Building a start-up from scratch isn't easy. As the online communications, marketing, and connection platform for high school athletics, VNN has seen several different iterations in its nine year history. From a blog and hyper-local media network, to enterprise resource planning, a direct-to-consumer marketing engine, and fundraising app all rolled into one, the opportunity is as large as it is complex.

20,000 high schools, 280,000 athletic programs, 1.2M teams, 18M yearly events, 12M volunteers, 25M active athletes, 50M parents, 1B buying opportunities. And that doesn’t include the local State Farm agents, Dairy Queens, Orthodontists, Realtors and Pizza Parlors who all want to reach them.

Where do you start? By understanding our key customers.

The athletic director

VNN began with a simple purpose - give high school athletic directors the tools to communicate and promote their programs to the community they serve. But when you're creating a new to-do for a person who already has a list of a hundred, the challenge becomes, "how can we design our product and communication around giving our customer less tasks so they has time to do the things they actually want to do?"

We realized that the ideal state of our customer, the athletic director, was when they weren't even looking at our product at all. These people are the community's connectors - and showing them another screenshot just meant that they'd be thinking about sitting at a desk all day. So unlike any company in the space, we aim to showcase athletic directors doing what they love; creating events, watching sports, and being the glue that holds local sports communities together.

At the same time to even get in the door, our products had to work together and turn one task into completion of five. Pushing a schedule into the facilities manager, team pages, the score reporting app, syncing changes, and ensuring parents have the ability to subscribe through an iCal feed. So, once the brand got their attention, the product marketing had to communicate those benefits clearly.

The advertisers

Once we signed-up nearly 10% of the nation's high schools to the VNN platform and became home to all the schedules, scores, rosters, photos, articles, and unique traditions associated with them, we started to hit the scale that made agencies and national brands take notice.

Now, the message was just as much about our audience as it was about the athletic director, and we could show that through imagery that captured all the great things that make high school sports special. For the AD, the visuals signify a job well done, an event that wouldn't exist without them (and VNN's help in pulling it off). To advertisers, we were positioning ourselves in contrast to the cold, digital feel of AdWords and Facebook, by showing a chance to associate with powerful lifelong memories and moments that won't be soon forgotten.