Bright ideas for new products often emerge when a personal need shows a gap in the market.
Cormac Keogh is heavily involved in the sport of rowing as a club coach, and found keeping tabs on the performance and training regimes of the 20-plus athletes in his team quite a challenge.
“People take rowing seriously and train very hard, and fitness and technique both play a major part in their success,” he says.
“I used to store training and performance data on paper and then occasionally I’d collate the data into spreadsheets.
“But I coach young people, and it struck me that the majority of them have smartphones with a lot of capability. I decided to tap into this to gather their training data and make it available to them on the web matched with their coach’s training programme. I quickly realised the process could be totally automated.”
The result of this eureka moment is RowCatcher, a mobile, web and cloud solution that allows coaches create and distribute training plans to their teams.
“Athletes use the technology on their smartphones to record their actual training details including speed, stroke rate, heart rate, distances, times and attributes about technique,” Keogh says. “In turn, coaches get feedback on how effective the plan is with charts showing progress and the effectiveness of various type of training.”
While Keogh’s initial product is targeted at the international rowing community, he says it can also be applied to other sports. RowCatcher will be followed by similar products for those involved in cycling and running.
The revenue model for RowCatcher is based on athletes paying a subscription of around €5 per month to use the service. Rowers as far afield as the US and Australia are already showing strong interest in the product.
Keogh is an electronic engineer with an IT background so having had the bright idea for RowCatcher he also knew how to build it. He lectures in computing at the Institute of Technology in Tallaght, and his company is based at the institute's synergy centre. Prior to this he worked for Microsoft as its Azure cloud computing lead for Ireland, and then in a global role as a technology alliance manager. Before that he spent 17 years with IBM where he designed and developed its WebSphere financial transaction manager product.
Keogh began developing RowCatcher in February 2013 and now has a team of four people working with him.
He estimates the cost of bringing the project to this point at around €100,000 in hard cash plus an unquantifiable amount of personal time. The venture has been self-funded apart from €10,000 from Enterprise Ireland in the form of two innovation vouchers. Keogh would now like to raise €200,000 to further develop the product.
“The USP of RowCatcher is that the training plan is central, “ he says. “The coach remains in control of what the athletes are doing. There are other apps in the market that gather some of the data we gather but they don’t bring the coach into the process.
“We are currently performing final tests to put the product in the mobile phone marketplaces for public beta testing. In the meantime we have used social media to raise our profile with the rowing community in Ireland and abroad.”
RowCatcher faces some competition in its niche but Keogh says his product provides much more functionality. He is not underestimating the challenge of breaking into the running and cycling worlds, however. “Those markets are enormous so even capturing a small slice would be very big for us. But for now we are concentrating on developing the market we know and love.”
