Website: www.fanbunker.com
Interview With: Mark Griffith
How many founders does Fanbunker have and what are their names?
Fanbunker has two founders, myself and Seth Roseman.
What are the founders’ backgrounds and qualifications?
Seth and I worked together at EarthLink several years ago and each have considerable experience in Internet product and marketing. We are also both big sports fans, and our passion for following our teams uncoveredwhat we perceived as a potential market niche for Fanbunker.
What does your website do?
Simply put, Fanbunker pulls together the best online content neatly organized by sports team. We provide links to the best blogs, the local newspaper beat writers, and the best message boards. The need we fill is creating a portal that allows a fan of a particular team to quickly and easily get to the best online resources for that team.
When did you launch?
We soft launched in August 2007 with our beta, but are continually building out our content offerings. We are beginning our marketing efforts this month.
Has it been easy or difficult to build your community?
Its too early to really answer this question, as we are just beginning our marketing efforts now. This is a crowded space, and we will be depending a lot on viral marketing, so we anticipate building our community will be a challenge. However, we also believe our approach to focus on the reader, and providing them the best content, in an easily digestable manner, is
something that will catch on.
Do you have any revenue streams besides advertisement?
While we do have some limited advertising on the site, this is not our focus at the moment. Our goal is to provide strong value to our readers and the sports bloggers, and if we are successful at that, the revenue
streams will happen.
Funding: Self funded, Angel Investment, or Venture Capital?
Self-funded.
Are you currently looking for funding?
We are definitely open to it. We have several big ideas that can take user participation to a level not currently seen in the online sports arena today, but would probably need a cash infusion to pull it off.
What is your favorite feature on your site?
The real value we bring is a human search component to online sports content. We are constantly checking our list of sites, to make sure the bloggers are actively updating them, and seeking out new great sites. This is not Digg, where anything can be posted to the site by any reader. Our goal is to make sure the site is populated with the most relevant
information, and provides links to the most relevant sites.
What Type(s) of Technology do you use?
We use a combination of HTML, PHP and AJAX.
Any bold predictions for sports and technology in the future?
In a web 2.0 world where anyone can be a publisher, there has definitely been a shift in terms of perceived authority. Today, bloggers may be the first choice for some in terms of where they get their sports content from, as opposed to 20 years ago, when tradiional media companies filled that role. On the flip side, with so many publishers, how does a user find the handful of blogs that can meet the high standards of authority? We believe simple algorythms will be ill-equipped to make that determination,
and someone will need to fill that need to educate the average fan.
STN’s Take:
Fan Bunker is designed well and easy to use. By looking at the different team pages they do a great job of aggregating all the best sports sites and blogs. Like Mark said, this is a very crowded space and we think it will be an extremely tough place for them to succeed. We think their best chance to succeed will be by adding some type of community aspect to the site. This way they can garner more page views since people will be leaving their site to actually read the information. A comment system and a profile page where you can choose your own sites to collect news would be helpful. Also, if they could do the same thing for player news and give each individual player a page, I think a lot of people would find that very useful especially in fantasy football.
