A Soccer Club's Request Turned Fit:match Into a Sports Data Business

A single request from an English soccer academy in 2024 pushed Fit:match from retail fitting tech into sports — and founder Haniff Brown says the move delivered 300% growth. Today the company counts FIFA, Major League Soccer and Major League Baseball among its partners, delivering athletes a full set of anthropometric and body-composition measurements in seconds.

Brown, a Williams College math major and former private equity investor, built Fit:match as an AI body-scanning platform to help shoppers find clothes that fit. Then a major English sports team, which had seen the technology through a retailer, asked him to visit its youth academy in the English countryside. "At first, we were like, no, the technology is built for this purpose," Brown told Entrepreneur. "But sometimes as an entrepreneur, you just have to take a risk and you have to go with your gut."

What changed on that trip?

At the academy, Brown talked with coaches, scouts and sports scientists. They told him the key constraint: "If you can get this body scanning process down to 10 to 15 seconds, you would unlock a huge advantage for us." Most athletic assessments take far longer and pull athletes out of training. Brown came back and made the call: "We're going all-in on this."

That conversation reshaped the product's market. Fit:match now describes itself as a body intelligence platform — in Brown's framing, "almost like the ChatGPT or the Claude or the Gemini of the human body" — providing remote body analytics at scale for hospitals, athletes and coaches.

Why the youth level matters

Brown, a self-described die-hard Manchester United fan, says the youth focus is what satisfies him most about the sports business. Whether it's MLB or MLS, Fit:match works at the youth level. "If you can democratize it the right way, you can get access to more youth, you can help develop ecosystems and pathways that don't exist today, and you can also provide data to parents so they can make better decisions for their sons and daughters," he said.

How he sells a category that didn't exist

Brown splits founders into two camps: those building incremental businesses and those building something that doesn't exist yet. He puts himself in the second group, which changes the adoption playbook. His rule is to demo live on every client call — whether he's talking to Cleveland Clinic or a sports team in Peru. No videos, no slide decks. A team member gets on the call, takes four pictures with an iPhone, and walks the prospect through the scan.

"This is an experience that I always tell people my eight-year-old son can do and my 70-year-old mom can do," Brown said. "And what I found is the ROI and the payback on putting it out there has been huge." His reasoning: the more the technology stays hidden, the more obstacles pile up in the sales process.

What does this change for founders chasing funding?

Brown is blunt about venture capital: he doesn't like fundraising. He compares it to gas stations on a drive from Los Angeles to New York — necessary fuel stops, not the destination. "It's not the means, it's not the ends — it's just some fuel that you need to get to the next stage and execute your journey," he said.

His order of operations is product first, market second, paying customers third — investors will follow. "What I found is that fundraising becomes easier once you solve for those things," Brown said. "So my advice is to focus on the stuff that investors really want to see." He sees too many founders invert that sequence and chase capital before proving the basics.

The practical takeaway for operators: your next market may already be using your product, just not the way you planned. Brown almost turned down the meeting that tripled his business — the willingness to fly to a youth academy and listen made the difference.