New technology from startup ventures is transforming the sports industry. The mission of this series will be to introduce startup companies in the sports technology space to a broader audience and allow Founders of promising new ventures to tell their story.
Company: Fanvana
CEO: Swetha Prabhakar
1. Company Introduction: 1 to 2 paragraphs about your company. What do you do that makes you unique?
Named the best sports startup at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, Fanvana has developed a sports context engine that provides a personalized, real-time social discovery experience for fans. Using fan locations, trending and real-time scores and stats as context for fans to start discussions, Fanvana creates a standalone social sports experience on mobile. Fan chatter on Fanvana is intelligently mapped to sports personalities, teams, games and topics, allowing fans to broadcast their opinions to fans like them without having to build a following. The voting model also gives every fan a megaphone and the ability to decide which posts should rank higher. This is very different from the follower and friends-based paradigm of many popular horizontal social platforms.
Over 60 million socially engaged fans in the United States live outside the state of their favorite teams. This number is even larger (1.9 billion) globally due to the widespread popularity of cricket and soccer. Our community connects fans everywhere by helping them discover other fans they may like, find places nearby to watch their favorite teams play and join the live game chatter. Whether you are 10 or 10,000 miles away from the stadium, Fanvana gets you in the game.
Fanvana currently supports MLB, NBA and NFL and is available for download on iOS and Android.
2. What is your elevator pitch?
Discover what’s happening right now in sports & join the live chatter. Follow any game, any story, anywhere effortlessly with fans like you.
3. Problem & Solution
Growing up in the Bay Area and following the Spurs, despite their enormous success over the past decade, was never easy to do. While at Stanford, I found it very difficult to discover and interact with other Spurs fans on campus and I had no idea where to watch Spurs games nearby. There was no organic way for us to get to know one another and start spirited discussions about when, if ever, Tim Duncan would start to slow down or comment in real-time on Manu Ginobili’s insane passes that inevitably either cost the Spurs the game or become Top 10 highlights.
With Fanvana, I set out to solve my personal pain points as a displaced fan, in hopes that it would improve the fan experience for other fans like me. We recently launched Fanvana on Android and iOS publicly for NFL, MLB and NBA to create the ultimate real-time social discovery experience for sports fans.
4. Market
Roughly half of all socially engaged fans are “long tail” fans, a phrase I coined to describe fans that live far away from their favorite teams. Our target market is currently millennials and young professionals in the United States, many of whom follow teams they are not geographically close to.
There is a large, untapped market for these fans. The total annual addressable market in the United States is $1.2B (60M fans). Globally (including soccer and cricket), it is a whopping $4B (1.9B fans), assuming a 10% smartphone penetration rate.
5. Business Model
The focus right now is growing our fan base on Fanvana. We plan to monetize through targeted advertising using our fan context engine, which provides real-time fan segmentation based on fan locations, team loyalties and engagement metrics. The key levers that our advertiser ecosystem would support include promoted events and check-in deals for game day (that is mapped to our database of over 26k places in the U.S. and Canada), promoted search results and promoted posts.
6. Management Team – with titles
Swetha Prabhakar, Founder & CEO
Krishna Prabhakar, Co-founder & COO
Dominic Orr, Board Member (CEO, Aruba Networks & Technology Advisor to the 49ers)
7. What do you want the audience to know about your venture?
Fanvana won first place in the Trade Show Blitz Competition at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference this year and was named the most promising sports startup.
Bonus questions:
If you were stuck on a desert island with any three athletes, who would they be and why?
I would have to go with Charles Barkley, Ronda Rousey and Andrew Luck for their sense of humor, brawn and brains, respectively. I would imagine that a deserted island would not have much in the way of entertainment, so Chuck would be necessary. Ronda could help ward off wild animals and protect us from danger. Andrew Luck would be our best shot of getting off the island.