Social network for neighbors Fatdoor has raised $5.5M in its first round of institutional funding. The company has also brought aboard ex-Yahoo Jennifer Dulski as its CEO.
The investment group was led by Norwest Venture Partners with the participation of KeyNote Ventures. Dulski comes to Fatdoor after nine years at Yahoo where she served variously as VP/GM of Local Markets and Commerce, VP/GM of Yahoo Autos, and VP of Business Unit Marketing.
Fatdoor aims to connect you with your neighbors by providing a localized social network for your physical community. Although the site will be in private beta until the spring of 2008, a handful of details have been publicly available since at least June. The website will integrate with Microsoft Virtual Earth to display local business and residential listings on an interactive map. Once users claim their listings, they can add profiles and put down their interests. Users can then plan events and form local interest groups with the site.
Fatdoor will also pull in information from other web services such as business reviews from Yelp, events listings, and driving directions. Users will be able to add their own business reviews but they won’t be displayed outside of the network on Yelp’s website. Fatdoor’s homepage will display something akin to the Facebook news feed with information about upcoming events and recently created groups.
I wonder what the old CEO Raj Abhyanker is doing now? Did he go back to the patent law practice or start another company? I heard that he has started something new.. anybody know the name of the startup?
What a neat idea for a social network. I’ve always thought that social networks are only really useful when they are linked in some way to real world networks.
Well good for you fatdoor, gives me some hope for us!
How are they sucking out reviews from Yelp? Is Yelp ok with this? Last I heard, they’re very protective of their reviews & community, as they should be. I for one will stop using Yelp if they start whoring out my reviews to the world.
These folks should meet and hang out with http://www.rottenneighbor.com
LOL! 5.5 MILLION dollars?? For what amounts to a Map Mashup and a SQL database? Jesus what do these people DO with all the rest of this money?
rottenneighbor.com
I wonder how Hasbro feels about Fatdoor stealing the non-wobbly weebles for their logo?
$5.5 M for a site that’s not even launched, not even a proven business model with a brand new CEO? that already has a lot of competition? okkkkkkaaaayyyy………………
Is it just me or does this one just seem to be missing something that really makes it interesting?
Joke / Bubble 2.0
I saw these people at Web 2.0 EXPO in SF in April. Out of the blue the other day I checked on them, still not launched and I thought they were deadpool, but nobody cared to write about it.
I can’t believe they were able to find anyone dumb enough to give them that loot. 1999? Money for what? I still don’t know what they do or how they’ll make back that $.
Read an article from Marc Andreessen earlier today that VC’s are looking for 10X return…
http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06.....about.html
Who possibly signed off on that for FATdork?
yikes. if this is a good call i would make a bad VC.
ME what happened to part 2 of your blog ?????
So, their business model seems reasonable enough — I’m guessing monetizing via targeted local business ads.
The 5.5m is for building out an outreach program to kickstart/”seed” the site’s usage.
Granted, it’s a crap-shoot as to whether they’ll achieve any real network effect, and get any meaningful adoption, but I would say their plan on paper probably sounded more reasonable than even Facebook did in 2004. (”News Feeds” in 2004? Social utility? Must have sounded pretty odd back then, and yet a few years later we’re all drowning in the kool-aid. Anyone have a life-vest?)
If I don’t say “Hi!” to my neighbors now when I walk by them in real life on my way to the mailbox, why on earth would I use a social network to get me to start?
If the “Neighborhoods” Facebook app can’t make me do it, no one else is going to.
Hmpfh. Sounds like a tool for stalkers.
What?
So neighbours nowadays are going to sit in their studies 100 yards away from each other and tap away on their keyboards, instead of walking over to their garden fence?
Either this is completely pointless, or congratulations Internet, you’ve finally killed real social interaction.
Don’t know how good the product is, but I agree with a former comment that online networking is generally and more effectively based on real life networks. Personally, I don’t think we know our neighbors well enough. I’ll give it a shot.
I think it’s a great idea. Where I live in Paris for example we don’t really socialize with our neighbors, though there are probably a lot of good people out there to know. The local advertising business model is obvious. The concern is how to achieve critical mass, where the entry ticket is low (for a social network script), and with already too many social networks..
I guess this is similar to http://www.lifeat.com
This is obviously a great idea. I’m not sure it’s for the neighbor next to you as much is it is for the one two streets down and a way to collaborate on everything from Garage sales to School picnics. That’s fairly obvious and it makes total sense to me. Also, I’m not sure if any of you checked out the numbers on CNN Tech for 8coupons.com but if those guys in one city can charge businesses $250 bucks a month at the clip of 150 businesses ($37,500/month) even though they have 1700 registered users, these guys can make at least that much or more. Also, I’m not sure fatdoor is looking for any advertisers other than the ones in your neighborhood that ALREADY pay those God awful coupon circulars over $250 bucks a month. Also, cincymoms, which is not too pretty or functionally brilliant, made 650k in it’s first six months and that’s only in Cincinnati. That’s a lot of cash when you extrapolate across zip codes and major to mid-major cities. The point is that you guys shouldn’t think so much about what you would do with such a service but think about the ability of local businesses to advertise to anyone in their local areas. For business owners, sites like this are cheaper advertising investments than the back of store receipts or anything remotely similar.
-Tim Abbott
-Founder Noocleus Media
It is nice to see how it will work to plan events for local business groups, also I hope it will help lot in creating local networking connecting through neighborhood.
Best wishes to FatDoor. We at Front Porch Forum have been helping neighbors connect in our fair city for a year and 25% of the households have subscribed.
I think that neighborhood networks are a good idea. I started one for my neighborhood on ning. The other thing to consider is the thousands of local groups on Yahoo! Groups. My wife and I are each in several for our ‘hood.
The challenge for these guys is going to be seeding the networks so they’ve got enough interesting content up there for people who are touristing through. Also, you’d need to define what is the motivation for someone in Omaha to be the first person in their neighborhood on Fatdoor? And if there’s already a way to communicate with everyone in Omaha who has a propensity for joining social networks (like an email list or Yahoo! Group), isn’t Fatdoor redundant?
Scraping Yelp won’t be enough, but I think there’s legs for figuring out how to bring local content to neighborly relationships.
They should seriously think about changing their name. Anything with FAT in it is a negative conversation waiting to happen: “we thought we used Fatdoor to connect with out neighbors but we must have accidentally used FatAss or FatNeighbor or FatHead…” - Really dumb name, I think.
I see some value in the concept but if I were a VC I sure would have wanted to see it work in a neighborhood, any neighborhood before I wrote the check. Maybe their plan is more detailed then they are letting on.
Well, if you wanted to see if it would work, thank Michael Wood-Lewis for that. Although, I could imagine tons more functionality, the concept is displayed nicely on the Front Porch Forum website. The 25% of all households have registered is a sick, very sick number. Great job Front Porch and best wishes fatdoor.
Seriously? Ning makes so much more sense. I set one up for my neighborhood and everyone who is interested posts info.
it’s a good idea that’s already being done (social networking - the one TC featured about the buildings/ meet your neighbors, i-neighbors.org and others like the front porch one) and local advertising - littleengine.com, plus a couple of the others covered on TC (let alone google local).
That they got $5.5 by a VC firm without any traction, not even live yet and no proof that it will work or ability to achieve any kind of critical mass (while massively protecting my identity from the creepy guy who lives around the corner) just boggles my mind.
I just have a hard time believing they got $5.5 in stealth for this idea. Get me to those VCs, I’ll pitch my numerous unproven ideas for the bargain price of only $4M.
CEO drove Yahoo’s local endeavors? what is that? Oh right, a local weather widget on the home page. Rock on.
This is very similar to a French network : http://www.peuplade.com which is quite successful in France. An English version will soon be released, currently under construction at the following address : http://www.peuplad.com
I’ve been using a great community based social network called TownConnect. I’m in the process of organizing my son’s school and my softball team on it so it seems pretty useful.
sorry, the url above didn’t work for some reason.
https://www.townconnect.com/
dulski - not ceo material, sorry. fond memories of her glossing over at the mention of anything remotely technical, should be working at P&G instead.
why anyone would even bother writing yet-another mashup in the already overcrowded local space make me wonder, but then again look who is jumping on board
How many more mistakes, just as those that were made in 1999/2000, will we see in the coming year? Does the world really need another social networking site? I will not speak for others, but I have no interest in maintaining five-separate social-networking pages. How will I remember all my unames and psswrds? LinkedIn and Facebook are enough. Norwest Venture Partners should have given me the $5.5MM instead, I could have wasted in more meaningful ways. Everybody hold on to your backsides, another dot-bomb is coming our way, it’s 2001 again. Didn’t anybody learn from the first time? I’m just a technical recruiter, what do I know!!!
Sorry, typed my url incorrectly above. It’s fixed in this spot.
Researches show neighbors want to keep some distance from each other. Do you really want your neighbors know what movies you watch, and that you just got out of a relationship? Local sites must have a purpose other than just socializing. And you certainly don’t need $5.5 million to do a beta of that. In contrast, we have launched our local website http://www.trivalleybook.com for
[cont'd because it was for some reason cutoff]
It looks like it does like the less than sign. We launched our site for less than $100k and we are only asking for $2M to reach profitability.
very cool team and a lot of money! but we´re not afraid. perhaps you´ll like to have a look at your project: http://www.townkings.com
quite similar to fatdoor and we work on that money thing