Website: Fanboom

Interview With: Thomas Caporaso

What is your background and qualifications?

I am a seasoned online marketer with loyalty, continuity, subscription and membership experience.  My specialties include online member generation, product development, SEM/SEO, e-commerce, and new partner generation.  I have built programs for many leading brands like AIG, Victoria’s Secret, AAA, Citibank and AOL to help them either acquire, retain, or monetize their customer base.

I am also a passionate sports fan and follow many different teams and sports

What does your website do?

FanBoom puts the power of sports information in your hands. At FanBoom you can track all of your favorite teams, and writers (national and local), read the best of the sports blogs, and interact with robust community of fans of your favorite teams. Our goal is to build a portal of sports information that serve up Your Sports, Your Way, so you won’t have to go anywhere else.

How do you generate revenue? If through ads, what ad network do you use?

Our site currently generates revenue through ads.  We recently signed a deal to be in the Burst Media network.  We are also working with other solo sponsors.

How have your marketed your site?

We have created a blog network (blogs.FanBoom.com) that currently has six different sports (basketball, baseball, football, soccer, nascar, and hockey).  We also posts many of our articles to the large sports focused blog networks.  Many of these posts have generated significant organic traffic for us. Killerstartups.com also did a great review of our site.

Funding: Self funded, Angel Investment, or Venture Capital?

We recently received a very small round of Angel investment

Are you currently looking for funding?

We are currently looking to help fund our marketing plans.

What type(s) of technology do you use?

Ruby on Rails

What is your favorite feature on your website?

My Boom – a very easy point and click menu that allows you to pick your sports and team so you only get the news related to the teams that you want to read about each day.

If you ran Espn, Cbssports, Cnnsi, etc, besides your website what sports website would you acquire?

I would focus on the team specific blogs that are written by passionate fans.  One of our strategies is to build out our blog network by working with these team specific blogs.  We like the angle that a passionate fan writes from which ultimately drives comments and feedback from people who read it. 

That back and forth discussion is what sports is all about.

Any Bold Predictions for Sports and Technology in the future?

Yes – sports news and information will be completely managed by the consumer.  Sports fans don’t want to be spoon fed lots of irrelevant content, they want to have a deep and wide view of the teams that they follow.  We plan to be at the forefront of that conversion and completely hand over the keys to that content to the consumer who can do with it what they want.

Website: www.sportspyder.com

Interview With: Dallas Devries

How many founders does Sports Spyder have and what are there names?

Two brothers — Dallas DeVries and Derek DeVries

What are the founders’ backgrounds and qualifications?

I have a background in computer and systems engineering and Derek in fine arts. We ended up working together at a few startups together out of school. We’ve gained most of our technology experience working for these fast growing startup companies, and even went through a big acquisition on one of them.

What does your website do?

SportSpyder aggregates over 2000 news sources to a single location. Most of the sources show up on SportSpyder within an hour of when they are posted. People can use SportSpyder to comment, vote on, and subscribe to the articles we aggregate.

When did you launch?

February 2003. The site has gone through quite a few iterations since.

How have you built your community?

Sportspyder.com was built out of metsny.com. I orginally came up with the idea when I got sick of visiting a dozen sites to see if they were updated with Mets news. This was back when RSS was relatively new, and not widely adopted by mainstream news websites. Metsny.com was relatively successful, and we thought — why not do this for all the major sports teams? Our community now is largely NY sports fans but its starting to spread quickly to other areas.

What types of marketing do you utilize?

Mostly word of mouth. However we give webmasters the ability to easily include headlines into their website and many people have found us this way. SBnation also uses our RSS feeds in many of their blogs for displaying headlines for their specific team.

Do you have any revenue streams besides advertisement? Who is your ad provider?

We created an online store to for each team using Amazon Affiliates. We have several ad providers: Tribal Fusion, Value Click, Burst Media, Casale Media and Google Ads. We are testing driving a site called Pubmatic which is suppose to optimize all your different ad networks. They are in beta but in my opinion but could end up being a valuable resource.

Funding: Self funded, Angel Investment, or Venture Capital?

Self funded. Our startup costs are purposefully minimal, with the biggest cost being the effort we have spent developing the site in our spare time.

Are you looking for more funding?

We aren’t actively looking for funding but if the right opportunity presented itself we would consider it.

What is your favorite feature on your site?

Honestly getting my Mets news from dozens of sources within an hour or so of it being posted anywhere. This is why I started the site and why I think people keep coming back. Our search engine is pretty cool too, as you can search about 200,000 sports articles from the last six weeks.

What type(s) of technology do you use?

We started in PHP and migrated to the Ruby On Rails framework when it came out of beta. Derek has recently completed a book titled “Rails for PHP Developers,” which is in part due to experience working on the site.

Any bold predictions for sports and technology in the future?

Over the last eighteen months I have seen the sports blogging industry explode. When we initially started SportSpyder a lot of teams didn’t have much news outside of the major news networks. Now there are several great alternatives to the mainstream sites. Almost every mainstream site has added sports blogging of their own over the last year. I predict that decreasing revenues with print papers will result in us relying more on networks like SBnation and MVN for sports news. We hope that in the future that SportSpyder will increasingly become the gateway to for accessing and finding all the best sports content.

STN’s Take:

There is nothing better then a person with passion building a website for exactly for what they want. We can’t remember where we read it but a very successful venture capitalist said that he would only invest in a company where the founders are building something they would use on a day to day basis. This is great advice for any entrepreneur. Dallas has used his passion along with his brother to build the best sports aggregation site out there. There is really no reason anyone should not be using this site if they like to follow their team’s news on a daily.

We do have a few suggestions for them though. The first is that they need to do a better job of indexing their individual news pages. On the comment page they just have each individual article indexed with a number. We would like to see that page indexed with the title of the article. We think they will be very surprised by the new amount of search engine traffic they get when people search certain key words if they make that change. Odds are they will come up higher then all the dumb newspapers out there that haven’t hired a search engine optimization consultant. We would also like to see the comment page come up when one clicks on the page for news like the way Digg and Ballhype do it. This reminds people to come back and comment about the article and create a community feel.  Along with putting the comment system in front of the reader more, they need to give people a reason to comment by setting up a system that rewards the top commenters.

Website: www.ballhype.com

Interview with: Erin Gurney

How many founders does Ball Hype have and what are there names?

There are two of us – myself and Jason. And we’re married. To each other.

What are the founders’ backgrounds and qualifications?

I have an MBA in finance from Michigan State University and worked at internet startups and then in online marketing at Intuit for the past 5 years. Prior to that, I dabbled in journalism as an undergrad at Yale, and was an editor at a trade magazine following college.

Jason’s the engineer, although he also has an MBA from University of Washington. He’s been working at technology companies leading development teams for the past decade. On the side, he’s always kept busy with personal web apps. One of those, lowpost.net, was started as an NBA sports-blog tracking application two years ago, which became popular enough that he extended it to baseball with striketwo.net and football with faircatch.net. These sites helped build the relationships we needed with sports bloggers to get BallHype off to a running start.

What does your website do?

We help sports fans find the best stories and videos on the web, either automatically through the 2000 or so blogs that we track, or because users post them to BallHype.

When did you launch?

BallHype launched publicly on April 1, 2007. ShowHype, the entertainment version of BallHype, launched six months later on October 15, 2007.

Has it been easy or difficult to build your community?

Both. We tapped into the sports blogging community for the BallHype launch, as I mentioned. The reception was really great and since then the site has taken off. With ShowHype, we didn’t have hundreds of entertainment bloggers who were aware of us at launch, but we’re seeing really positive momentum as the word gets out.

What types of marketing have you done?

Other than hand out a few cards at a Warriors game, none. We have web site buttons and widgets that bloggers post on their sites, or writers will link to stories they find on BallHype, which helps send new readers our way.

Do you have any revenue streams besides advertisemnt? Who is your ad provider?

No, just ads. We are using Google AdSense and testing a couple other ad networks. Revenue growth hasn’t been as big of a priority for us as building the site and community, but we’ll focus more on monetization next year.

Funding: Self funded, Angel Investment, or Venture Capital?

Our daughter’s college fund.

Are you looking for more funding?

No – we’re earning some revenue from the site so we’re going to try to keep it “all in the family” as long as possible.

What is your favorite feature on your site?

The best part about BallHype for me is the content – on any given day there are dozens of really funny, interesting articles on the home page, often from blogs that I didn’t know of a year ago.

What Type(s) of Technology do you use?

The site is homegrown using django and yui frameworks.

Any bold predictions for sports and technology in the future?

Boundaries will continue to blur, as more bloggers will cross over into writing for mainstream sites and publications, and more traditional sportswriters begin blogging. We’ll also see an increasing amount of creative content enabled via technology—video, Flash, mashups, etc. And look for robots to dominate track and field, auto racing, and combat sports by 2020, although it will take them a bit longer to master team sports.

STN’s Take:

For a few months now I have pretty much visited Ball Hype on a daily basis.  You can always find the best stories of the day on there.  Not only is Ball Hype great for people looking for blog articles, its great for new bloggers as well. All you need is a couple of friends to vote on your article and you can get it to the front page. I am sure as they get more popular that will be harder.  I really like the fact that they track over 2000 blogs. Their list actually help me put together STN’s Top 25 Bloggers.

It amazes me that they really didn’t do any marketing and were able to grow the community as much as they have so far. It does make sense that since they already had relationships with other bloggers that it was easy to get the word out. Even if you have a great idea, it is extremely importanty to have relationships with people you are creating the product for.

Anyone else think Erin had a crazy bold prediction? Robots doing track and field, auto racing, and combat sports? I just can’t see that happening in my lifetime but I commend here for thinking out of the box.

If you haven’t visited Ball Hype, do it.

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.