LockerDome is ‘Facebook on steroids’
Commentary: Social networking sports site eyeing growth
February 01, 2013|Jon Friedman, MarketWatch
Gabe Lozano is concentrating on LockerDomes growth strategy and has no
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — When Baltimore Ravens linebacker Courtney Upshaw plays in the Super Bowl on Sunday, football fans will recognize him at once. But he isn’t quite a household name just yet.
That’s where fast-growing LockerDome, a sports-centric, social media website, comes in. It offers an online platform for about 1,475 professional athletes, brands, media personalities and other sports properties that use LockerDome as a hub to amplify their social media strategy.
“For an athlete, a LockerDome network is like a Facebook fan page on steroids.” said Gabe Lozano, LockerDome’s 30-year-old co-founder and chief executive.
And it’s paying off, too, for LockerDome. The company was founded in 2008 as a youth-oriented sports site. For its first four years, it made scant progress, with under 100,000 average monthly users. Then, sparked by Lozano’s meeting with Jim McKelvey , a fellow St. Louis resident who had founded mobile payments company Square, a light bulb went off and the company re-invented itself as a sports site featuring professional athletes.
In the past 13 months, LockerDome has exploded to reach an average of 8 million monthly unique visitors with more growth to come, executives say. They estimate that the company could boast 20 million monthly unique visitors a year from now. See 10 of the most unlikely Super Bowl icons.
How fast has the company grown? Consider that the St. Louis Business Journal published a piece in December, saying that LockerDome had hit the 3 million mark in monthly visitors. Two weeks later, the publication updated the results by noting that LockerDome had reached 4 million.
“Fifteen times this year,” the St. Louis Business Journal pointed out, “LockerDome has set a new single week growth record. Each week, the startup’s user base grows about 14%.”
Like Twitter in its early days
Advertising-reliant LockerDome is Madison Avenue’s ideal, too. The core audience for its free accounts is comprised of 18-to-34 year-old affluent males, the very demographic that makes advertisers drool.
Regarding its financial footing, LockerDome announced that it has raised $3 million and Lozano said he expects to have added an additional $5 million by March 31 for a total of $8 million.
Clearly, Lozano thinks big. “I see LockerDome now like Twitter was in 2008, when it started to explode and come on the national radar,” Lozano told me.