Mpower Sports and Recreation: An inside look at entrepreneurship
Photo / Lori Valigra
Rob Mueller, co-founder of Mpower Sports and Recreation, is moving his Maryland-based adaptive sports media company to Brunswick, and volunteered at last week's Maine Startup & Create Week to make local connections.
Rob Mueller was an entrepreneur on a mission at last week’s Maine Startup & Create Week.
As part of moving his company, Mpower Sports and Recreation LLC, from Maryland to Brunswick, and further honing its business plan, he volunteered at the event to make local connections. Mpower is an adaptive sports media network whose website uses journalists, photographers and filmmakers to tell stories about athletes with disabilities.
Mpower Sports still is in its early stages. The challenges Mueller and co-founder Eli Wolff face are typical of entrepreneurs who have identified a market need and are trying to figure out a business model to generate revenue. Its stated mission on its website is to “resolve the ‘media desert’ surrounding adaptive sports and recreation and to reduce the amount of time it takes someone to discover their ability through the power of sport.”
“There are 1 billion people with disabilities in the world,” Mueller said. “The disability group is the largest minority in the United States. It’s also a group any of us can join at any time.” According to 2010 U.S. Census figures, 56.7 million Americans, or 19% of the population, have physical or mental disabilities.
Mueller said it can take up to five years for an athlete who has suffered a trauma to want to try adaptive sports — those with equipment modifications and rules — because they will not be at the level they were before. In the meantime, many of the disabled are depressed.
Lightbulb moment
That’s how the idea for the company came about. The company started in June 2013 in Gaithersburg, Md., curating content it is trying to push to mainstream media outlets like ESPN, NBC and the Bleacher Report. Another target is Whistle Sports, the largest digital sports-media company on Youtube, which earlier this year received a $20 million Series C round of investment from NBC Sports Ventures and others. So far, Mueller says, it does not have a channel focused on athletes with disabilities.
“We need to come into the 21st century and create an online resource as a tool,” Mueller said. “I started writing a blog, and that grew into Mpower Sports, a publishing platform where we aggregate and curate content. We’re now branching into original content. We will be a hub focused on content.”
Mueller sees the website as both a rehabilitation and education tool.
Co-founder Wolff, who had a stroke when he was 2 years old, was a member of the U.S. Men’s Paralympic soccer team in the 1996 and 2004 Paralympic Games. He also helped establish the ESPY awards for the best male and female athlete with a disability. He also is program director for the Sport and Development Project at Brown University in Providence.
Mueller, who is able-bodied, became interested in adaptive sports in high school, when he volunteered to work at New England Disabled Sports, a program at Loon Mountain in Lincoln, N.H.
He has spent more than a decade in the nonprofit world at different organizations catering to disabled athletes. About 60% of disabilities are invisible, he said, including traumatic brain injury or post-traumatic stress disorder.
To date, the company has been self-funded by Mueller. It’s business model is ad revenue. One of its top advertisers is Invacare, which makes high-end handcycles and wheelchairs.
But being a media company focused on getting ads is a business model that makes it tough to attract outside investors like venture capitalists, he admitted. He’s looking to branch out, including into the business-to-business market, where Mpower would work with events, video marketing and branding for athletes.
“One of our challenges is figuring out a business plan. In one session at MSCW they said a successful startup solves a problem that people are willing to pay for. We’re trying to show proof points to brands,” he said, such as Coca-Cola and others. He cited to a Guinness wheelchair basketball commercial from 2013 as an example of inclusion.
“I see a community here more than Maryland. We couldn’t get anyone from the Maryland Redevelopment Authority to give us the time of day, yet Gaithersburg is one of top 20 places to start a business,” he said. “I struggled for a sense of community and mentorship. I’m so impressed with the sense of community up here. People are so excited about that they’re doing.”
A Rhode Island native, Mueller said he and wife wanted to get back to New England, and decided they’d move to Maine whenever one of them got a job with benefits. His wife got a job first, at the YMCA at Pineland Farms.
He said he also is actively talking to local entrepreneurial groups, and has looked into the Maine Center for Entrepreneurial Development’s Top Gun program and talked to 2 Degrees Portland, which connects people who want to live and work in Portland with those who already do.
“I see a lot of energy in Portland and Biddeford and want to help bring that to Brunswick and Bath,” he said. “We are still a Maryland company, but our goal is to become a Maine company within a year.
Mpower hopes to create five to 10 jobs as part of the future business-to-business focus.
Rio could be turning point
Mueller expects the Rio Paralympics Sept. 7-18 to be a turning point for athletes with disabilities and, in turn, for his company.
“We have media credentials for Rio Olympics,” he said. “That will be a huge turning point for the media and for people with disabilities. We’ll launch a big marketing campaign around the adaptive sports fan,” he said. “Brands want to get in front of customers,” such as individuals with disabilities and their family and friends and people who are touched by a disability in their life.
He said fans of any sport should also be fans of people with disabilities playing those sports.
“Fans of basketball also should be fans of wheelchair basketball,” he said, adding that two-thirds of NBA teams have affiliated wheelchair basketball teams. In fact, he said the Cleveland Wheelchair Cavaliers were National Division III champions in 2010.
In an interview published by Knowledge@Wharton in 2012, Wolff said, “When I was at Brown, I had a really good coach, and we were able to figure things out, but it is not always like that. For so long, people with disabilities who wanted to play sports were looked at as being on the sidelines — like being on the disabled list on a Major League Baseball team.”
Some mainstream media outlets have started being more inclusionary. On recent episodes of ABC’s Dancing with the stars, deaf contestant Nyle DiMarco won in 2016, while other episodes included Amy Purdy, a double amputee snowboarding champion who lost both legs at 19 to meningitis, and Noah Galloway, an Army veteran who served in Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2005 and lost his left arm and leg to an improvised explosive device.
And a recent episode of NBC’s American Ninja Warrior showed Artis Thompson III, who lost his leg in a motorcycle accident, almost complete a grueling obstacle course with a prosthetic leg.
Mueller said he and Wolff hope to hone their business plan over the next year so both can work full-time for the media company.
“A key factor is timing,” Mueller said. “Rio will be a big turning point.”
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