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DiggAmateur sports team planning site TeamPages Inc.has raised $477,000 in first-round financing from Burda Digital Ventures and several angels. What's interesting is how forfeiting soccer matches led the founders to a Series A.
TeamPages CEO Mike Tan credits business plan competitions for getting the startup from a bare-bones idea to a fully functioning company. Tan got the idea for TeamPages in 2005 when he and his co-founder Nikolas Laufer-Edel were leading an amateur soccer team at the University of Victoria.
Getting team members information about practice times, games and playing fields was a challenge, and the team forfeited several games because of communication snafus. They made it to the playoffs, but when hardly any team members showed up, the team forfeited yet again. At that point Tan and Laufer-Edel decided to build TeamPages as a cross between social networking site Facebook Inc. and educational software company BlackBoard Inc.
The two wrote a business plan in spring 2006 while both holding down 9-to-5 jobs in the technology industry and won $10,000 in their first business plan competition in September.
"We had an idea and knew the best way to test out the idea was to put it in the business plan competition, which we won," Tan says. "We gained cash and credibility, and I found my technical business partner who was our mentor in the competition."
After that proof point, Tan incorporated TeamPages in October 2006 and formerly launched the site in January. In April TeamPages won $25,000 of cash and $15,000 of in-kind services after winning the New Ventures BC competition. That money, plus credit card debt and funding from friends and family, kept TeamPages going to the point where Burda Digital Ventures, the venture capital arm of Germany's Hubert Burda Media, stepped in.
Tan says TeamPages will seek to raise more capital before the close of 2008, but he's unsure of the amount he needs. The site has nearly 3,000 local teams using the service, and with its latest round, Tan aims to go nationwide. The seven-member startup gets revenue from selling advertising, but doesn't disclose those sales figures. - Stacey Higginbotham
See Nov. 16 post from Tech Confidential
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