Fanville: A start-up story
By Antonis Psarianos and Marios Mantzos
Starting up
Fanville transforms football experience into a wide urban experience. Both website and application connect the football pitch with the city, by suggesting places worth visiting. We also share untold and unique football players’ stories. The must have multimedia guide for every football fan travelling around Europe. Fans will take the opportunity to learn about events in the city where football matches take place and also about the events that clubs promote on their social media accounts. Moreover, Fanville will offer the chance of interaction to fans on their trips through its website and application.
This’ start-up idea established by Antonis Psarianos before Christmas 2016, also accompanied by Marios Mantzos, Nicholas Bardis, Julianna Efstathiou, Ery Dimitrantzou, Rozie Drosou. This project took place in Panteion University Master Program “New Media & Journalism” during Leadership and Entrepreneurship Journalism course, headed by Mrs. Betty Tsakarestou. Throughout the meetings we had in the university we put our strong basis on our website firstly (http://anmjer.wixsite.com/fanville) and we will try to keep it up, develop it more in the upcoming months.
Layout
As a result of our team meetings, the website consists of five main categories: Cities, Stadiums, Clubs on Social, Story n’ Play, Family Trips. Our main goal is to extend the history of European cities, especially stadiums. In addition, users will have the opportunity to get informed about football clubs’ social media activities, especially in periods that they have planned interesting events. In our fourth category, footballers’ stories will be published in two ways: a) with their social media activity and b) through interviews. The last category is about information for those people who are planning to travel to Europe with their whole family. This part is last but not least. One of our innovations is to attract families because is hard for a man to leave his wife and his children behind for a few days, travelling for a football match.
Target group
It stands to reason that our target group is football fans who travel out of their country and our goal is to give them advice about how to broaden their horizons. This is our difference as start-up founders; to offer the chance to those who are interested only in football to learn about museums, sightseeing, local and cultural events. For example, a traveler who wants to visit the city of Liverpool for a football match, through our website, he can get informed about “The Beatles Story” (museum of rock band The Beatles), Central Library of town which named city’s top attraction on 2013, etc.
Social Media
One of our first goals was to create accounts in social media and we fulfilled it. First of all, we set up an Instagram profile (https://www.instagram.com/fanville/) and then our Facebook page was established (https://www.facebook.com/Fanville-1648791288756051/). Later, our Twitter account was created (https://twitter.com/Fanville_). Furthermore, we are planning to create more social media accounts, accordingly to website development (for example, YouTube channel).
Conclusion
To sum up, through this course our start-up team members had the opportunity to get closer together as partners as well as friends. This course gave us the chance to get in touch with entrepreneurial journalism and how we can create more in this industry. We have faith that this experience provided us with useful knowledge, which will help us in our future activities.
