Founded in 2015 by a trio of ex-professional hockey players, Shnarped is a social media platform dedicated for capturing and sharing sports moments. With many extensive video-editing tools and a community filled with sports fans, Shnarped offers a place where fans of every sport can gather and simply enjoy amazing features of human athleticism.
“We set out to create a sports platform that was inspiring, youth-friendly, and connected players and fans in a meaningful way” explained Dustin Sproat, Co-founder and CEO at Shnarped. “We used news and stats as a way to initiate easy communications with athletes, and decided to start in hockey before expanding the model across other sports”.
Shnarped first came into the sports scene through Hockey Players for Kids, a charity organized at connecting pro-athletes with their fans. Hockey Players for Kids soon led to Shnarped Hockey, which is considered the first prototype-beta of Shnarped, and ran as a social media platform. Shnarped Hockey during its early stages was a great success. It garnered over 10,000 users in the Canadian region and it was one of the most convenient methods of communication between fans and professional hockey players.
“While in many respects we were quite successful in that endeavour (more hockey fans received messages from NHL players on Shnarped than Twitter last year), it has always been a struggle for us to get the right players and fans on board at the same time” remarked Sproat. “In order to scale our business into something sustainable (and ultimately world-class), we confronted the fact that we would need to revisit the concept. One of the first things we did was reach out to youth that play organized sports to see what things they’d love to see. They are the trendsetters in social media, and they inspired this new vision and set the course for an exciting new journey towards awesome video features like slow motion.”
Shnarped Hockey was based on the premise of focus groups: kids between the ages of 13-22 were asked to explain their thinking and love for social media apps and how Shnarped Hockey could improve. The Shnarped team not only realized what could make their app stand out, but also what teenagers nowadays were looking for in social media platforms.
Kids responses to favorite Social media interactions
- Easily apply awesome video effects to sports videos like slow motion, a spotlight tool, moving stickers/emoji’s, and music.
- Browse and ‘like’ fun content organized by your favourite sports
- Edit photos with tools like add text, filters, draw, and add stickers.
- Tag your friends in Shnarps (a shnarp is a post), and easily share them across all your social media accounts
- Create collections of Shnarps by adding to threads and swipe through them easily with smooth and intuitive hand gestures
Eventually, the Shnarped team decided Hockey did not offer mobility and range of audience that they desired. Shnarped Hockey became a sub-group of Shnarped, and the company shifted their focus from just hockey to sports all over the world. According to Sproat, the decision to transition from Shnarped Hockey, into just Shnarped was a very difficult one.
“We could have tried to merge the platforms, which would have allowed us to keep and re-engage many of the users of Shnarped Hockey onto this new platform” expressed Sproat. “This would also have decreased our operating costs and allowed our tech team to focus on one platform instead of two. However, this would have left many fans, verified players, agents, scouts, and coaches very disappointed”.
Shnarped’s Features
Shnarped’s platform resembles Instagram’s combination of social media + video uploading, making Shnarped easy and fun to use. Its most distinctive video-editing features lie in its slow-motion cam, adding music to videos, etc; basically anything one needs to create interesting and creative sports moments among the Shnarped community.
This addicting sports app also includes the following features:
VIDEO FEATURES
– Slow motion video, Fast motion video
– Add music from your iTunes library
– Sound Effects and Stickers
– Spotlight specific areas of your video
PHOTO FEATURES
– Add text to your photos
– 10+ great filters for styling
– Draw on your photo
– Use the templates to create custom sports cards
– Earn likes and followers
MORE FEATURES
– Reply to a photo or video with a photo or video
– Sign-up with Facebook
– Find friends to follow
– Notifications of relevant activity
– Explore sports, #hashtags, and users
– Share to Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and more.
Shnarped App Overview
1st Tab: Home Button
- The newsfeed. Equivalent to Instagram or Facebook’s news feed, this is where the popular, trending, or hot videos will be shown on Shnarped.
2nd Tab: Search
- The search category allows one to add equivalent sports categories into their own personal newsfeed, also allowing one to search for friends and other users.
Middle: Shnarp!
- Upload your own videos to your heart’s desire. It comes with all of the video-editing features listed above.
3rd Tab: Notifications
- Like any form of social media, the notification tab exists to bring news and alerts to the user that might otherwise go unnoticed.
4th Tab: Profile
- Last but not least, a profile settings button that allows the users to change displayed information, biography and more.
Shnarped CEO Dustin Sproat recently sat down with SportTechie to discuss the development of the Shnarped app and how their platform will seek to create a community of sports fans from all over the world.
1. Can you tell us more about the personal story behind Shnarped? What inspired you to become an entrepreneur, let alone create an app at first for ice hockey and now for all sports (philosophy, mission, etc.)
“My dad was a small business fan and I will always remember that growing up, my father had a lot of flexibility in his job; he could always come watch all of my hockey games and everyone else’s dads couldn’t so basically I just remember that was such a great thing he did. The path to an entrepreneur started when I first went off to school, and then eventually to pro-hockey and then after hockey retirement where a group of us at UBC started a charity called hockey players for kids; it was considered my first startup. We operated this for a few years, learned a lot from that as we focused about connecting pro-athletes with their fans.
Overall, I learned a lot from it, as there are wins and losses with every new project. After coming to UBC for my MBA, did Shnarped pop into my head. Soon enough, it became our first company and we used a lot of what we learned from hockey players for kids to help us make Shnarped hockey. Instead of needed physical connection between players and fans, Shnarped hockey tried to improve on remote-communication. Realizing we wanted to work with more sports other than hockey, Shnarped hockey morphed into what is now Shnarped; Even though it is only in its baby stage, we are focused on continuing to create a community filled with sports lovers of all kinds.
2. Who is Shnarped’s biggest competitor(s)? What type of competition is Shnarped currently facing, and will expect to face as it continues to grow?
Depending on how you define us, there are many different similar companies out there. Like I said, Shnarped is an Instagram for sports but with better video editing tools that are specific to sports so essentially we create the right place for you to post your sports content and we give you the right tools to make that stuff look awesome. Social media applications nowadays are often divided into one part social media competition and one part video-editing competition. The big question that I always ask is “why cant kids just watch this stuff on Instagram or vine or Facebook?” Kids often responded that Instagram is stuff about friends and they can’t post hockey highlights or sports highlights on there because it seems like a cocky thing to do.
As for the platform itself, there are so many video-editing apps and most of them do one or two things, not to mention they require money. This is called a pre-fragmented industry; you can do slow motion in one, but you cant put music etc. so for us, we decided to give those tools away for free because we want the content and we want people to use them.
As you guys develop the app, and start to market it or advertise it, where is Shnarped planning to look for investment and funding?
We’re 3 years old so we’ve been pondering this question for a while. We initially started with just 3 people; one of them was a software engineer, so we basically bootstrapped and worked with a little bit funding from friends and family, and in Canada if you get a bit of funding from a few different places you can leverage that and get some decent government funding so its kind of like this back and forth seesaw. Now we’re at the point where there’s something called the Canada media fund in Canada that has given us a significant amount of funds so we’ll be good for the next 8 months and after that we’ll be looking to for venture capital funding and hopefully companies will start to monetize for us. Monetization will happen the same way it does for companies such as Snapchat and Facebook, which is if you get enough eyeballs then companies will get funding.
4. When will the Shnarped App go live and what ideas/plans does Shnarped have in the foreseeable future?
We definitely want to hit through the American market in the future. Currently, we’re taking a local focus with this invite only and hopefully the way Shnarped spreads is through communities. Our plans were something a long the lines of: “Lets hit hockey around the world (during Shnarped Hockey) and now that we’re covering a lot of sports with Shnarped, lets focus on big places such as Vancouver or Toronto. For now however, most of our plans is concentrated on improving the app and sharing it with as many people as possible.