Inside the Dorm-Room Side Hustle Fueling the $1.6 Billion NIL Gold Rush | Income Tips & Side Hustles

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Key Takeaways

Opendorse simplifies NIL offers, supporting 100,000+ athletes and practically $1B in transactions.
The platform ensures compliance with NCAA, state, {and professional} athlete rules across all offers.

Blake Lawrence launched Opendorse — now the main NIL market — from his Nebraska dorm room with cofounder Adi Kunalic, practically a decade before most people even knew what “NIL” meant.

Today, the platform helps more than 100,000 athletes and has facilitated close to a billion {dollars} in title, picture, and likeness transactions — a scale as soon as unimaginable.

“In North America, only about 5,000 pro athletes earn money through endorsements,” Lawrence tells Entrepreneur. This contains the whole lot from social media promotions to commercials and billboards.

“Opendorse stepped in to give those athletes one platform to manage everything: who’s paying them, what they’re getting paid for, their deliverables, contracts, tax documents and compliance.”

Opendorse started in 2012 as a tool Lawrence constructed to help his former Nebraska soccer teammate, Prince Amukamara, handle endorsements after he reached the NFL. Lawrence and cofounder Adi Kunalic created an app to automate the course of and, basically, “help him get paid to tweet.”

It didn’t take long for actuality to set in.

“When we onboarded Prince, I immediately got a call from his agent asking what we were doing,” Lawrence says. “I told him we were getting Prince paid to tweet, and he shut it down fast: ‘You can’t do that — that’s my client.’”

So Lawrence added an agent workflow. Then funds hit Amukamara’s account, and his financial supervisor called next, demanding documentation. After that, the NFLPA reached out. One by one, every stakeholder had a say.

At the time, it was exhausting. Looking back, Lawrence sees it otherwise.

“We were getting our asses kicked left and right by rules and policy changes early on,” he says. “We had to constantly tweak and adjust just to survive. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy — but I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”

Related: “You Have to Grow Up Fast”: How This College Athlete Became a CEO Before Turning 18

Half a million athletes. One very sophisticated market.

When NIL entered college sports activities in 2021, Opendorse shortly shifted its focus to youthful, less skilled athletes who needed more help — and represented a far bigger market. There are roughly 500,000 college athletes, making the space 10 occasions larger than the professional market.

“When you add college athletes, the scale changes dramatically,” Lawrence says. “But that size also brings added complexity.”

The platform features the same for college and professional athletes, however the key distinction is compliance. NCAA athletes face strict guidelines round what they will and might’t endorse — no tobacco, alcohol or betting manufacturers, for instance. And every deal must be disclosed and accepted. These rules are enforced at each the state and national ranges by way of NCAA insurance policies overseen by the College Sports Commission.

That is way from the only complexity concerned with this multi-level market, however.

Serial entrepreneur and self-described ‘industrial athlete’ Steve Denton joined Opendorse a few years in to help scale the business. He had no sports activities background past being a fan. Still, having lived by way of the early web period as a businessman, he instantly noticed parallels between that second and the rise of NIL in college sports activities.

“From a monetization standpoint, the internet did around $400 million in ad sales in its third year,” Denton says. “NIL? $800 million. I’m not saying it’s the same thing, I’m just saying it’s off to a great start.”

When Denton met the cofounders, he noticed a profitable team with a good business and a lot of potential that just needed some help attending to the next level.

“I’m terrible at zero to $5 million,” Denton laughs. “But if you need to go from $5 million to $100, that’s where I’m comfortable.”

The largest factor that stood out to Denton was the ridiculous TAM (complete addressable market).

“I saw a platform that was moving hundreds of millions of dollars of payments, and was keeping 175,000 kids compliant,” he remarks. “I don’t know the last time you tried to get a hold of an 18-year-old for negotiations, but this certainly makes it a lot easier.”

Related: The Cavinder Twins and Raising Cane’s Owner & Founder Reveal the Secret Sauce of Success

A struggle on two fronts

Opendorse operates on two fronts: the model facet and the athlete facet.

On the model facet, the first challenge helps corporations determine out which athletes to work with. Denton calls Opendorse’s matching technology a “fish finder” — it surfaces the proper athletes based on a model’s viewers, targets, funds, and security tips.

Once a model decides to maneuver ahead, Opendorse handles the whole lot: sending gives, delivering contracts, outlining deliverables, managing taxes, securing approvals, guaranteeing the athlete completes the work and dealing with all NCAA and school reporting.

Since college athletes are balancing courses, practices, and games, they’re not full-time creators. Opendorse’s technology makes the entire course of simple and manageable for them.

On the athlete facet, Lawrence and his team concentrate on getting athletes onto the platform — a course of that often entails on-campus visits and hands-on onboarding. These periods stroll athletes by way of downloading the app, setting up their profiles and studying how to current themselves professionally.

Lawrence compares it to building a résumé: why ought to a model select you out of a whole lot of athletes in your campus? Schools play a position, too, overseeing offers to make sure compliance.

Plus, it’s a large boon to collaborating schools.

“If you’re the first school in your conference to partner with Opendorse, you gain a real recruiting edge — you can tell prospects you’re the only program in the market with a top-tier NIL marketplace,” Lawrence says. “Schools need a partner like Opendorse to give athletes a simple, compliant way to access NIL deals, and that’s how we build the supply side of the platform.”

Related: He’s Helping College Athletes Navigate a Multi-Billion-Dollar Industry — But His Top Money Tip Can Help Anybody Grow Substantial Wealth

Moguls and machetes

Lawrence and Denton complement each other properly — one coming from the athlete world, the other from entrepreneurship.

“Blake has forgotten more about NIL than I could ever know,” Denton says. “I didn’t appreciate the complexity of it when I first joined.”

Lawrence feels the same method, calling Denton a mentor.

“As an entrepreneur, even with a cofounder, it’s like you’re in the jungle with a machete,” he says. “You’re hacking away, and at least someone’s next to you, but they don’t know where you’re going either.”

Denton, he says, is the seasoned information — serving to navigate the dense forest of compliance and regulation.

“I can’t say enough about what it means to have somebody who’s done it before and can help us take those steps,” he provides.

By the end of the decade, Opendorse goals to maneuver $10 billion to college athletes. But daily, the team isn’t fixated on the end line — they’re centered on execution.

“We want to do really great work every day,” Denton says. “We have to, because the college economy has changed so much in just the last year. You’ve got the House settlement, salary caps, a third-party entity defining fair market value, and the people who made the rules now trying to rewrite them. Congress is being lobbied, payment companies want in — the entire ecosystem is shifting at once.”

Because of this, resilience is essential.

“It’s like skiing moguls,” Denton provides. “You need a strong core and flexible knees. And we’re definitely hitting some moguls right now.”

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