MSD was spawned out of necessity—or more accurately, to save a future parent from having to track their kids’ stats in Excel. This story starts ten years ago. Jose, the co-founder of MSD, loves soccer, and fortunately for him, his oldest son did as well. You could tell he was destined for greatness when he was scoring goals and doing airplane celebrations at age five. His spirit and excitement for the game were undeniable.

Since Jose had played soccer growing up and is also a computer scientist, tracking stats came naturally to him. As his son started out in his career, he was on many teams—some that used apps to track games, and some that did not. And when he would switch teams, or get called up to a more advanced league, he would be downloading another app. What he found was that these apps were not catered to the individual athlete. They were meant for coaches to give out schedules, set up practices, and in later years, live stream games.

Jose searched for an easy-to-use tool that would allow him to keep track of game stats and then be able to slice and dice them. But that tool did not exist. So he did what many engineers would do: he started using Excel. This at least allowed him to keep clean stats for his son’s performance. And sure enough, when junior MLS soccer came knocking, they wanted to see detailed stats—but only for leagues that were of a certain difficulty level.

While he was tracking stats and his son was scoring goals, Jose continued to flesh out his idea for what would make a great sports tracking app. It needed to have a simple interface for entering game stats and provide charts and reporting. He also wanted to easily add image and video highlights. Lastly, he wanted diary entries to add freeform information like practice schedules, dietary performance, and workout information.

Around five years ago, he built out a data model for this—and it was big! He then continued on with life, but when he again had to provide specific stats to MLS, and was pivoting and slicing data in Excel, he got the urge to build again. He went back to the drawing board and, in version two, greatly simplified the model, distilling it down to the core of what the system really was.

This coincidentally coincided with him reaching out to Bob. They have worked together on and off for 25 years, having done multiple startups together and built many large-scale systems. Jose mentioned his son playing and that he had a database model ready to go. Bob has always been a sports fan and still remembered the day, ten years ago, when Jose’s son scored that goal and ran across the field doing the airplane celebration. He told Jose that day that the kid was going to go pro. He loved the app idea, had some spare time, and said, “OK, let’s do it!”

They got to work and started building out the features. The idea of sharing with friends and family was always there, but working together, they came up with the trophy and scoring system. This, in turn, led them to Stats Man—the AI assistant that quickly helps spot anomalies in your stats. Things like entering more goals than shots taken, or prompting you to enter more detailed breakdowns about the kinds of goals you scored.

Lastly, while this was originally being built for soccer, it quickly became apparent that it could lend itself to many other sports as well. A year later, they are ready to share their creation with you. Hearing stories about how easy and helpful the product is to use—and how great it looks—continues to inspire them. They have a ton of new features and sports they are adding to the platform and are very excited to work with everyone on this.