Eran Fine was playing basketball with his soon-to-be co-founder, Eran Dvir when they came up with an idea. They liked the NBA and both had been using NBA League Pass, a service which allows its users to watch live NBA games from anywhere. They also had many other friends who enjoyed watching the games together so they wondered, “What if we approach the NBA and say, ‘there are about 20 of us, can we get a better deal?’”
From there, JOIN. was born.
JOIN. is based on the realization that two things are happening. First, people are consuming as a group. Second, if you bring a group of people to buy a product or subscription, they’ll make sure that the value of the service will go up by bringing the price down for each consumer.
“There’s the added value of coming as a ‘tribe,’” said Ran Kern, JOIN.’s VP of Business Development. “Especially in sports, people have the pride of their team and the game.”
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“We incentivized people to bring their friends by saying, ‘we’ll give you great services, we’ll lower the price for you and your friends and we’ll give you upgrades,’” said Fine.
The NBA isn’t the only league that JOIN. works with, they also do business with MLB.tv, some daily fantasy sports sites, as well as many other businesses. You can see where JOIN.’s business comes in on MLB.tv’s homepage by clicking on the link that says “Join w/Friends – Save 30%.”
In its partnership with these businesses, the fans aren’t the only ones who stand to benefit from JOIN.’s services. Through cloud services, JOIN. allows its customers to better understand who the people are that are purchasing the services. “We’re providing pretty interesting observations for our customers,” said Fine. “We show them who the social influencers are. We can show them whether it’s worth investing in someone.”
In other words, a service like MLB.tv can better understand their customers and make decisions based on who is most likely to buy what and how likely they are to influence their friends to buy in as well. According to Fine, “It’s not only a system to generate sales but it’s analytics and observations to the property owner and the seller.”
The cloud services analyze how many invitations are going out and how many users are interacting. Based on these numbers offers can be tweaked or adjusted to benefit their clients. According to Kern, this makes it easier to identify the customers who have a broad influence over others. “We identify who the influencers are and we can actually come up with different marketing campaigns targeted for those specific users.”
To further simplify the process of buying and selling online goods, JOIN. is now adding instant messaging which will be able to lower friction and expedite the dialogue with group members. “You have a very advanced tool where you have the group and ability to generate real-time communication between the group members,” said Fine.
Along with the added benefit of instant messaging, they are also soon partnering with another major sports league, something that will be announced shortly. Dvir and Fine are also opening a U.S. office in New York as their business is based out of Israel. This came from the realization that they wanted to be closer to their customer base and perfect their services based on the needs of those customers.
If you’ve got a tribe, JOIN. just might have a deal for you.