Innovation starts with understanding your community — and knowing how to serve them
Watch Momentum is a digital sports media company founded by an MLB player to give fans behind-the-scenes access to professional athletes. The company had the content and the access — but needed a systematic approach to understanding its community, identifying who would actually pay, and positioning itself in a crowded market dominated by well-funded competitors.
This engagement demonstrates the Measurable Impact pillar in action: designing solutions that start with deep community understanding, scale by serving real demand, and deliver outcomes tied to identifiable audience needs.
Impact-driven innovation fails when it builds for an imagined audience. The first step was rigorous customer discovery — understanding not just who the fans were, but how they behaved, what they valued, and what they'd actually pay for.
A common assumption in digital media is that passionate fans will pay for content. The research revealed a more nuanced picture: there was no strong correlation between live game attendance and willingness to pay for online content. Fans who attended 20+ games per season weren't necessarily more likely to subscribe than those who attended 1-2 games. This single finding reshaped the entire monetization strategy.
Survey data across willingness-to-pay, content preferences, platform usage, and engagement patterns revealed two distinct personas worth building around:
Understanding your community also means understanding who else is trying to serve them. The analysis identified six direct competitors — from The Players' Tribune to Barstool Sports — each with a distinct value proposition and channel strategy. The key insight: no competitor was exclusively focused on the MLB personalized content niche that Momentum occupied.
Digital platforms often need to operate at a loss to achieve the network effects required for growth. The research showed that non-paying users drive growth (sharing, engagement, visibility), which in turn drives paying-user acquisition. This meant the monetization strategy couldn't simply gate content — it needed to offer tiered value, with free content fueling the network and premium content capturing revenue.
Customer discovery isn't just a startup exercise — it's the foundation of any measurable impact effort. Whether you're building a sports media platform or modernizing a government program, the methodology is the same: understand the community first, segment by real behavior (not assumptions), study the competitive landscape, and build value propositions that serve identifiable demand.