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. Feel free to contact us if you know of a startup that should be considered for this series.
Company: AppFriends.me
Founder: Kejia Tang, CEO
Headquarters: New York, NY
1. Elevator Pitch
AppFriends.me is a plug in social layer for mobile apps. We utilize public chat, private messaging, and social feeds to activate an app’s latent user community, building network effects within the app and foster deeper engagement with in-app content.
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2. Problem and Solution
User engagement is a perennial problem for apps – a lot of great content is never discovered, users quickly forget about your app, and it’s hard to know what content to deliver to which users. Our insight is that the most efficient way to engage users is by letting them engage each other. In sports, fans want to be in community with one another – either cheering on the same team, or trashtalking with opposing fans. By empowering fans with the proper tools to communicate their knowledge and passion with one another, you can build relationships between users that keep them coming back to your app, you can have power users curate content for other users, and you can generate enthusiasm for sharing your app outwards to new users. The AppFriends plug in gives you the most effective tools with just a few lines of code.
3. Market
Any app with content and live events are strong use cases. Sports news apps, live score apps, stadium apps are in our target market. The overall market is any content or social app.
4. Business Model
The primary revenue model is a monthly subscription for all core features. The secondary model comes from AppFriends’s “native friend referral” feature: AppFriends allows users to have two way private messaging with contacts who are not in the app via integration with SMS. These messages are embedded with deeplinks that encourage the outside contact to download the app during the course of conversation to access richer content inside. Downloads from this method will be charged at a fraction of the price of paid downloads.
5. Founding Team
Kejia Tang – CEO, Hao Wang – CTO, Mike Wang – VP of Engineering, Wei Shu – Director of Engineering. Between the cofounders, we’ve built over 30+ apps, including versions of the official NHL and Nascar apps.
6. What else should people know about AppFriends.me?
Happy to talk to any app developer about how to leverage the power of your user community!
Bonus Question: If you could have dinner with any CEO in the world, who would it be?
Hmm, this is a toss up between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos – they always have some far off vision that pushes us ever closer to sci-fi. I’d love to hear what new things they’ve dreamed up.
Contact kejia.tang@appfriends.me for more info on AppFriends.me.