Step aside, Zoom fatigue, VRTL wants to make virtual fan events fun again
VRTL founder Courtney Jeffries describes herself as a “recovering sports executive.”
“That was my entire career before I threw it away to chase down my startup dreams,” Jeffries told TechCrunch.
After playing softball at the University of Washington, she spent almost 20 years working in marketing and sales for teams like the Oakland Raiders and the New York Rangers. But while Jeffries was leading fan retention initiatives at Madison Square Garden, she noticed a glaring opportunity.
“My whole job was to focus on extracting the lifetime value out of the fans, but quite obviously, there’s an over indexing of attention on fans in the building,” she said. “The majority of fans are outside of an arena […] and there’s no platform, no way to scale in-person experiences that we know will trigger their loyalty.”
By 2022, Jeffries launched VRTL, an enterprise platform for entertainment companies — from sports teams to record labels — to capitalize on virtual fan experiences.
“It’s a very versatile platform that combines livestream, video chat, and then our proprietary suite of fan engagement experiences to drive those loyalties,” she said.
What makes VRTL, which pitched onstage today as part of the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024, different from any other video chat or livestream service is not only that it gives clients valuable data, but also that it has proprietary fan engagement tools.
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