Startup lets fans feel like insiders

Dallas Cowboys fan? Las Vegas-based Fandeavor.com has you covered.

How does a VIP tour of Cowboys Stadium sound? What about midfield seating for a game of your choice and a visit to Valley Ranch, the team's headquarters and practice facility?

Well, all this can be yours - for a price.

After a successful beta launch, Fandeavor.com founders Dean Curtis and Tom Ellingson amped up their offerings and marketing efforts little more than a month ago, and it's beginning to pay off. Last week, the duo sold its first National Football League package, a VIP experience to a Dallas Cowboys game.

The site sells experience packages that feature insider perks such as stadium tours, pictures with team mascots and signed memorabilia packages, with game tickets included in the sticker price. Teams and sports available now are University of Nevada, Las Vegas basketball and football, the Dallas Cowboys and a few other university programs, with more college teams soon to come. Curtis also said to expect NASCAR to pop up in the next two to three months, and National Basketball Association experiences should be available when the season starts.

"We're both big UNLV fans. It's really exciting for us to have them as one of our launch partners," Ellingson said.

Packages cost $300 to $4,000, but because this is a new market, the creators still are working out their pricing structures.

"These are generally priceless items," Curtis said. "We're constantly gathering data and figuring out what's going to be our right price."

Their target demographic is avid sports fans.

"We learned that die-hard sports fans, no matter what income range they fall in, don't have a barrier on price. This is why we love this business so much," Curtis said. "If you can deliver a great product, price becomes secondary to sports fans."

Fandeavor doesn't seem to have a problem attracting interested parties. Fandeavor.com's daily unique visitor count approaches 1,000. Monthly, the site is getting page views in the hundreds of thousands.

"And those numbers are growing," Curtis added.

When partnering with universities and teams, Fandeavor uses a revenue-share model, usually with a 50/50 or 70/30 split, with the second percentage going to Fandeavor. Once an experience is created, Fandeavor promotes it with ads, Facebook posts and "all the things we've gotten pretty good at while at Zappos," Ellingson said.

That's right, these two hail from Zappos University.

It was during their time at the online retailer that the two conceptualized Fandeavor. Ellingson, as the former head of business development, experienced VIP events while sports franchises were soliciting a Zappos sponsorship. He immediately said he thought that if he were a die-hard fan, he'd pay thousands of dollars for the experiences he was having.

So far, his prediction is coming true.

In addition to their first Dallas Cowboys package, the pair have been selling UNLV and Arizona State University experiences for the past month. Their biggest problem since leaving Zappos to start their own business is figuring out how to make their product better. When they've asked for customer feedback, almost all of it, they said, is positive, which from an improvement perspective, doesn't help.

"What we learned at Zappos is, it goes beyond the website. It goes into the personal emotional connection with the people who come to your website," Curtis said. "You first try to establish a relationship with customers and give them what they want throughout the entire process: before, during and after."

Ellingson and Curtis still are tweaking their product to determine which aspects of the experience resonate with fans in different parts of the country. They plan to continue to fine-tune things from wherever they happen to be working in downtown Las Vegas, whether it's inside /usr/lib, the Beat Coffeehouse & Records or at The Ogden.

In the future, Curtis said he wants fans to go to Fandeavor first before Ticketmaster or StubHub - the site does sell just game tickets, if that's what you're looking for.

Contact reporter Laura Carroll at
lcarroll@reviewjournal.com or 702-380-4588.