Tribesports Kickstarts New Business Model By Raising £30K In 39.5 Hours For Its Community-Powered Sportswear
The premise of interest-based or vertical social networking is a no-brainer: offer a destination and feature-set to connect people around a specific interest or activity, so that they can converse online, and possibly offline, too. However, monetizing social networking isn’t quite so simple, with many sites relying largely on a mixture advertising and affiliate e-commerce, which in return requires scale.
In many ways, London-based Tribesports — a social network for people doing rather than watching various sports — follows along such lines. It’s amassed around 200,000 highly engaged users since it was founded in 2010, many of those drawn from the U.S., and offers all the requisite social networking features, along with specific sports-related features, such as the ability to set ‘challenges’ for other users, as well as track workouts, share training routines and log other sports-performance data. Revenue comes from selling advertising and an accompanying ‘social commerce’ online store that encourages users to log the equipment they own or are intending to buy, with the startup taking an affiliate cut if they do.
To do so, the company took to Kickstarter on Wednesday with a goal to raise £30,000 to finance its first run of product — a target that it’s already reached less than 40 hours in. That’s not bad going, and provides exactly the sort of early-stage validation that was hard to come by before crowd-funding. It’s also worth noting that Tribesports, having raised over $3 million in investment, probably doesn’t need the cash, but the use of Kickstarter fits perfectly with the “community-powered model” that it’s attempting to pull off.
A big part of that brand building process isn’t just involving the community in making product decisions, but is also based on being a lot more transparent than other industry players, from the manufacturing process, sharing pre-production designs, and showing where each dollar goes in relation to the final retail price (see diagram below).