Is LockerDome St. Louis’ Groupon?

LockerDome is one hot startup coming out of St.Louis. It’s the first ever dedicated sports social network for youth and amateur sports. LockerDome has been likened to the Facebook or LinkedIn for athletes.

LockerDome allows individual sports organizations to develop their own sports networks, and most of the well known sports programs in the country have already joined and have thriving networks. The Dallas Texans, one of the top ranked soccer teams in the country has a LockerDome network, as does the East Coat Pro Showcase, a well known east coast event that’s made up of more than 100 of the 2011 Major League Baseball draft picks.

LockerDome and CEO Gabe Lozano aren’t just making a big name for themselves in the sports world, they’ve already chalked up a lot of funding. In December of 2011 they raised $750,000 in an angel round.  Participants in the round include serial entrepreneurs Brian and Carol Matthews, co-founders of Primary Network and CDM Fantasy Sports; Capital Innovators, a St. Louis-based technology accelerator fund; Moosylvania Marketing, a nationally-recognized marketing agency; and Hal Gentry, co-founder of Capital Innovators and GridLogix, among more than a dozen other angel investors.

LockerDome also caught the eye of Square’s co-founder Jim McKelvey who invested and also took a seat on the company’s board of directors.  But McKelvey wasn’t easily sold at first. He’s not the kind of investor that looks to pump money into a “flavor of the week” just to catch a big windfall he has three businesses that he’s started and still runs today, including Square which he founded with Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.

More after the break

“Some ideas are bad. They burn through money and don’t get traction,” McKelvey told Fast Company. “These guys were working on a modest bootstrap budget and grew slowly while having technical and management issues and did it without vaporizing millions of dollars. Once they got the implementation right it became interesting to me.”

Lozano told Fast Company that he believes there are three sides to every person, social, professional and recreational. Obviously Facebook solves the social, LinkedIn solves the professional and now his company, LockerDome solves the recreational.

Lockerdome just recently moved from Westport to offices in downtown St. Louis. Not only that but they were one of the only non-valley based companies to present at the coveted Silicon Valley Bank Showcase last month.

LockerDome hasn’t quite raised the money that Groupon had in it’s early days but they are well on track. When Groupon launched out of Chicago and not Silicon Valley they caught the world by surprise in the group buying space which was still in it’s infancy. LockerDome is also in a virtually untouched market. There are a couple of sites that tried to do what LockerDome has done but they were too statistical.

LockerDome makes sports social networking fun within your own sports network and by checking on those of your favorite teams and your friends teams. It’s also great for kids and parents who want to share their highlights from their most recent games with friends and family across the country. Now it’s a cinch for grandma and grandpa to keep up with their grandchildren’s teams from hundreds of miles away.

Linkage:

Want to try out Lockerdome head over to their website at lockerdome.com

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Source: FastCompany PRWeb