce with a three-person team. Here's what I didn't expect: the hardest part isn't the technology. It's learning to delegate to something that can actually handle it. The instinct is to stay in the loop on everything. Review every draft. Approve every send. That kills the model. You have to trust the system you built, or you become the bottleneck. The other thing nobody tells you: AI agents don't replace judgment. They amplify it. The quality of their work is directly proportional to how clearly I can articulate what good looks like. If I can't explain it, they can't produce it. That's a useful mirror to hold up. It forces you to get specific about standards you've always held vaguely. We're early in figuring out how to run a company this way. Not everything works. Prompts get revised, workflows get rebuilt, things break at 3 AM. But the direction is clear. One founder with the right system can do what used to take a team. And we're just getting started.
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Bill Riesner posted thisMost sponsorship decks die on the first slide. It's a hero shot of the stadium. A paragraph about the "passionate fanbase." Maybe a record attendance number. The sponsor has seen that slide 40 times this quarter. From 40 different teams. The decks that actually close? They open with a slide about the sponsor's industry. Their challenge. Their competitor's partnership spend. The first three slides are about the sponsor's world — not yours. That single change rewires the entire conversation. You go from "here's what we offer" to "here's what you need." Different budget line. Different decision-maker. Different outcome. 76% of sponsors can't accurately calculate ROI on current deals. They're frustrated. Lead with how you'll fix that, and the assets almost sell themselves. #SportsMarketing #SponsorROI #Partnerships
Bill Riesner commented on a post
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Congrats Emily! Cheq, a Cantaloupe Platform is doing some really cool stuff in the venue space. Excited to follow along.
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Bill Riesner liked thisBill Riesner liked thisBCG: "Conversion rates of core fans to known, contactable fans range from as low as 1% to more than 60%." Same fans. Same passion. Same jerseys. The difference is not budget. It is method.
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Bill Riesner liked thisBill Riesner liked this50 million promotional items distributed by MLB teams last season. Jerseys. Bobbleheads. Hats. Rally towels. Know what data those items generated after the game? Zero. Now imagine every single one had a chip that let fans tap for exclusive content. Player videos. Discount codes. Voting on next year's giveaway. That is not science fiction. The technology has existed for years. The teams using it are seeing results. vonga.io
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Bill Riesner liked thisBill Riesner liked thisYour merch provider knows more about your fans than you do. The NFL built 250+ attribute fan profiles. FC Bayern pulls from 50+ systems into unified "Golden Fan Records." Most teams? Merch in Shopify. Fan data in a spreadsheet. The two never meet.
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Bill Riesner liked thisBill Riesner liked thisYour sponsorship package includes logo placement, PA reads, and jumbotron time. Your sponsor's marketing team is comparing that to Google Ads, where they track every click to a conversion. You are not losing renewals because your inventory is bad. You are losing them because your proof is bad. The fix: individual-level engagement data that connects sponsor exposure to fan action. Not estimates. Not impressions. Proof. vonga.io
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Bill Riesner liked thisBill Riesner liked thisApps get deleted. Jerseys do not. The average sports team app has a 30-day retention rate below 20%. Meanwhile, fans wear team gear for years. If you are building your fan engagement strategy around an app, you are building on the most fragile foundation available. If you are building it around the merchandise fans already own, you are building on the most durable one. vonga.io
Experience & Education
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Vonga
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Licenses & Certifications
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Lean Six Sigma Black Belt
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Issued -
Attorney
Supreme Court of the State of Indiana; US District Court for the Southern District of Indiana; US District Court for the Northern District of Indiana;
IssuedCredential ID 30416-49
Volunteer Experience
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Volunteer Agency Evaluator
United Way of Central Indiana
- 3 years 6 months
Children
Evaluate United Way agencies to help improve operations and determine future funding decisions.
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Tutor - IndyBar Review Course
Indianapolis Bar Association
- 5 years 7 months
Education
Assist first-time and retake students in preparing for the Indiana Bar Exam.
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Director - Beta Alpha Chapter Housing Corporation
Delta Tau Delta Fraternity
- 9 years 2 months
Education
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Member - Audit Committee
ENACCT (Education Network to Advance Cancer Clinical Trials)
- 2 years
Health
Participated in Board level Audit Committee. Reviewed internal controls, financial statements and certified external auditor.
Languages
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English
Native or bilingual proficiency
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Spanish
Limited working proficiency
Organizations
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CargoYard, LLC
General Counsel & Advisor
-Advised logistics start up on business strategies including strategic planning, marketing, operations, and financial controllership. Served as outside General Counsel starting in May 2012 providing legal guidance and document creation in areas including: Operating Agreement Patent Application Terms of Service Privacy Policy Tax
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