Disclaimer: This is a personal investment thesis written for my own records and published for educational purposes only. It is not investment advice. I invested £198 (~$250.57 USD) in FanHub via Crowdcube in October 2025. All equity crowdfunding investments are highly speculative and carry a significant risk of total capital loss. Please conduct your own research before making any investment decision.
A note on context: This investment was made before the SBC framework was formalised, but it was the first investment where I applied something close to systematic thinking. I work in professional sports. I have spent 20 years building commercial partnerships, fan engagement programmes, and revenue strategies for sports organisations. FanHub was the first equity crowdfunding investment where I felt I had genuine edge — not just as an investor, but as a practitioner who understood the problem the company was solving.
Company Snapshot
FanHub is a UK-based mobile application that rewards match-going football supporters for their loyalty. Fans earn LYLTY Points by checking in at games, making predictions, and spending with partner brands. Points are redeemable for free pints, match tickets, exclusive experiences, and partner discounts. Brands use FanHub to reach football audiences with measurable, transaction-verified ROI. Rights holders — clubs and leagues — use FanHub to access first-party fan behaviour data and unlock new revenue streams.
The company is raising on Crowdcube under FCA-regulated equity crowdfunding, targeting a modest raise to fund expansion.
Investment date: October 2025
Amount: £198 (~$250.57 USD)
Platform: Crowdcube
Security type: Equity
Shares received: 234
Company valuation at investment: ~£12,000,000 (~$15,000,000 USD)
Total raised this round: £30,734 from 229 investors
The Wave: Why This Market, Why Now
Fan engagement is one of the most discussed and least solved problems in professional sport. Every club, every league, and every governing body talks about deepening fan relationships. Very few have built the infrastructure to do it in a way that is measurable, scalable, and genuinely valuable to the fan.
The structural problem is this: sports organisations have enormous audiences but almost no first-party data about them. They know who bought a ticket. They do not know what that fan eats, drinks, travels on, or spends money on in the hours before and after the match. That data gap is worth billions — it is the difference between a sports property that can offer brands verified, attributable reach and one that can only offer impressions and brand association.
FanHub's card-linked rewards infrastructure — approved by Visa, Mastercard, and American Express — was the first solution I had seen that could capture verified fan spending behaviour at scale. Every time a FanHub user spends with a LYLTY partner, the transaction is verified and the fan earns a commission on the purchase. This creates a data flywheel: more fans means more transaction data, which means more valuable audience insights, which attracts more brand partners, which creates more rewards, which attracts more fans.
The timing was also right. The Avalanche blockchain partnership (announced October 2025) gave FanHub an infrastructure layer for onchain verification of fan behaviours — a meaningful technical differentiator in a space where most competitors were still working with self-reported data.
Why now? The convergence of card-linking technology, blockchain verification, and the growing commercial pressure on sports organisations to demonstrate fan engagement ROI created a window where a well-positioned platform could establish the standard before the major sports data companies — Genius Sports, Stats Perform, Sportradar — moved into the loyalty space.
The Surfer: Team and Traction
CEO Gareth Lippiatt has 20 years in sports technology and holds a Cambridge University MBA. He has one prior exit. The domain expertise is directly relevant — this is not a tech founder who discovered sports; it is a sports technology operator who built a product for a problem he understood from the inside.
The traction at the time of the raise was the most compelling part of the thesis:
- 188,000+ users (growing to 205,000 by early 2026)
- 4.9 stars on the App Store — an extraordinary rating for any consumer app
- 35 rights holder partnerships, including the Scotland and Northern Ireland national teams
- 50 brand partners distributing rewards to fans
- 30,000+ onchain transactions per week in the first 60 days after the Avalanche integration
- $1 per wallet per month in verified revenue from partners including Fanatics
- $4 million raised to date — the entire business built on $4M in capital, which is exceptional capital efficiency
- Backed by Avalanche and Blockchange
The 4.9 App Store rating is the number I kept coming back to. Consumer apps with that rating are genuinely rare. It means the product is working for users in a way that most fan engagement platforms do not.
The Moat: Defensibility
FanHub's competitive position rests on three overlapping advantages that I understood well from my professional context.
Rights holder relationships. Signing national football associations — Scotland, Northern Ireland — is not a marketing achievement. It is a distribution achievement. National associations have direct relationships with every club in their pyramid, which means FanHub has a pathway to reach fans at every level of the game through a single partnership. These relationships take years to build and are not easily replicated.
Card-linking infrastructure. The Visa, Mastercard, and American Express approvals are genuine barriers to entry. The compliance and technical requirements for card-linked rewards are significant — most startups cannot clear them. FanHub has cleared them, which means any competitor would need to go through the same multi-year process.
The data flywheel. As the user base grows, the transaction data becomes more valuable. A platform with 200,000 verified, match-going fans and their spending behaviour is a fundamentally different commercial asset from a platform with 200,000 social media followers. The data moat compounds over time.
The moat scores lower than it might because FanHub is still a small company in a space where the major sports data companies have much larger balance sheets. If Genius Sports or Sportradar decided to build a competing loyalty product, they could move quickly. The defensibility is in the rights holder relationships and the card-linking infrastructure — both of which take time to replicate, but neither of which is impossible to replicate.
The Numbers: Valuation and Position Sizing
At approximately £12 million (~$15 million USD), the valuation was modest for a company with 188,000 users, a 4.9 App Store rating, national association partnerships, and card-linking infrastructure approved by all three major networks.
The comparable exits in the fan engagement space — Fanatics ($31B valuation), Socios ($1.5B), and the various sports data companies that have gone public — all validate the category. A company that can establish itself as the standard infrastructure layer for fan loyalty in European football has a credible path to a $100M+ valuation.
The £198 position size was not a framework decision — the framework did not yet exist. It was sized based on my conviction level and the modest raise target. In retrospect, this should have been a larger position. The combination of domain expertise (I understood the problem), product quality (4.9 App Store rating), and infrastructure moat (card-linking approvals) was one of the strongest investment signals I had seen in equity crowdfunding.
Why This Investment Was Personal
I work in professional football. I have spent years building commercial partnerships, fan engagement programmes, and revenue strategies for sports organisations. I have sat in rooms with brands asking for measurable ROI from sports sponsorship and watched clubs struggle to provide it.
FanHub was solving a problem I had experienced from the other side of the table. The card-linked rewards model — where a brand pays only when a fan actually spends money, not when they see an impression — is the kind of accountability that commercial partners have been asking for for years. The rights holder data layer is the kind of first-party fan intelligence that clubs desperately need but have never been able to build.
This is the investment where I felt most like an informed practitioner rather than a retail investor. That is both an advantage and a risk — domain expertise can create conviction that is not fully grounded in the financial analysis. I was aware of that tension at the time.
Risk Factors (As I Saw Them in October 2025)
1. Scale risk. FanHub was operating primarily in the UK football pyramid. Expanding to other sports, other countries, and other fan behaviours would require significant capital and partnership development.
2. Platform dependency. The Avalanche blockchain integration was a meaningful technical differentiator, but it also created a dependency on a third-party infrastructure provider. If Avalanche's ecosystem contracted, FanHub's technical moat would be weakened.
3. Rights holder concentration. The Scotland and Northern Ireland partnerships were the headline traction metrics. If those partnerships did not renew or expand, the growth narrative would be significantly weakened.
4. Monetisation maturity. At $1 per wallet per month, the revenue per user was still modest. The path to meaningful revenue required either significant user growth or a step-change in the revenue per user — neither of which was guaranteed.
5. Crowdfunding round size. £30,734 is a very small raise. It suggests either that the company was not yet ready for a larger institutional round, or that the Crowdcube campaign was primarily a community signal rather than a primary capital raise. Either interpretation is worth noting.
Go/No-Go Decision (October 2025)
GO — £198 committed via Crowdcube.
The domain expertise, the product quality signal (4.9 App Store rating), the card-linking infrastructure moat, and the rights holder partnerships were enough to clear my threshold. The valuation was modest. The position size was conservative given the small raise and the early stage of the company.
| Metric | At Investment (Oct 2025) | Current (Mar 2026) |
|---|---|---|
| Investment Amount | £198 (~$250.57) | — |
| Shares | 234 | 234 |
| Company Valuation | ~£12,000,000 | ~£12,000,000 |
| Users | 188,000+ | 205,000+ |
| App Store Rating | 4.9 | 4.9 |
| Status | Active | Active |
All financial data sourced from the FanHub Crowdcube campaign page, the FanHub website, and the Avalanche Network FanHub deep dive (October 2025). This article will be updated as new information becomes available.
