We promised an update on how things were progressing at Fanzter, so here goes... (better late than never, right?).
We're excited to announce the name of our first product - Coolspotters.com
Coolspotters is in the final stages of development, and soon, we'll be putting it out there for millions of people to use. Coolspotters is a consumer-focused site that offers an experience that could shift the way people discover great products (and much more). It's a powerful platform, but for the user, it will just be fun.
If you're interested in being one of the first people to take Coolspotters for a test drive, please sign up at www.coolspotters.com.
After several months of searching for the right investment partners, we are excited to wrap up our first round of financing. Whether it's the first of many funding rounds, or the last money we'll ever raise, what we're most proud of is the team that has resulted from the effort.
Mike Slade, Nick Hanauer, and other partners from Second Avenue Partners led the round for us, immediately demonstrating the kind of energy and experience they'll be bringing as we move toward launch. Our first two board meetings with them, in July and December, were incredibly interactive, and it helped to refine our launch strategy for Coolspotters (coming early 2008). We can't wait to share it with you.
Following the investment from Second Avenue, we were lucky enough to pique the interest of some other very accomplished and talented entrepreneurs. Rich Barton, the current CEO of Zillow.com and ex-CEO/Founder of Expedia, as well as Adrian Hanauer, the co-owner of the Seattle Sounders MLS expansion team, both expressed an interest in investing after learning about our product and plan. Kelly Smith, an experienced serial entrepreneur who co-founded ImageKind and served as VP of Product Marketing for Myrio (acquired by Nokia Siemens), rounded out the investment group.
This team, in terms of personality, experience, and energy, is a perfect fit for our company.
Early in our fund-raising process, Facebook launched their application platform for third party developers. So, of course, every VC we talked with asked us about our "Facebook strategy". Being completely focused on Coolspotters, we honestly didn't have one. But given our eagerness to launch something, we figured we would give it a shot. And after two weeks of heads-down development, we launched OneThing!.
If you're on Facebook, you should check it out. We presently have 40,000 users, and growing!
So much great work has already been done to ensure that our upcoming launch goes smoothly. But sometimes, getting a product vision to match the results of your work takes a certain level of design brilliance. We wouldn't settle for anything less than excellence. And to find it, we had to jump across the pond to London.
We engaged Mark Boulton, a designer with his own firm, who is universally recognized by industry insiders as one of the very best. Achieving simplicity is complex, and creating something elegant can seem haphazard at times. In facing these challenges, Mark is a true artist in his work, and the result is something we can't wait to share with the world.
We are happy to have Stephen Agalloco (formerly of Johnson & Johnson) join the Fanzter team. Steve relocated from the Washington, DC area and has quickly become a key member of our technology team.
We're still interviewing candidates for other key roles. If you know of any great technology people, we hope you'll direct them to: http://www.fanzter.com/jobs.
We moved to a new office space and we have to admit: we love it. It's spacious, affordable, and hopefully, it represents the last move we'll make for a while. We have plenty of room for our growing team, and best of all, we no longer have to take a 60-year-old freight elevator to our desks every morning.
That's it for now. See you next update.
The Fanzter Team
http://fanzter.com
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