Investigating the competitors of 4Side Sports shows that most of them have put just several sports business segments as their target market. For example, Go Sports just has five sports for reserving and having played there, or Sports Hall just works on school games. However, 4Side Sports will not differ between the sports clients’ ages and would approach all the mentioned market segments equally to have a broader platform among the others. In addition, below, we have mentioned other competitive advantages one by one:
Online Reservation
The main idea behind 4Side Sports is to provide a platform where clients can reserve the sports complexes as easily as they can. Among the most famous platforms in sports business regions (i.e., MeetUp and Sports Easy), none of them has this feature. Online reservation in 4Side Sports is not restricted to sports complexes, but clients can rent/buy accessories they need for their physical activities.
Connection with Personal Trainers
To our knowledge, among the competitors of 4Side Sports, we can rarely find one business that has a contract with the personal trainers to introduce them and approach clients for them and not getting any money for introducing them. In 4Side Sports, all personal trainers can have their own page/dashboard and update them regularly based on their experience and the achievements that they had. Also, they will put their training plans and training course prices for the potential clients that want to work with them. Since most such personal trainers are small enough to pay huge amounts of money for introducing themselves, 4Side Sports does not get any money in this step, except for some commissions on the sold training plans and courses. This pricing strategy is counted as another competitive advantage in the future as well when other platforms will start to connect with personal trainers.
Management Panel
4Side Sports Platform has two sign-up options. One for the clients and one for the business owners. In the business owner platform, 4Side Sports provides all options that a business owner needs, such as a staff panel, accounting panel, etc. In the next phase of our action plan, 4Side Sports will add several options to this management plan for the sports complex managers to control their venues such as getting access to the cameras, turning on/off the lights, and other personalized controls that they need in this platform.
Events and Competitions
Among the competitors of 4Side Sports, only MeetUp works on making events for similar-interested clients. It is not useful that much when it comes to making competitions. However, organizations that want to have events and competitions can use 4Side Sports in which all processes from reservation and marketing and introductions can be done automatically, with much less cost for the competition builder.
Finding Teammates/Competitors
Playo and Meetup are perfect platforms for finding similar-interested people to play with. However, Playo is running in India and Meetup is mostly for events but not sports. If a platform like 4Side Sports brings an option for the clients to find their sports partners to play/compete with, it will have a great competitive advantage. We can suppose 15 people that want to play soccer which needs at least 22 people to start. They are already 15 but they cannot rent the field because of a lack in their numbers and the field is going to be empty most of the time, because it is rarely possible that 22 people can be always coordinated with each other. However, using 4Side Sports, people can participate in plans together and the teams will be completed easily, which is good for both players and complexes. In addition, this is also good for those people that like to play soccer, but don’t have a team. By using the 4Side Sports platform, they can easily find a team to play.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Artificial Intelligent (AI) can be useful to 4Side Sports in several ways, all are counted as great competitive advantages compared to its competitors which have not used AI in these ways. First, in recommendations to the clients; 4Side Sports platform analyzes the behavior of clients in checking the different sports complexes and tries to find the favorite sports of the clients and show them the offers related to such sports. Next, artificial intelligence used in the 4Side Sports project can analyze the previous sports preferred by the users and their locations, then assign them to different sports leagues and competitions held by our platform. Third, clients who are not sure which personal trainer is the fittest for them (or which sport), can fill 4Side Sport’s surveys and questions, then 4Side Sports will use its trained machine learning procedure to identify the skills of the client and match them with the best fit. Last but not least, the users’ preferences can be gathered and analyzed in the management panels of sports complexes and personal trainers, helping them to have better business decisions.
Discount Options and Follow-up procedure
Approximately all the competitors of 4Side Sports follow up with their clients by offering them the existed discounts. Thus, 4Side Sports also brings up the information about the discount offers for different sports complexes. However, since 4Side Sports’ services are more varied than the other competitors, this part will be more comprehensive than the others, and clients have more options to choose from. The most important strengths of competitors are their presence in the Canadian market and their familiarity with Canadian multiethnic culture. Also, familiarity with local sports complexes and having an easier procedure to make contracts with them is considered another strength. However, the features of such platforms are not the same as 4Side Sports, and our web-based platform has several significant competitive advantages over them.