Having already sold two companies to Research in Motion, Jay Steele and Shaun Johansen are launching a third startup product that they hope will find millions of users.
Bedford’s Eyeball Inc. is launching today its flagship product, a social network for mobile devices that lets those in the amateur sports community tell each other about their games. It is built in the knowledge that there are hundreds of millions of people involved in amateur sports and virtually all of them want to share their scores and highlights.
“The NHL app is for a small number of teams, each with thousands of fans,” Steele said in an interview.
“An amateur team maybe has 50 fans. So we’re trying to build a platform for thousands of teams with a few fans each.”
In launching Eyeball, Steele and Johansen are returning to familiar turf. Two years ago, they were employed by BlackBerry Inc. (formerly Research in Motion) as sort of “in-house entrepreneurs.” That means they spent their days trying to develop new products within BlackBerry. Then BlackBerry’s fortunes changed, they were laid off and they began to consider another venture.
They have done it before. During the original dot-com boom in the mid- to late-1990s, they teamed up to launch Plazmic, an early mobile venture that they ended up selling to RIM. A few years later, they started another mobile startup called Viigo. And again they sold it to RIM.
When they were conceiving their third startup, they knew they wanted to do something in the mobile market, which they consider the future of personal computing. They began to realize the opportunity presented by the countless millions of people who play, organize, coach and/or watch amateur sports.
What they came up with is a social network for mobile devices whose hallmark is its simplicity. The dominant feature at the launch allows the user to post the score of a game simply by swiping the screen. Each time you swipe the score box, you add a point to one team or the other. You can also post comments, such as saying what team member scored.
“It’s really simple in terms of using it,” said Steele. “The idea is to communicate the critical information.”
Going forward, the team plans to introduce a set of features that make it more useful to a wider market.
The overall goal is to gain wide market acceptance, and Steele and Johansen plan to use viral marketing and aggressive search engine optimization to spread the word.
They believe the earliest adopters will probably be people in the “elite youth” sports community. The entrepreneurs understand they will probably need more than a million users in order to generate meaningful revenues.
The most obvious source of revenues is advertising, though Steele said the company will need a few hundred thousand users to make money even with focused advertisers. A second source of income would be selling digital content to users over the app.
The company so far has been funded through investment from the founders and several Ontario-based angels. Steele and Johansen plan to soon approach venture capital investors with the goal of raising a round of funding next year.
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