NJM Tennis – CYstarters
CYstarters is a highly selective 11-week summer accelerator for student entrepreneurs hosted by Iowa State University’s Pappajohn Center for Entrepreneurship. The program provides funding, mentorship, and hands-on workshops to help participants validate, launch, or grow a startup.
At CYstarters, I developed NJM Tennis, a tennis accessory startup focused on fun, trendy, and personality-driven racket dampeners for young adults. Over the 11-week program, I built the brand from the ground up by validating the concept, designing the product, creating content, and developing the e-commerce strategy.
Hi, I’m Nic Mackaman.
Entrepreneur | Social Media Strategist | Content Creator
Social Media Ventures
Shredder Vs
Notable Achievements
1 Million+ Followers on TikTok (<1 year)
100k+ Followers on Instagram
1 Billion+ Total Views
100 Million+ Viewed Video
Featured in The Wall Street Journal
Shredder Vs is a social media brand I launched in January 2022 after recognizing a unique opportunity in the market for content that is both visually satisfying and engaging. By developing a video formula centered around shredding interesting, satisfying, and unexpected items with an industrial shredder, I created content that captured curiosity and delivered simple yet captivating entertainment. This project combined creativity, attention to detail, and a strong understanding of audience interests to stand out in the social media landscape.
NJM Tennis
Notable Achievements
13 Million+ Total Views
10k+ Total Followers
300k+ Likes
NJM Tennis (formerly “Nic Mackaman”) is a tennis-focused social media channel that combines innovative content creation with a high-quality, first-person video approach using a 360-degree camera, likely the first of its kind in short-form tennis social media. To elevate the content, I used AI-assisted coding to develop a custom ball tracking program that creates a dynamic ball trail effect, making the footage look almost like a video game. This enhances visual clarity and audience engagement. By leveraging trend analysis, audience strategies, and editing tools like Adobe Premiere, I’ve built a unique channel that brings a fresh perspective to tennis on social media.
AI - Powered Projects
Tennis Ball Tracker
This Tennis Ball Tracker was built entirely using AI-generated code. The program uses YOLO (You Only Look Once), a state-of-the-art object detection model, to track a tennis ball in real time. Through an interactive GUI, users can customize visualization settings such as trail length, opacity, and color for a personalized experience. To power the tracker, I first trained my own YOLO model using a dataset of tennis ball images. I later collaborated with a freelancer to develop a more optimized version, ensuring greater accuracy and efficiency. The program seamlessly integrates OpenCV, PyQt, NumPy, and PyTorch for image processing, UI design, and AI model inference, creating a smooth and responsive tracking system.