Matt Hall on Shark Tank
Happy Wednesday,
Matt Hall started a tutoring company to fund his real ambition: using 3D printing and digital manufacturing to make custom-fit mouth guards accessible and affordable to everyday athletes. Today, TrueFit Customs provides mouth guards to hundreds of professional athletes across the NFL and NHL, has the Athletic Trainers Associations of both leagues invested directly in his company, and he’s even turned down Nike.
He also appeared on Shark Tank and walked away with a $750,000 deal at a $7.5 million valuation.
This week Jake and I sat down with Matt to walk through how he built all of it.
Full disclosure: TrueFit is a client of Uncle Charlie, which makes this a particularly fun episode for Jake and me.
The best mouth guard is the one that's worn. You can make it four millimeters thick, but if only 50% of players actually wear it, what's it helping?
How They Got Here
Pre-TrueFit: Started A+ Tutors, a tutoring company for athletes and high school students; grew it to the point where he had other tutors working under him. Called it "a pimping gig" because he couldn't control the product once he wasn't the one teaching. Decided he needed to build something with a physical product instead
2019: At 25 years old, researched emerging technologies and landed on digital manufacturing (specifically 3D printing) because custom fit is already built into the cost at any volume
Early days: Manufactured mouth guards out of a room the size of his current office, doing sales in the morning and driving 30 minutes to the lab in the afternoon. Built their own front-end and back-end software from scratch because nothing off the shelf was compatible with a custom-fit product
The first big bet: Put $30,000 into digital advertising and got $60,000 back. Decided to keep going
The unlock: Showed up to the NHL Athletic Training Society conference expecting competition but found none. Instead, he walked away with four NHL teams on the first visit
Shark Tank: Applied on a whim, went through eight months of silence, then a year-long process of being whittled from 1,000 applicants to 100. Walked in alone, delivered his 90-second pitch in front of all five Sharks (Mark Cuban had just flown in on a red-eye after losing the national championship game) and closed a deal with Rashaun Williams
Today: Provides custom mouth guards to hundreds of athletes across the NFL and NHL, has the Athletic Trainers Associations of both leagues as investors, and is working toward getting the price of a custom-fit guard down to the cost of a stock one
The Big Idea: The Loophole
When Nike pays $20 million to be Alabama's exclusive equipment sponsor, the athletic director has to buy everything Nike provides. But if Nike doesn't make a product (say, a custom-fit sports mouth guard), the players can go off-brand, and there's nothing Nike can do about it.
That's the loophole, and Matt has been quietly sprinting through it.
Mouth guards live in a gray area that equipment managers don't own. They're provided by athletic trainers (the medical side of the house), which puts them outside the scope of most major equipment licensing deals. The big companies that could theoretically compete have either ignored the market because it's too small, charged $300 to $400 for a custom guard that nobody buys, or made stock mouth guards that professional athletes refuse to wear.
Matt walked into that vacuum with a 1990 peer-reviewed paper from a Japanese dentist, a 3D printer, and $15,000 cash left on hand. He went to the NHL Athletic Training Society conference expecting competition and found none. He did the same with the NFL. Both times, he got in the door and built relationships that have since become investments; the first time in history that an athletic trainers association has invested directly into a company.
Jake's comparison after the conversation is the right one: it's the Fanatics model. Fanatics went league by league, got investments from each one, and made it economically irrational for any team to use anyone else. TrueFit has done the same thing in a completely different vertical, and the moat gets wider every time another athletic trainer comes on board.
Nike eventually noticed; they even approached TrueFit about putting Nike logos on their guards. Matt didn't say no; he just set a number high enough to make sure it’d be worth his while if they ever agreed.
5 Tactical Takeaways
1. Start with the technology, then find the product.
Matt didn't set out to make mouth guards. He set out to use digital manufacturing to make custom fit more widely available and affordable, and then figured out which product to sell. That order matters. When you start with the technology, you're not locked into one market. TrueFit makes sports mouth guards today, but the question of what comes next is a lot more interesting.
2. Athletic trainers are the most underrated distribution channel in professional sports.
Equipment managers handle the gloves, the cleats, the pads (rights which are all locked up by league-level licensing deals). Meanwhile, athletic trainers handle the medical side. Meaning the only product athletic trainers provide that actually ends up on the field is a mouth guard. Matt found this door unlocked, walked through it, and then built software specifically for athletic trainers so that when players move teams, all their scans move with them. That stickiness is the product.
3. Go to the place nobody else bothers to show up.
Matt showed up to the NHL Athletic Training Society conference with $15,000 left in cash and $120,000 in credit card debt, expecting to find a room full of sports mouth guard companies. There were zero. He walked away with four NHL teams. The same thing happened with the NFL. The absence of competition at a conference is a better signal than any market research report.
4. On Shark Tank, your opening valuation is a negotiating position, not a number.
Matt came in asking for a $15 million valuation, but he knew they'd cut him in half (in reality, he actually only wanted a $7.5 million valuation). He survived Kevin O'Leary telling him how ridiculous his valuation was (which he'd anticipated) and closed at exactly the number he wanted. The lesson: in a negotiation where the other side always anchors down, anchor up.
5. The best mouth guard is the one that's worn.
This sounds obvious, but it took a 1990 Japanese dentist's peer-reviewed paper to prove it. The entire TrueFit design philosophy - thin guards, open backs, custom fit - comes from one article that nobody else in the industry had apparently read. Matt's guards are as thin as 2 mm; they protect against 95% of incidents, and players forget they're wearing them. Fit > thickness every time.
Why It Matters
There are 40 million over-the-counter sports mouth guards sold every year in the US. Only 2.5 million of them are custom fit. That gap (37.5 million mouth guards worn by people who deserve something better) is the entire TrueFit business plan.
To be honest, I didn't fully appreciate how complicated this business was until this conversation. Jake said it well afterward: getting a custom-fit mouth guard from point A to point B is one of the most logistically complex businesses he's ever seen.
30% of TrueFit's operating costs go to software development; they're building end-to-end digital manufacturing automation using AI; they’re partnering with dental service organizations so people can walk in, get scanned, and have a guard shipped directly to them. All for a product that most people buy at the last minute from Dick's on the way to practice.
That's the thing about niching down this aggressively: some markets look small until you actually dig into them. Yet sometimes, just wanting to improve upon a centuries-old problem is enough.
📩 And don’t forget: Bottom of the Ninth is back this Friday with the top three stories in sports and business from the week.
See you then,
Tyler & Jake