Three Startups Capitalizing on Baseball

Baseball season has begun and for all of the fans of America’s pastime, it was much too long of a wait. For enterprising entrepreneurs, they know that the best way to succeed as a small business is first, to appeal to a large audience and second, give them something that resonates with something they love.

Baseball fits these two criteria perfectly and because of that, many startups have found success building a business around the baseball crowd. Here are a few of those businesses.

Cufflinks

It wasn’t supposed to work out the way it did. Ravi Ratan purchased the domain name as an extension of their small family business but soon after he did, people started e-mailing and asking to see what he had. He took pictures of the inventory in his family’s store and rapidly sold everything. One of their hottest sellers is a cufflink that uses material from actual baseballs. Buyers can go online and look up the history of the baseball used in their cufflinks. Not only does he have baseball cufflinks but the same model is used for other sports.

While the Men Watch

This doesn’t actually appeal to the baseball fan but the female spouses of baseball and other sports fans. You know how it goes. When sports come on, the guys sits on the couch, monopolize the remote, and watch the games for hours.

Best friends Jules Mancuso and Lena Sutherland came up with a radio series that features play by play broadcasting from the woman’s perspective. One show topic includes “Frankenstein on the Field: 10 Fashion Fixes for MLB Umpires” Once the series grew, it attracted advertisers and has now taken off in to countries around the world.

Prepaid Parking

Any baseball fan knows that the worst part about going to a game is finding a parking spot but parkwhiz.com has taken some of the stress out of that. Parkwhiz has partnered with parking lots around the country to offer parking spots that can be prepaid over the internet. The person only has to drive to the game, take their spot, and walk in for the first pitch. The service is so popular that they’ve experienced year over year growth of 350%.

Bottom Line

Looking to start your own business? Look for areas of great popularity. Like baseball, there are plenty of opportunities for growth in even the most crowded of niches if you find an underserved area of the market and solved a problem.