A Yelp meets Ticketmaster meets Facebook for families? That's what Famplosion is positioning itself to be.
In this week's Vator Box, Charlene Li, founder of Altimeter Group and social networking guru, helps us analzye the opportunities for this young San Francisco-based startup, founded by David Gehring.
Li joined Ezra Roizen (Vator Box regular and digital media investment banker) and me. Here are our observations and advice.
- The idea of a family-focused service for local events and activities is a great one. We're all parents, so we can see the value of a service that allows us to find fun things to do in our local area.
- Famplosion allows parents, the neighborhood social activity enthusiast and school teachers, etc. to share their reviews about places to go, activities to experience, and events to see. Clearly, a UGC component is an effective way to create content about hard to compile, long-tail events/activities in local areas. The focus on local is a good one.
- The trick is organizing the content in a meaningful. So, far Famplosion has a nice UI and appears to be on the right track. While review places like Yelp are a valuable resource, Famplosion digs deeper and provides a more granular way of discovering. For instance, you can drill down into a taxonomy of about 24 things to do - plays, parks, etc. - and the ages those events are appropriate for - 0-3, 3-6, etc. This is something more specialized than other sites, like Yelp, or even Diddit (which also seeks to aggregate user-generated reviews around activities). See our analysis of Diddit on Vator Box.
- Famplosion should focus on creating profiles for families. This way, families can say what they're interested in. It should also add collaborative filtering and make recommendations based on similar family profiles and behavior.
- Famplosion might want to partner with Daily Candy or Instructables as a way to distribute or as a way to provide coupons and offerings. Famplosion might also seek to distribute on Conde Nast or Meredith, places that don't have local event information for families. The company should probably stay away from local newspapers, which are barely surviving today.
- Famplosion should stay away from local advertising as the model. The local businesses can barely understand advertising, let alone online advertising. It will be a long sales process to get them in. But if Famplosion can create profiles around the kids - though that might be tricky - it'd be a gold mine for companies, such as Procter & Gamble.
- Famplosion should have email newsletters, recommending what places to go and events to see each week.
- Other niche sites exist today - GoCityKids and Weekend Sherpa. Famplosion might want to partner with them.
- On the fundraising side, raise as little as the company can get away with. Build the audience, focus on a few geographies and find key influencers - active moms, field-trip organizers - who can help create the content.
(Note: We'd love to get your feedback)
Thanks for the review! A lot of great ideas, some of which we're working on, and some of which, honestly, I just jotted down for us to work on next! We agree the newsletter side of the business will be significant, and this coupled with Personalization and Recommendations is going to be..., well, we hope it's going to be powerful in it's ability to encourage parents along as we all try and find great things to do with our kids locally. Keep checking back as we're adding new content every day, and adding new functionality almost every week at this point. Thanks!