Fancred (live in the app store) Measures a Sports Fan’s Life
Wednesday Mar 13, 2013 by Susan Johnston - Contributor, VentureFizz
Boston is known for its ardent sports fans, so the home of the Red Sox, Celtics, and Bruins served as a natural birthplace for Fancred, a mobile social platform for sports fans which just launched in the iPhone app store. The company is also part of the current session of TechStars in Boston.
Facebook and Twitter host their share of sports discussions, but the conversation can be fragmented, according to Fancred CEO Hossein Kash Razzaghi. He says Fancred will give sports fans a dedicated place for discussing their favorite teams and getting news from the sources they trust.
“Our secret sauce is that we’re actually measuring the life of a fan,” explains Razzaghi, a Southeastern Conference fan who moved to Boston in 2006. “Some fans are very passionate about their teams and some fans might be a little bit less passionate. By measuring what you do in our app, what people you like to follow, what teams you like, the Fancred score allows us to learn more about you and give you a better experience.”
Based on the people you follow and the type of fan you are, Fancred will recommend additional people to follow and measure your influence on your followers. “Are you generally able to predict plays? Do people respond to things that you say?” says Razzaghi. “We think that you can absolutely define someone’s knowledge, passion and influence across the topic.”
The platform will also provide a publishing platform for sports fans to create and consume content. “We’re aggregating the best news content that you like to follow and adding a social component around that,” says Razzaghi. “Fancred will be a publishing platform for you. All your publishing happens on Fancred and you can push out to those other platforms.”
Prior to Fancred, Razzaghi founded a t-shirt company while in college and worked his way up from executive assistant to a top-grossing salesmen at Brightcove. He left the Cambridge-based online video platform last fall to focus on Fancred, bringing the core of the new company’s team with him. While at Brightcove, Razzaghi spent two years in San Francisco but eventually asked to return to New England, a place near and dear to this sports fan’s heart.
“I think we’re trying to build a sports company in the best sports city in the world so we think there’s a lot of opportunity here,” says Razzaghi.
Susan Johnston is a journalist and contributor to VentureFizz. You can follow Susan on Twitter (@UrbanMuseWriter) by clicking here.
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