Start With the Audience – the Product Can Come Second

01 /The Concept

PAC stands for Pro Athlete Community – which pretty clearly describes what the startup does on paper.

The deeper idea, though, is less obvious. The community exists to help professional athletes figure out what comes next – what to do with their lives after their playing career ends, whether by design or by injury.

The broad goals are what you'd expect from any good professional network: find people with similar interests and ambitions, develop new skills outside of sports, and build relationships with people already working in those fields. To that end, PAC runs regular in-person meetups for members and brings in guest speakers from different areas of business.

Beyond networking, PAC runs a multi-stage educational program.

Pro Athlete Business Combine is a 4-day in-person accelerator – a first immersion into the world of business. Participants get an overview of current opportunities across industries and meet with startup founders and CEOs for firsthand insights.

Next Chapter U Business Combine is a longer format: one week in person, nine weeks online. Its job is to help each participant identify their own strengths and interests so they can find a business direction that fits. The program includes coaching and deeper dives into specific sectors through expert talks and company visits.

Next Play Business Combine is the umbrella name for the next phase – purpose-built courses on specific business topics, with duration depending on the subject chosen.

Notably, each of these programs includes a dedicated module on real estate investing. Whether that reflects the genuine interests of professional athletes or a particular enthusiasm on the part of PAC's organizers is left as an exercise for the reader.

All programs are developed and delivered in partnership with faculty from the University of Miami Business School. Graduates of each stage receive a University of Miami certificate.

Membership is free for the first year – for participants who were invited by an existing member or completed a Business Combine accelerator. There's a reasonable suspicion that the accelerator itself isn't free.

From year two onward, membership costs money, though the exact amount isn't public. Given that the audience consists of professional athletes, one can safely assume the organizers aren't overly bashful about their pricing.

Since the start of this year, PAC's membership has doubled to 650 athletes across 10 different sports leagues. Nearly 10% of all active professional American football players are now members.

Riding that momentum, PAC has raised $7.6M in new funding, adding to the $3.6M it raised last summer.

02 /Why It Matters

Paid communities have multiplied in every direction – personal development, career reinvention, financial independence, leadership training, and everything in between.

But most of them share a common headache: acquiring new members. Community builders typically have to cast wide nets – advertising everywhere to everyone – hoping to pick out the small subset of people who actually want what the community offers.

Put another way, "people who want X" is one of the worst possible ways to define an ideal customer profile – for a community or a product alike. You can't build effective, precise ad targeting around a mindset.

That's where PAC has a structural advantage. Its audience is unusually crisp: professional athletes. That clarity means you can reach members almost directly – working from existing databases of professional athletes or using marketing channels that target this audience with near-surgical precision.

The broader principle: a huge advantage for any community or product is having formal, verifiable attributes that define the target audience. Those attributes need to do two things simultaneously: enable marketing campaigns with essentially 100% targeting accuracy, and function as a necessary and sufficient condition for someone to actually need what you're offering.

Will nearly every professional athlete eventually face a career transition and need to figure out what comes next? Close to 100%. The only remaining question is whether your community can convincingly answer "why will you actually help me?" – which, in theory, is a much more tractable problem to solve through product iteration.

PAC isn't the only community built on a sharp formal criterion like this.

Chief ([related review](/review/klub-na-milliard)) built a community for women in senior executive roles and raised $142.5M in funding. Its 2022 round alone was $100M, pushing the valuation to $1.1B.

The New Club ([related review](/review/odnovremenno-pomoch-i-kompanijam-i-zhenshhinam)) built a community for women in senior technical leadership specifically, and raised $3.1M in its first round last spring.

Knoetic ([related review](/review/54-milliona-za-pravilnyj-otvet)) raised $54M – including a $36M round – on a community for Chief People Officers.

What makes Knoetic especially interesting is that it didn't stop at community: it built a dedicated analytics product available exclusively to members. The flip side also holds – companies buying the product automatically join the community.

PAC likewise has products embedded inside the community. They're educational, but they're products nonetheless.

03 /Opportunities

The classic startup path: invent a product, then go hunting for people who need it. Most startups die somewhere in that second step.

There's a more reliable route. Start by identifying an audience you can reach easily and cheaply – then work hard to build something that audience genuinely needs. It may take a few attempts, but the odds are meaningfully better.

That's the core direction of travel: build products by starting from audiences you can identify through clear, verifiable criteria.

You can build a community, or a product, or start with the community and build the product later – those are details. What matters is anchoring to:

- Formal audience attributes that make targeting fast and cheap, and

- Near-universal relevance of your offering to everyone who meets those attributes.

So: what clearly defined audiences can you actually reach? What communities or products would virtually every member of that audience need? Answer those two questions, and building the business becomes a largely technical exercise.