The FanWide team. (FanWide Photo)
The FanWide team. (FanWide Photo)

Symon Perriman, like many sports fans, lives outside of his favorite teams’ hometowns. For nearly a decade, he has been hosting viewing parties at bars around Seattle with other Duke alumni to cheer on his alma matter’s sports teams.

The experience left something to be desired.

“With no centralized platform to connect supporters with bars, interested fans were often unaware of events featuring their favorite teams, and the bars were often unprepared,” he said.

FanWide CEO Symon Perriman. (FanWide Photo)
FanWide CEO Symon Perriman. (FanWide Photo)

Perriman and his fellow Blue Devils hooked up with a group of Oregon alumni experiencing the same frustrations. They saw an opportunity and FanWide was born.

The service connects fans based on their team and location so they can organize viewing parties at local bars. FanWide’s revenue comes from bars eager to bring in business on otherwise slow nights.

“Sports viewing parties are not new, as there are individuals and alumni/fan clubs in single locations doing this manually, where they have to find the local fans, call the bar, check they have the game, ask if they will play it, negotiate deals, then promote the event,” said Perriman. “However we are the first company to solve these challenges with technology, providing a fully-automated and highly-scalable platform with tools for both fans and bars.”

Since launching in January, the Seattle startup has grown to 20 employees. FanWide is promoting over 1,000 events a week and has partnered with 710 ESPN Seattle and Anheuser-Busch. According to Perriman, the startup is also in talks with professional athletes to come on as brand ambassadors.

FanWide is in the process of raising a $2 million Series A to support expansion across the country.

Prior to FanWide, Perriman held tech and leadership roles at 5nine Software, ScorchCenter, and Microsoft. We caught up with him for this installment of Startup Spotlight, a regular GeekWire feature.

Explain what you do so our parents can understand it: “FanWide is a social network for sports fans that organizes viewing parties for every team in every city. Our revenue is generated from sports bars that pay us to bring them customers.”

Inspiration hit us when: “I waited for over an hour to get a beer at a poorly organized sports watching party in Seattle. The bar was completely understaffed and unprepared, despite the fact we were bringing them over 100 Duke alumni to watch the big game on an otherwise quiet and rainy Tuesday in December.”

VC, Angel or Bootstrap: “All of the above. As our revenue is directly related to sports seasons, we have built our business through different investment vehicles. I bootstrapped the company with the first $10,000. Next, I found an Angel to put in $50,000 to scale up our development team. To maintain ongoing operations through launch, our leadership team has funded an additional $40,000 using convertible bonds for equity. Now that we have launched, we are actively speaking to several VCs, trying to raise an additional $1 million to $5 million to grow nationwide.”

Slogan_Nationwide_nolinkOur ‘secret sauce’ is: “Our passion for sports. Our entire leadership team are all big sports fans and are working for equity so we can spend our cash on development. A few months ago I quit my full-time job as a technology executive (VP at 5nine Software) to go all-in and run FanWide, and several of my other executives have followed, even though we are pre-revenue and have no income. We believe that we are providing a much-needed service to the tens-of-millions of out-of-market sports fans and travelers nationwide.”

The smartest move we’ve made so far: “Surrounding myself with people that I trust. Several of FanWide’s leaders and advisors are close friends who have found their own success in business, finance, law, data analytics, sports management, sales, and marketing. This has allowed us to have an advisory board that has diverse perspectives, yet all have the best interests for our mutual success at heart. Every advisor, employee and even contractor is offered equity in the company, so we are all working towards a common goal.”

The biggest mistake we’ve made so far: “Thinking we did not need a professional UX designer. Although our engineering team did several design iterations ourselves, we are not specialists in this important role for a consumer app. We waited too long to hire our designer, which slowed down our development and wasted important cycles close to launch.”

Would you rather have Gates, Zuckerberg or Bezos in your corner: “Since I built my career (along with FanWide’s technologies) with Microsoft, I would personally have Mr. Gates in my corner, as I admire and owe him so much. He probably does not remember hosting me for a BBQ at his place when I was an intern at Microsoft over a decade ago, but it made an impression on me.

From FanWide’s business perspective, Mr. Zuckerberg would enable us to grow faster as a social network and data platform, loosely modeled after Facebook. We look forward to having conversations about collaborating with Facebook in the future.”

Our favorite team-building activity is: “Our reward is our passion — sports watching! It’s great to bring the ‘FanWide Family’ to bars for events we are hosting to support our customers, use our product, and help spread the word. No one complains about getting paid to watch their favorite team compete.”

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The biggest thing we look for when hiring is: “A person’s decision-making process. We are a fast-moving startup designing a new technology, so there is a lot of ambiguity and uncertainty. It is important to understand people’s thought processes in how they analyze problems and select resolutions. They need to know how to find data to make educated assumptions, then prioritize the different outcomes against the needs of the business.”

What’s the one piece of advice you’d give to other entrepreneurs just starting out: “If you want to build and lead the company yourself, be patient and wait until you have the right skill set and supporting team. I came up with the idea for FanWide in 2007, but I was new to the tech industry. Over the last decade, I learned how to build and manage teams in engineering, operations, marketing and sales at tech companies, while launching several small businesses myself. I developed a great network of technology professionals and advisors that believed in my vision and ability to execute. It has only been in the past year that I’ve had the experience to be able to successfully run a company and direct all four divisions within it.

If your experience is only in technology or only one of the other areas, it will be hard to become successful managing teams of people in a different functional role. If you are the ‘idea person’, it does not entitle you to be the CEO. Step back, and partner with people you trust that have experience in those other areas, and then your company can be successful.”

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