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Practice makes perfect

Entrepreneur aims to level playing field with PracticeGigs platform

Colette Greenstein
Colette Greenstein has been a contributing arts & entertainment writer for the Banner since 2009. VIEW BIO
Practice makes perfect
Semi practicing tennis. (Photo: Matt Burke)

Born out of frustration and a desire to excel at tennis, Toni Oloko founded PracticeGigs, a “peer-to-peer learning marketplace” that enables tennis players to develop their skills by connecting, practicing, and playing with more advance tennis players.

Author: Matt Burke“I feel that we’re living in an age where information is everywhere. You can find what you’re looking for online, on YouTube, in a clinic but the real limitation is the quality of your practice, how often you’re able to repeat what you know. That’s really the area that we’re focused on.” — Toni Oloko

A nationally ranked tennis player by the time he was 15 (he began playing at the age of 12), Oloko knows first-hand that practicing with more senior-level athletes helped to improve his tennis game. “My family couldn’t afford the $100 private lessons and I realized that practicing was the real key to taking my game to the next level. I read the Malcolm Gladwell book, The 10,000 Hour Rule and I’m just trying to figure out how to practice more. I personally ended up paying people slightly better than me to practice with me and that was one of the initial inspirations behind PracticeGigs,” says Founder and CEO Toni Oloko to Banner Biz. “I ended up taking my game in tennis from the state level to the national level in one year. I got inside the 100 in the country. That was kind of the personal inspiration.”

A graduate of Boston Trinity Academy in Hyde Park, Oloko deferred attending The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania last year to develop the start-up. Last summer, PracticeGigs was invited to become one of five “cohorts” or start-ups in the first year of the Roxbury accelerator Smarter in the City. Located in the heart of Dudley Square, the business incubator provided the startups with in-kind support such as a workspace for six months, legal services from Boston College Law School, and a stipend.

The program also helped Oloko by providing mentorship, an opportunity to learn from other more experienced business leaders and laying a foundation for his company. “I’m a first-time entrepreneur and one of the biggest things that it can help you do and all these accelerators are doing it, giving you networks as well as giving you a framework of things to run your business in, that allow you to not waste time wondering, ‘oh, do I need to worry about this or what issues should come up.’ I think that gave me a good framework to begin to build the company through, as well as networks.”

Described as a “peer-to-peer platform,” PracticeGigs offers a new way to become better at tennis and hopefully at other sports in the future. The platform makes it free to find people to practice with and the peer-to-peer learning aspect of it is that you’re playing with someone better than you, explains Oloko. “You can pay them a little bit of money for a practice session. In tennis the practice sessions on our platform would be $15 to $20 bucks while a private lesson would be about $100. You’re really learning from someone at your level. You’re learning from someone just a notch above you.”

Through his own first-hand experience, Oloko believes one can learn just by playing with other people and by practicing more. “I feel that we’re living in an age where information is everywhere. You can find what you’re looking for online, on YouTube, in a clinic but the real limitation is the quality of your practice, how often you’re able to repeat what you know. That’s really the area that we’re focused on.”

Author: Matt BurkeDan practices his tennis skills.

Oloko and his employees are also fine-tuning the process of being able to guarantee that someone will be there to play with whoever schedules a practice session. The way that PracticeGigs is able to do that according to Oloko is by one, pulling from such a large network of people on their platform and secondly, is that they also have a little bit of an algorithmic IP on that side. “We’re able to find people and send messages to the right people allowing us to automate the process a little easier,” explains the Founder/CEO. Enter technical co-founder and Harvard undergrad Matt Neary who joined the company in 2014 and built the iOS application for PracticeGigs. His “sweat equity” as Oloko describes it, “made my idea and everyone else’s idea come alive.”

With PracticeGigs taking off, it seems Oloko may not be attending The Wharton School anytime soon. He’s been able to raise seed funding through networks that he’s personally made, through angel investors and different people around the Boston start-up ecosystem.

In the next two to three years his goal for the company is to offer eight to ten other activities outside of tennis such as golf, soccer, videogames and chess, as well as expanding to other cities. He’s considering Florida, New York, and San Francisco because each of those markets have an entrepreneurial climate. A comparable ecosystem is already set up in those areas, plus Florida makes it easy for warm weather sports, envisions Oloko.

To learn more about PracticeGigs or to improve your tennis game, visit www.practicegigs.com.