Why I’m Betting on Trenton Sandler (And You Should Pay Attention)

YouTube recommended Trenton Sandler to me. College runner at LSU, making videos about being a D1 athlete.

Most “day in the life” athlete content is the same. Wake up, eat oatmeal, go to practice, show the ice bath, repeat. Trenton’s stuff is different. You feel like you’re in the race. When he wins, you smile. When he fails, something hits you in the chest. That’s rare.

I messaged him. We got on a Zoom call — me in front of my whiteboard, him sitting at a coffee shop in Baton Rouge with cars going by. I always start these calls the same way: what did you learn about me before we talked?

He’d done some research when I first reached out. Knew about the knowledge panels, knew I focused on SEO and credibility. He didn’t try to impress me with a Wikipedia summary of my career. And before I could mention my elephant metaphor — you know, are you looking at the trunk, the feet, or the ears — he used the same metaphor on me.

Two Runners, Two Decades Apart

I was a D1 athlete. Ran the mile, got to 4:07. Trenton runs about 5 seconds faster. He’s chasing sub-4, has two more years of eligibility plus a fifth year. The way he trains tells me he’s going to get there.

When I was his age, I was obsessed with Nike. Cut the swooshes off my teammates’ shoes. Studied the Bloomberg terminals tracking Nike stock. Flew to the Louvre in Paris to stand next to the Winged Goddess of Victory — Nike herself — and take a picture. Had the resume, the race results, trophies from 5Ks and 10Ks. Couldn’t get an interview. Other candidates with half the credentials got hired because their daddy knew somebody.

Years later, Nike paid us millions for analytics through our agency. I brought friends to Nike headquarters, got the tours, met the people, got free shoes. The path that looked like rejection turned out to be the better path.

I told Trenton Sandler that story because the same pattern is happening with him. He’s not trying to climb somebody else’s ladder. He’s building his own thing.

Trenton Sandler Is Building a Mental Performance App

Trenton is developing an app for the psychology behind athletic performance. He’s working with Grant Chaisson, a sports psychologist in New Orleans who’s read every psychology book on the shelf — literally — and uploaded all his notes into Claude as a second brain.

Trenton Sandler met Grant in person, had lunch with him, and within days restructured the business model. Switched from freemium to a paywall. The paywall qualifies leads for Grant’s one-on-one coaching. Trenton takes subscription revenue. Grant gets a pipeline of 10,000 qualified leads who already demonstrated they’ll pay for mental performance content. Grant doesn’t pay Trenton a dime directly. Both sides win.

That’s affiliate marketing at a level most agency owners don’t understand. He figured it out himself.

He’s also working with a professor at Army who trains cadets in mindfulness — her research shows measurable improvements in accuracy and endurance. He cold-emailed her. He cold-emailed multiple professors of psychology. Reads their books before meetings so he shows up prepared.

I told him the obvious thing: he and Grant should co-author a book. We’ve done this before. We have the best-selling book on Amazon for social media — outsold Gary Vaynerchuk. TikTok paid us to write about their ad platform because we’re the number one people in Facebook ads and they copied the system. I interviewed 10 people who had real success on TikTok, turned those conversations into chapters, and co-authored it.

Same approach applies. Trenton’s already doing long-form YouTube. Those become chapters. Grant’s coaching principles get woven in. The credibility is there because it’s based on real stories and real results.

Trenton Sandler the Storyteller

When I asked what drives him, he didn’t say money or fame. He said he wants to make people feel things. Knew it since his first videography class in high school. He’d rather give you genuine adrenaline watching a race — actual chills — than be the guy handing out advice.

I’ve worked with the Golden State Warriors for five and a half years running their digital marketing. Brought young people into the tunnel where Steph Curry warms up before games. I tell them: do not pull out your phone. He’s about to go into the game. If you do that, they’ll kick us out. We come in with media passes, we know the owners. Be cool.

Trenton got stopped about a hundred times after racing in Boston. At least ten of those were during warmup — people wanting pictures while he’s shaking out two miles before a race. He stopped his watch and posed because he didn’t want to be rude, but he understood the cost. When I told him the Steph Curry story, he said he wished more people understood that.

What We’re Building With Trenton Sandler

We built him a proper website. TrentonSandler.com. The domain was sitting on Namecheap pointing nowhere. During our Zoom call we set up the nameservers together — spun up a full WordPress instance on AWS, gave him admin access to everything. His site, his domain, his content. We’re not an agency that holds your stuff hostage.

Before the call, I’d already built a 22-page analysis of his content. Our system inventoried his videos, had AI watch every one of them, figured out his key topics, identified things he might not even know about himself. His YouTube is strong. His website and SEO are weak — no knowledge panel, no hub connecting all his content. When the hub of the wheel is weak, it doesn’t matter how good the spokes are.

We wrote the schema markup for his site. The full technical case study of how an AI agent built Trenton’s entire personal brand website from a blank WordPress install — including schema, content, and design — is documented separately. Articles repurposing his YouTube videos, linked together by category and topic and the products he wants to promote. When the app launches, the entire constellation of his content can drive traffic to it. This is the entity-based SEO approach we’ve documented extensively.

I connected him with Dylan Haugen — another young adult we work with. Dylan’s a pro dunker, 5’11” white guy doing things NBA players can’t do, just turned 18, building his own agency and podcast. Trenton immediately offered to connect Dylan with his buddy Trace Young, an ex-Clemson basketball player who scaled his Instagram to 400K in a year and runs an agency in New York. That’s a connector’s instinct.

I told him about our sock company. Moms in Portland make custom socks with your face on them. Handwritten notes in bubbly mom handwriting on a Post-it. Not AI, not robots. Real people. We’ve sent thousands of pairs. One of the most effective relationship-building strategies I’ve ever used. I’m sending Trenton Sandler a pair. He’s sending me autographed training shoes.

Chris Rummel

I had a best friend named Chris Rummel. We co-founded a software company. Ran marathons together. Built a tool that took your runs, heart rate, and nutrition data and adjusted your training plan automatically — before any AI stuff existed. We studied actual physiology journals, not Runner’s World. Heart rate zones, anaerobic thresholds, neuromuscular efficiency, how diet fits into periodization. Professional athletes endorsed it. Hal Higdon and the Chicago Marathon community agreed to use it.

Chris was a flight instructor at Embry-Riddle. He was getting married and needed money for the wedding. I gave him $20,000. He was too proud to take it as a gift, so he insisted on selling me his Volkswagen GTI. I didn’t want the car. But he wouldn’t let it go any other way.

The car sat in my driveway while he rode his motorcycle. One day someone swerved into his lane. He flew off the bike, hit a sign, and died.

I spent a year doing nothing. Netflix. Got fat. Felt like his death was on me because he was on that motorcycle instead of in the car sitting in my driveway.

When I tried to honor him by releasing the software we’d built, I couldn’t get into the server. Chris was the engineer. All the code was locked behind his credentials. Lost everything.

When I watch Trenton Sandler building something with Grant — combining athletic credibility with sports psychology, creating an app, writing a book, documenting it all in public — I see what Chris and I had. Except Trenton’s doing it smarter. Building in public. Not keeping the code locked in one person’s head. Creating partnerships where both sides win without depending entirely on each other.

Building in Public

We build in public at BlitzMetrics. We charge big companies real money for the systems and research, and that funds our ability to help young entrepreneurs like Trenton. Robin Hood model. When we document what we’re doing — building the website, analyzing the content, researching partners — that’s the signal that we actually do what we say we do.

At the end of our call, Trenton said something that stuck with me: it’s just good humans being good humans.

That’s the whole thing. No gatekeeping. No secrets. Real people doing real work and sharing it so others can follow.

I’m betting on Trenton Sandler. Not because of his follower count or his mile time. Because he thinks like a builder, tells stories like an artist, and treats people like a human being.

Pay attention.

See how we built Trenton’s entire website from scratch using an AI agent: How an AI Agent Built a Complete Personal Brand Website From a Blank WordPress Install