How can a combat sports athlete build a brand? Millions.co founder Matt Whitteker believes he can help

While success in combat sports relies heavily on earning victories, building a brand is becoming an increasingly important aspect of the job.

Former UFC two-division champion Conor McGregor has become a global icon during his eight-year run in the UFC, and while his fighting skills earned him those two belts, it was provocative use of social media that helped secure the biggest paycheck of his career with his 2017 foray into boxing against all-time great Floyd Mayweather.

Currently, some of the most in-demand athletes in combat sports are brothers Logan Paul and Jake Paul, who built a following on YouTube that has fueled unbelievable demand for their entry into high-profile boxing matchups, as well.

But building a brand, complete with social media interactions and merchandising opportunities and more, isn’t an easy process. Nevertheless, Millions.co founder Matt Whitteker believes he’s got a solution with his company, which he bills as “the leading social commerce and video platform connecting the sports world.”

“At its core, Millions is a social commerce platform,” Whitteker told MMA Junkie. “So it allows any athlete to spin up their own brand literally in minutes and be selling and transacting merchandise – so hats, caps, hoodies. But we didn’t really want to stop there. We were solving a problem for our friends when we started the company that they were literally printing stuff off at their their local print shop and then going to the post office and trying to mail it out to their fans. And we’re like, ‘OK, we’ve got to solve that.’ So we created the platform originally for merchandizing and E-commerce, but then we figured, why stop there? Let’s add on other products that fans want to engage with their athletes by using.

“We decided to to create an ‘ask me anything’ platform, so you can ask your favorite athletes anything. They’ll record a video and send it back to you so you have a personalized video from your favorite athletes. And then we also built what we’re calling a ‘watch stream,’ but it’s basically any athlete can spin up their own pay-per-view for any livestream event, so athletes are doing it mostly to just watch parties right now. … So three products: Start your own brand, start your own merchandise and E-commerce with no inventory, video ‘ask me anything’ and then ‘watch stream’ your own pay-per-views.”

While Whitteker believes Millions.co could eventually expand across all professional sports – not to mention collegiate athletics now that the NCAA has revised its name, image and likeness policy – he says combat sports was the perfect place to launch because of his own personal history.

“Listen, I’m Canadian – I grew up playing hockey my entire life, but I started boxing when I was about 16 or 17,” Whitteker said. “Opened a boxing gym with my younger brother, who is one of the co-founders, so we’re diehard boxing fans. The gym that we opened – this will age me a little bit, but like 15 years ago, it’s still open, so we love boxing. We love MMA. We’ve trained kind of at the national level, done training camps, so we just naturally started there.

“The four athletes that gave us the idea, they were all professional boxers and MMA fighters that we knew from the boxing gym that we owned. So that’s why we started, because we were just huge fans, and it’s kind of great to scratch your own itch. Like, we wanted to buy all this merchandise, so it was just a great confluence of events.”

Millions.co had already recruited the likes of UFC contenders Bryce Mitchell and Jamahall Hill, as well as Bellator’s Hannah Guy and Jaleel Willis, and MMA pioneer Renato Sobral – better known as “Babalu” – among others and says early engagement in the platform has been impressive. He also said he’s heard of a few creative ways for fans to engage with the athletes, including those hoping to place a wager on a fight reaching out to get expert advice.

“Do an AMA video, and it’s going to blow your mind,” Whitteker said. “If you follow and respect one of these athletes that you’ve seen up there, getting a huge knockout or entering the cage, and then in your inbox, it says your video is ready, and here it is – it’s that athlete literally explaining how they did that submission or how they got that knockout or how that opponent got picked, like literally anything. Or, you know, if you want to make a bet and win some cash, you might want to get some expert consulting. So check it out. Check out the platform. It’s a lot of fun.”

To see the full interview with Whitteker, check out the video above.