Project Overview
Fandelo is the next big thing set to disrupt the worlds of social media, news, e-commerce and fan engagement. Fandelo was created for fans of sports, music and entertainment to follow their 'favorites' - athletes, musicians, celebrities, teams, leagues and bands - while cutting out the clutter and toxicity associated with today’s mega platforms. Built by fans for fans, Fandelo is the #1 fan engagement platform on the planet.
Ultimately, fans want to get closer to their sports, music and entertainment idols. Talent and industry are constantly seeking innovative ways to capitalise on this passion. But fans don’t like just one team/artist, so industry players compete aggressively, often in platforms designed for friends to connect - not with the fan experience in mind.
Fandelo flips the industry on its head. It's the first true pure-play, omni-channel for fans (and favorites alike), and is the world’s only automated fan engagement and social platform. Fandelo aggregates all publicly available content (news, video, events, tickets, audio, scores, socials) and is supported with a powerful e-commerce marketplace (merchandise, memorabilia, tickets, events, NFTs). Additionally, there are dedicated fanrooms built around favorites offering the ability for fans to connect and engage.
One place. One-touch. Up-to-date. On-demand.
Organisation
Team
Allan Bennetto
James Henderson
Nikki Milivojevic
Tim Paine
Ricky Ponting
Nick Riewoldt
Dzung Nguyen
Project Brief
Fandelo is a cutting-edge new social media application developed by a team of visionary creators and fans - built by fans, for fans. With its personalised content, vibrant fan communities and immersive features, Fandelo is the only app of its kind worldwide.
At the core of Fandelo lies its ability to connect fans directly with their favorite athletes, musicians and celebrities, fostering an intimate connection and enhancing the fan experience like never before.
Fandelo is revolutionizing fan engagement and has established an entirely new benchmark for user experience in three of the most prominent realms of fan passion: sports, music, and entertainment.
Not only does Fandelo create a new fan experience, our solution is built for favorites too. Favorites (the athletes, musicians, celebrities, and teams fans follow) can be verified onto the platform as 'Official Favourites'. Knowing these favorites have limited available time (and often little creator know-how), Fandelo provides a channel that grows an incremental audience, allows them to engage with their most passionate fans, and where they can promote/sell the things that matter most from tickets to merchandise to memorabilia to charitable and corporate interests, etc. For them, Fandelo is the only social channel that updates automatically, without them having to lift a finger.
Born in Melbourne, Fandelo represents the spirit of Australian innovation and showcases the country’s capabilities in the digital landscape for the world to see.
Project Need
Fans can confidently go to Fandelo, rather than use on average 6-12 other apps, to get all the information, content, music, videos, social engagement, forum banter, events, tickets, scores and more that they are currently seeking across a myriad of other apps and sites.
The current landscape exists at two ends of a spectrum: the social giants with their high audience yet low engagement and the niche team or talent related apps that generally have a higher level of engagement yet low audience. Fandelo operates in this middle space that no one app/product/company yet owns - a space of high audience and high engagement.
Our point of difference is in the innovation of the idea, the quality of our user experience, the pure-play nature of the product, the robust nature of our future-state product roadmap and, perhaps, most importantly, the ability to drive fans from passion-to-purchase, with betting and a B2B Saas extension for agencies and industry in play top truly be able to own the fan ecosystem.
The cherry on top is our proprietary Fan ranking system (ranking users against one another based on engagement with their favourite's content) and kudos rewards (given by other fans/users for contributing to the community and by sharing the app).
User Experience
Fandelo is completely new - in idea, technology and implementation - and was built entirely around a deep understanding of fans. In Fandelo, users can read news, watch videos, stream music, view upcoming events, buy tickets, see the latest scores, view socials, post Fanroom content, poll other fans, earn a fan ranking and gather kudos, all in the palm of their hand.
At the heart of Fandelo is its platform which has been under development since March 2020 (business registered a year later). Fandelo can be freely accessed via both the App Store and Google Play at no cost, by all fans with a smartphone, anywhere in the world.
Fandelo has been custom built and developed using best-of-breed technologies (including Java, Next.js, React Native, AWS (Elasticsearch, CloudFront & RDS), MongoDB, Magento, Salesforce and Stripe). A custom AI recommendation and validation engine ensures relevance and quality of all content ingested to allow a seamless, immersive and enjoyable experience.
Our multi-layered community forum management ensures safer Fanroom experiences, including in-built moderation and profanity software (Hive). This is supported by a dedicated community and content team ensuring attentive user support.
Powered by a fully-custom, innovative technological platform with its cutting edge native application and state-of-the-art cloud-based software architecture, Fandelo offers an interface that seamlessly curates feeds for each individual user, and adapts via layers of logics and AI to individual preferences and behaviours.
Project Marketing
True to its Melbournian roots and with the backing of some home-grown favorites, Australia serves as the ideal proof-of-concept market for Fandelo. Fandelo provides a unique experience for fans to connect with their favourite events, games, athletes, teams and artists before, during and after events to ensure an elevation of the fan experience.
User acquisition activities are focused on engaging/re-engaging with fans/superfans alike across AFL, cricket and brand. TTL communications include paid and organic social marketing (across Google including YouTube, Tiktok, Meta). Social efforts are amplified by a pilot podcast series that gets fans closer than ever before to their favorite talent in a bespoke format that allows for deep fan engagement as the series progresses.
India will serve as Fandelo’s secondary growth market following launch in Australia, where we will drive volume onto the platform through targeted, full-funnel (paid, organic, experiential, events), low-cost acquisition efforts with an initial core focus on engaging cricket-mad fans (India accounts for 90% of crickets’ 1B fans globally).
Beyond this, following proof of concept in Australia and expansion in India with reaching user growth metrics, North America proposes a significant opportunity of future growth. While we will keep our roots in Australia, we have plans to commercialise our business in USA starting 2024.
Whilst our multi-national, multi-channel marketing strategies will drive reach and downloads, it’s the fan experience on-platform that keeps fans coming back for more, securing a 90% return rate in beta.
Project Privacy
Data architecture
We have built a fully custom data architecture with best-in-breed software plug-ins. This ensures not only the scalability of our data infrastructure, but also manages privacy and security. The design of this is fully compliant and in adherence to law. We’ve prioritised the integrity of data throughout this process. Privacy considerations also flow through to our partnerships and payment processes, which are purposely via tokenisation. We also separate marketplace, CMS and user data so we’re able to process and store commercial, community and partner data cleanly and safely.
Data bank
Data is an incredibly meaningful and valuable aspect of our business. Our goal is to create the largest data bank of data on fans of sports, music & entertainment globally.
Data & Privacy Policy
Our legal approach to data and privacy policy (www.fandelo.com/privacy) is fully compliant with Australian Law, and also takes into full consideration compliance with GDPR legislation.
Digital - Entertainment & Leisure
Digital services have overtaken entertainment and leisure. They influence what and how we watch or listen to, where and how we eat, dine and play, how we book and how we interact before during and after entertainment events. We're looking for nominations that make entertainment even more entertaining.
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