The wake-up call

When Justin Kaufenberg was a college student, his father — president of a Minnesota youth hockey organization — shared a frustration that would change everything: after 30+ years of volunteering, he had effectively lost his nights and weekends to treasury duties instead of coaching kids on the ice.

Kaufenberg experienced it firsthand while working for a youth hockey club, watching nearly $1 million leave the building in a little tin money box during registration. “That was kind of the wake-up call,” he said. What he and his co-founders discovered next shocked them: nearly $100 billion per year was being transacted in U.S. recreational sports alone.

Finding the real economic engine

The platform started with basic tools — websites, schedules, messaging — but clubs kept pulling them deeper into business administration: registrations, payments, paperwork, chasing bad checks. When a Minnesota hockey club asked them to enable online payments in a few days, they said yes, pulled all-nighters, and collected over $100,000 in registration fees in the first 60 minutes.

“Relatively simple math showed that our business model, the real thing that was going to be our economic engine, should actually be payments monetization — not software fees.”

The PayFac decision — and its consequences

SportsEngine became a payment facilitator, processing payments directly and setting up each sports organization on its own sub-account. It worked — and it meant hiring teams of developers to build payment processing from scratch, then expanding into insurance, lending, background checks, and apparel, all tuned to the seasonal cash flow of sports organizations.

A fintech-first business

Payment processing and embedded financial products became the supermajority of revenue: a customer paying a couple thousand dollars in SaaS fees became worth 5× more with payments, and 2× more with each of background screening, insurance, and lending. SportsEngine’s acquisition by NBC Sports validated the model.

What they’d do differently

“We basically wrote every line of code from scratch,” Kaufenberg reflected. “I don’t think you have to do that today. You can partner and use best-of-breed payment and embedded finance solutions while achieving the same upside as becoming a PayFac.” The lesson: focus on what makes your platform world-class in your vertical — partner for the fintech infrastructure.

Why JustiFi exists

After a decade and millions of dollars building fintech monetization the hard way, the team built what they wish they had: white-label fintech infrastructure with complete data ownership and toggle-on financial products — without writing every line of code from scratch.