Ep. 56 | The Tech Startup Changing Sports Scouting - Sebastien Hilaire

Jack sits down with Sebastien Hilaire, founder of Prospect1, a Panama-based sports intelligence startup that helps teams identify, develop, and promote athletes through contextual performance data. They dive into how the platform supports more intelligent decision-making and what it’s like building a tech company in Panama’s emerging startup scene. Sebastien shares what’s working and what is not when doing business locally and the mindset required to grow something meaningful in a developing market.

Sebastien Hilaire

Prospect1

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Transcript

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Welcome to Shakin’ Hands, where we provide the platform for entrepreneurs and thought leaders to share their stories in order to hopefully influence others to get out of the rat race and chase their own dreams. If you have any recommendations for guests or questions that you want to be asked, please don't hesitate to reach out. Anyways, if you enjoy the podcast, please like, comment, subscribe and share in order to keep the podcast growing. Otherwise, I'm your host, Jack Moran and this is Shakin’ Hands. If you're looking for business mentorship, I have a place where you can get feedback on your unique personal development and business growth challenges. Over the last year, I've brought together a group of impact driven thought leaders where we meet every single day to discuss psychology, communication, mindset, and business case studies. We have people who have made millions of dollars, lost millions of dollars, Harvard MBAs and new entrepreneurs like you and I. Entrepreneurship can be lonely. So if you're looking for a support system, please follow the link in the description below for some more information. We're recording already. Yeah. We're running. Can I say, can I? Can I swear or not? Yeah, you can start over. You can. I can say whatever. I gotta be myself. You can be yourself for sure. So let's start, like, what's, Tell us about your business. What do you got going on right now? And by the way, I like the golden goose, as that's my sister working for Golden Goose. No way. She ships me the shoes. Hell, yeah. I might have to leverage that, talking to you. I'll give you. These things are up and running on. Their last one sends me the, the link for the friends and family. They're, like 20, like 30 bucks now. What? Maybe I shouldn't say that. Look at that. I don't know, 60 or something, but it's. Yeah, it doesn't even make sense. That's crazy. Yeah. I'm gonna have to get that magic logo. Go. You tell me. That's unbelievable. Yeah. All right, so my my business is probably one we do. So we do. I do understand which professional athletes can go pro and then we connect them to a professional teams. Easy. Okay. Sweet. How did you get into that shit? I played professional soccer. I played in college. Then I came back and we started automating things for the team I played for. So nutrition, we couldn't pay for a nutritionist. But it's very simple. You just have to do some math and do an equation and find out, like the caloric needs. Then you add the macros and it's whatever you see on Instagram, like, get to do this quiz. Have you seen it? Like the Be Shred. If you do this quiz you get your personal nutrition plan. I did that like a while ago. And then I started working on on, on on the physical abilities and we found some correlations. You had a good core. You could switch directions. Good. Then if you have a good jump, you have a good for your dash. And with correlations, we started finding that we could predict then who was going to be faster from a jump. And playing with data. Now we can predict which players are going to go to a professional team. I'm going to make it a and then we started selling it. How what are the factors that are influencing or determining whether a player has the qualities to be a, successful professional athlete? Okay. So I'm going to talk mainly about soccer because it's our main sport. We also work with the Olympic Committee in Panama and we work with other sports. But but in soccer nobody is going to like believe this because they all think it's some technical ability or they all want to say it's the eye of the coach. That's bullshit. If you measured their jump and then their ability to change directions and you cross that with, with their with their endurance, you already can take out like 90% of a players. Wow. Yeah. So so then it says words of time, time and space. So you have to be at a certain place in a certain moment. And then in that moment, if you miss the past or if you can control the ball, that's the technical ability. And then you pick who's better for that. But if you can't get to the place you need to be there, then you you're not going to make it. So I was talking about this on one of the earlier episodes, or yesterday, one of the girls, her husband is a professional baseball player from the Ottoman. Yeah. And, I was talking to her about how I've spoken with a lot of professional athletes and also professional coaches who say that once you get to that, like professional level, everyone is, like physically very talented. But what separates like the good from the great is mental. Yeah. Have you guys noticed that? Is that something that you realize or you're testing for. So 90% are away. Everyone at that level has to be that fit. Then technical is the second filter. And they're usually you can learn that stuff. The mental where we understood was players with the same personality type. Have you done this personality test? I've done, Myers-Briggs. Myers like I don't know exactly the Myers-Briggs, but somebody with the same like the more conscious people are able to stay because they understand the consequences of their acts. They're able to stay consistent. And consistency is king. And those are the ones that are usually going to make it. So break down that personality type a little bit more in depth if you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. My English is rusty and you got to take it easy. But specifically is they gotta be able to so they're aware of everything, everything that is happening to them. So whatever it takes, what takes them away from the flow state is where when somebody is doing the wrong stuff because they understand what what is correct and what what is supposed to be done. And whenever somebody like a teammate, does the wrong person make the wrong decision? Like that's the the messes with their heads a or something that is not supposed to happen on their control happens. But when everything it's according to plan, like they're very plan oriented. They're, they're, they really enjoy it and they can get into full stack. Well, what is what does it been like transitioning from the from being an athlete into business? And I've seen a lot of there is a lot of issues with athletes after they finish their professional careers. Some associated with the main one that I've heard is that like lack of not notoriety, but they identify with being that professional athlete. And once they leave that professional sport, they no longer have that identity. And it can be very detrimental to them because they're kind of like, where do I go? You lose confidence because because you're at the exact where you're it's who you are. And and everybody say that to the athlete. And so now before they used to want to be rappers, after they play, now they want to be founder. Now we want to be founders. So so I think being a founder was like, for me it was like, a way to close that identity. Gap. But for sure, there was a period of depression and, and, and where it was, I didn't know who it was, and I didn't know where I was going with my life. How did you begin to, like, refind that purpose again? What was that process like? So I stopped the on my third or second year in college because I, my family and I, we decided to I should go to college where I got a scholarship and I spent like the last year partying and stuff. And then I came back here, came, came back to Panama. I didn't know who I was, so I started getting involved with the team and I went to I was going to go back and play, but I wasn't way out of shape. So I really like connected with the players. And and my problem was we didn't have the competitive advantage of the US because teams here don't have the money to develop the pay the players the right way. So when I saw the problem and I started like finding small solutions to every single small problem I could find, then I felt the need to take this to the next level. What do you take from being an athlete that you apply now into your business life, discipline? So, it's the the way we like. Whenever people tell me, like, I'm tired, I can get this done. I'm like, hey, if you have to run a thousand labs, you run the thousand labs. If you have to wake up at 4 a.m., you wake up at 4 a.m., you just have to do whatever you have to do. And that's something that in my company, like most of us, were athletes. And then there's a group that are not athletes, and I see it in them. And I used to get really frustrated because they wouldn't have like, we have a deadline for one week. If you have to work 50 hours a day, you do it. And all of us, we know that and we're used to that. And it's okay. But but there are a few guys that that don't feel that and are not used to that. And that's something I think it's a pretty good benefit. What is the biggest challenge that you've encountered? To date, maybe, maybe it's within your sports career or within your business career. No, no, no, it's definitely business. It's sales. Because being a former player, like, I empathize and I really want the solution to work. So I find a way to give like a premium, a freemium offer. And and I never charge people and they help a lot of people. And I have, I think I have half of my users at the beginning were were friends. And for years I wanted to work with. And then I was looking at the company and we had zero cash flow and that that was a big problem, like understanding. Yeah, I was fixing the problem. I wanted to fix, but I had to make money from it, that that was the main problem. How did you address that? What did you change? I'm still working on it. It's not it's not it's not solved, like mentally. But basically I put somebody else on, on the, on the, on board. Like whenever we got a new client, I, I will as soon as we close the set the deal, I will send somebody else to finish the details, because that would mean I would for sure make a mistake. Like doing myself away from the equation. What are the unique attributes of your personality that are valuable to the business? I'm pretty good at solving problems outside the box like. It's like even a gateway. I mean, it's the same, same attribute I had when I used to break. I would have three rival, three adversaries in the field. And, I'll find a weird solution that will work. I will do the same thing. For example, we created, where we didn't have money for for marketing, and we had to advertise a brand new product that was coming out. So we created a reality TV show where we found brands to sponsor our sponsor. Were is now our biggest marketing effort. That is our reality TV show. What do you see from other entrepreneurs that leads them to be unsuccessful? What's your biggest business? IC share that's a good one. I wasn't ready for that. Well, like, what do you think? Are the qualities that make someone unsuccessful? Maybe you say like, these people are lazy or they don't have resilience, or they have a negative belief system. Like what are something that you see, as a common thing in entrepreneurs or even in athletes? Oh, you know, you know what? There's this startup culture that believes you, the makes you believe that there's going to be a business plan later, or you can just get a bunch of users and you're gonna convert them and that's absolute bullshit. And I fell into that, and I feel identified by that, I think. And I, and I see people going through going through that door right now and, and they're going to find out it doesn't work. What's your long term vision for the company? I'm going to say for the first time, I haven't said that in I haven't said this, but the plan is for the World Cup in Qatar. We want I want to well, the next big marketing stunt will be that we're going to give a million bucks to, a player that comes from our platform and plays in the World Cup. Wow. The the girl that I was telling you about before her husband is playing is a coach in that, that world Cup. Seriously? Yeah, I forget, I know her name. We can give it to you afterwards, but is it only for soccer? Yeah, the World Cup is only for us out there. Okay, so there's some event. There was a World Cup in baseball that was in Qatar as well. Yeah, but sorry. And also the World Cup. What the soccer World Cup is in Saudi. But yeah. But yeah it's there was an event on baseball and I'm sure I might know this guy. Well yeah, I forget his name. We'll have to find it afterwards. If you had $1 million of guilt free capital, how would you deploy it within the company? A million bucks? Yeah. How long do I have to buy it? I mean, as long as you want. Okay, sure. You just got it in your bank account.$1 million just hit your right now. Right now. What's the next question like? Why are you not doing it? I will integrate with hardware or use in computer vision. I'll work on product right away. Oh, hire AI and computer vision specialists. That's our next step. What do you think the future is for your company with the implementation of AI, do you think it's gonna have a big impact? All right. This is something nobody has ever been able to. And I see why. Because it's complex. You can't tell if an athlete, for example, has done x amount of. Correct. Good. Like completed X amount of passes scores. So many goals how fast they run. But you can't measure for now. If they took the right decision and making the right decision has so many variables and so many waste can go wrong that nobody hasn't been able to do it. And and I think that's like measuring so great. You might be like a big breakthrough. How do you gauge like the right decision for now it's absolutely subjective. Like he should have gone should have gone forward. Or maybe he should have taken the defender on. Maybe he should have taking a shot. But it depends on the situation. So for every situation we would have to create, an X amount of solutions possible and rate those solutions. That's a bit of the blueprint I have in my mind. But like that's a nice problem I would like to tackle soon. Are you from Panama originally? Yeah, yeah. How do you see the entrepreneurial culture, in Panama developing slow slow thing. It's it's a small market. So every like consumer product would be almost useless, like in a tech way. It was like in the tech industry. So you get the normal industries. But but companies are fighting for a small market share. So it's it's pretty hard. So you have to really like I mean, if you come up with something, you have to dominate the country to be a sustainable company. And we all have to go outside the country like you guys in the US. You you don't even think about another market until you make, I don't know, $100 million a year. Yeah. Mean like here you make 50,000 bucks a month and you're already thinking about the next country because you don't know if there's going to be a next market. What do you think the keys are to success? As a but as an entrepreneur in Panama, you have to know people, everybody knows each other. Like it's easier, too easy to know people. But I think the key to success in Panama is to know that Panama is not going to be your market, and to be able to test really fast, whatever a hypothesis you have in your head, and maybe and create plans to deploy them outside. But it's not a market where you're going to be extremely successful in tech, maybe in tourism and real estate you will. But but I think they will get squirted too. So, I'm not sure. So you say you got to know a lot of people. What are the differences in the culture here in Panama? How does someone like, you know me like a gringo that comes to Panama? How do I have success within the Panamanian culture? When where do you see where do you see? Like Americans or people from other countries? Where do they fail within Panama? Culturally, you're screwed in that, just getting, no, no, no, actually, normally what I see is they hang out with were pretty close as a, as a culture, and it's pretty hard to get in. And usually you hang out with expats, but you got to really make an effort to know people locally and, and hang out where they hang out. You got to learn the language and I'm trying, man. There's no no way around that. And maybe the right expats know the connections you need, but mostly you're going to have to to do the work. Yeah. Like if you want to make it, you got to do the work. As in everything else, you got to make the friends you need to make. What do you think the biggest opportunity is? Here in Panama. So everything that has to do with logistics, because obviously you have the canal, but also we are not like, you don't have a shipping address here. You have to ship to a box. I think that's a market that can be exploded. And whoever figures that out first and worries and the G6 area doesn't make sense that we have the canal and you can't get a pirate ship to your home. Yeah. It's not. It's not right. Yeah. Everything comes through here. It goes to Costa Rica and they can ship stupid right away to homes. And we have to go to a bigger box. I think last mile might work where might might be useful, but I think whoever can crack that is going to do something interesting. That's crazy. Yeah. And I just moved here obviously. And like, I don't even know the address to my building. I have no idea. I have no clue. There's no hydro smoke. It's the. You see that? It's the building. Yeah. That's the address. Yeah. We don't have street number. We do have street numbers. We don't have, house numbers, so. That's crazy. I didn't even realize that, like, I, I saw it on the address, and I just figured that there was some system that you guys understand that I don't, but there just isn't a system. Yeah, next to the green door and close to the the mango tree. And I'm. I'm serious, I am. It's weird that I'm serious. Because if you look at the city looks like a Miami, it's it doesn't look like, like a socialist organized country, but it is extremely organized. Yeah, yeah. How do you define success for yourself? I want to solve my problem. That's my my next step. I want a solid within the next five years, and then I want to taco about. I want to be able to to fix things quickly with solutions that create a little value, by the next ten years and have a big and diversified in other industries doing the same thing that I'm doing right now. And and then when I'm able to do that, what are we happy? Are there any internal challenges that you're aware of, or internal limitations that you're aware of in yourself that, you know, like I need to conquer this limitation if I want to be more successful and I want to grow. Yeah. For sure. Like, do I need to soar with the whole list or. I mean, we got to happen now and it's it's so I'm pretty self aware, but but I haven't been able I talked about discipline before. I can do the work but I gotta work more on strategy like and sticking to long term planning because the way I'm wired, I would work for, I don't know, two months without taking a day off, but I, I'm working on stuff that is not very important or efficient and, and having the time to think from the drone's point of view, who helped me a lot to to grow. I think that's my, my biggest problem. And what do you think you what habits do you implement to be successful? Like what are the most important day to day habits that you, execute on that have led to the success that you have had? All right. Studying every layman like me doesn't even make sense. I used to be the worst in school, but now I study every day, at least 30 minutes. Also, journaling, like being extremely disciplined with my calendar, and taking the most of the day and and blocking the times. I don't want to be changing heads. So, for example, this in this podcast is in the afternoon, and I'm only setting meetings in person this afternoon. I'm not going to open the computer. I'm not going to talk to my team. I'm not going to talk about product. I'm only going to concentrate in this. And tomorrow morning I have product and I, I'm going to work on the design, the next shipments, whatever I have to. And then in the afternoon, I work on sales. I'm just going to be making calls. I think that's, I started doing that for the last six months, and it's been amazing. Lies, that routine, important because we, I guess you leave it to you. Like, if you have to change heads all the time, you're not able to give 100% of your attention to whatever you're doing right now. And the most successful, like, the most efficient work I can do, I do it after I've been doing the same thing for one hour. But if I'm changing tasks every hour, it's not like I do shitty work. Yeah, when you say that, you journal, what do you journal about? So the, then like how I feel entering the day, how I need to feel to be successful during the day and whatever is not on my test manager or my calendar that I need to be aware of and I, I simplify whatever is complicated from, from my 15 most important tasks. And then at the end of the day, what happened and what I, what I, what I, what I'm where I have to leave for tomorrow is just to take it away from my head. Why is that important to do? Mainly I can't sleep. So if if I know what what I, what I miss today and I'm trying to go to bed, it's it's it's impossible. Well, yeah. That's crazy. What do you think is the single biggest piece of advice that you would give entrepreneurs that you've learned through your entrepreneurial journey? That we're not exceptions. Like you read a book and there's a methodology and you will think that doesn't apply to me because I'm not in the same industry. And I am special for whatever reason. There are systems that have been put in place to be successful at X amount of things. Nobody's that special if they don't apply to them to, to, to their companies and whatever you like are humble enough to understand that. And you put in place the systems that are there to execute, you're going to be successful. You just got to do whatever is in the theory and put it in practice and don't believe doesn't apply to you because I don't know if you're working in the industry or the yeah, yeah, it's all we have, all the resources in the world at our fingertips. Exactly. Yes. You know, having suppressing your ego and realizing that there's always something else to learn and then having the discipline to learn that information and then implement it, there really is no excuse why someone shouldn't be successful. And the only thing standing in an entrepreneur hours way is themselves. Exactly. The ego. Yeah, yeah. If you put it in the perfect algorithm and I wish I could do it in Spanish because, yeah, you're asking great questions and my English is limited. It's limiting my ability to answer them. But but yeah, man, it's crazy how much we put our egos in front of solutions. And because I think is right, maybe my team told me that it's not going to work, but my ego, and following my ideas, I've lost. I've lost a lot of money on that. Yeah. It's great advice. And I think you're articulating your ideas very, very well. Very concise and simple. So. Well, validating your assumptions. How many, like, have you read the test? No. The book is a mom test for mom. This is a book about making the right questions to validate that you're what is. These are the right ones. Wow. And? It's a step by step. It's like a playbook just to make sure you're not developing products that are not going to be useful. The client isn't going to be wanting to pay. And every time I come up with a new idea for a product line, I skip this and I miss right, and I lose money because I didn't do the work and didn't follow the process. To be able to shape the world that I wanted to shape and it's crazy because I've read the book three times and I keep doing it. Like now that I understood that I wasn't mature enough to where I'm having somebody else on my team validate whatever hypotheses we come up with, and it's starting to pay off really well because, it works. But yeah. Zero. Well, something that I notice about you that's a very good quality is that you're not afraid to admit your faults and and you're aware of your faults. And in my opinion, that is the first step to growing and changing is having that awareness and and the limitation is the people that are in denial about those faults. Nobody can be perfect. But if you at least have those awareness and are doing those self-assessments, then you're making the first step to growth. And it's we have a theory in our company that whatever you think you're. It's directly proportional how you think. Like your self assessment. If you're okay, if you're a five and you believe you're at seven, you're automatically at three. That's it. I mean, directly proportional because you're going to be okay. Being that overconfident makes you take risks that you're not able to chart to, to handle and to back up. So automatically you drop to a three like proportionally. And the it goes the other way around. If you think you're a three, well you're a a five, then you're a seven. Exactly. Because you're going to do much like it's much more worth it to be on, to underestimate your value than overestimate it. And and I self-awareness for me it's it's one of the I don't hire anybody that thinks they're much better than they actually are, and I don't. And I try to stay humble and keep my head where I'm where I think I am. That's really good advice. Things where if people are interested in your services or they want to connect with you and, you know, want some advice from you about your own journey, where can they find you? Sure. Business. You can find me on Instagram. Sebastian. Hilaire Sees you way. And prospect one is my company so you can find the price of one app. You can find it on Instagram or web or however I think you on where you want to and how. You don't have to do that. You don't want to do that. Follow link. I'm just keeping a link on your website and everything below. But no, I appreciate you coming on. You've been a great guest and, thanks, looking forward to see how your company grows. It's gonna do well, I will you will see it for sure. I believe in you. Thanks. For.