SportTechie Startup Profile Series: FANSeye Sports Actually Brings Validity To Fan Analysis


FANSeye-logo-wordmark

Company: FANSeye Sports Inc.

CEO: Frank Provenzano

Headquarters: Dallas, Tx

 1. What is your elevator pitch?

FANSeye is a sports evaluation platform for fans to rate players. And each other.

2. Problem & Solution

Problem#1: there is no organized forum for fans to engage in an insightful conversation about players in a particular sport and to get recognized for knowing what they are talking about.

Problem #2: for consumers of insightful and entertaining sports conversation, the content is spread out amongst multiple platforms and littered with noise

Solution:

  • Pre-organize the conversation: since we already know what fans are going to be talking about (the players) we can set up the conversation database before the discussion actually happens.
  • FANSeyeQ: establish a points system for fans to get rewarded for contributing content to the conversation that people engage with. Users build their FANSeyeQ score with the goal of reaching Expert status in the app, giving them the highest level of power and privilege.
  • FANScore: a unique crowd-sourced fan opinion metric that is a function of the individual player ratings in user posts.
  • Dual Content Feeds: users can follow either the players they want information on or the users they find engaging, giving them the pre-sorted content they want at their point of need.

3. Market – your target market and the overall market

Overall market: According to US Census data, there are over 100 million people in the United States that emotionally identify with at least one professional/college sports team.

Target Market: we are targeting both the sports fan that currently participates in the sports conversation through “traditional” social media platforms and the fantasy sports player looking for insightful roster information.

Our initial launch sport is the NFL:

  • there are 88 million people who follow individual NFL athletes
  • there are over 36 million people who play fantasy sports with a market spend of over $4 billion

4. Business Model

In-app: premium purchase options (insider content/stats & user challenges)

FANScore monetization: FANSeye will produce a crowd-sourced & real-time fan opinion metric that currently does not exist in the market

Database monetization: our database will contain detailed player preferences of our user base on a geo-segmented basis

5. Management Team 

Frank Provenzano: Founder & CEO

  • Former NHL Assistant GM (Dallas Stars & Washington Capitals)

Megan Considine: Director of Marketing

  • Former Managing Director, Mobile & New Digital Products, The New York Times

Advisory Board: Alex Goligoski

  • Player, Dallas Stars (NHL)

John Vidalin – Chief Sales Officer, Miami Heat (NBA)

Mike Hume – National Sports Editor, Washington Post

Mike Solow – CEO, Idea Harvest LLC

6. What else do you want the audience to know about your venture?

One of the recurring themes of my 17 years of NHL front office experience was the difficulty for the average person who was passionate and knowledgeable about a particular sport to get their foot in the door of the true player conversation. FANSeye’s mission is to build the first truly global player evaluation platform and eliminate the traditional barriers to entry for people that have the insight but not the inside connections.

Bonus Questions:

If you were to invite any CEO to dinner who would it be and why?

Craig Jelinek, CEO of Costco. Why? He is running a successful retail empire by employing practices that seem to be the opposite of what the “standard” business practices are in that sector. He seems to embody the “CEO as servant” style of leadership, which I admire.

If you could go to any sporting event, what would it be and why?

I would go to the first Copper Canyon Ultra Marathon. The concept of a group of people running 50 miles through rough and dangerous terrain for a cause greater than themselves is both rare and almost impossible to sustain.