The video examines how social networking sites try to turn massive user bases into profit, using the Vancouver startup TeamPages as a detailed case study. TeamPages aims to become the "Facebook of amateur sports" by offering free team websites that generate revenue through display ads and a paid "Pro" subscription ($55 per year). The segment follows founder Mike Tan as he struggles with a limited $650,000 seed fund that has been largely spent on development, leaving only a three‑month runway. To grow, the company pursues user acquisition via free sites, league partnerships, and a marketing push with a local ad agency and potential sponsors like Boston Pizza. Experts Leila Boujnan and Evan Carmichael discuss the viability of the niche market, the challenges of converting a small percentage of users (about 5%) into paying customers, the pressure of declining online ad rates, and the need for strategic partnerships (e.g., against competitors like Tackle). They also forecast future monetization trends, emphasizing mobile, bargain‑focused platforms, and diversified revenue streams. The program concludes with a rapid "Hit or Miss" segment where the experts evaluate other web concepts, illustrating their analytical approach to assessing online business ideas.
Chapters
Facebook. Had you even heard of it 2 years ago? Today, 13 million Canadians use it, and the company is worth $15 billion. At least, that's how much Microsoft offered to buy it. In fact, people are connecting on the web through all kinds of websites. It's called social networking, and it's exploding in popularity. So are interactive websites. So no wonder plenty of fortune hunters want to be the next Facebook. Check out our Trend Tracker.
The people who run social networks and interactive sites can make money from member fees or ads. We scoured the country looking for Canadians with exciting ways to bring people together. In Saint John, New Brunswick, we discovered Jason Richard and PropToGo. That's prop as in property. His website connects real estate state buyers and sellers. In Edmonton, Alberta, we met Ken Battista and Jason Suriano and their company Hot Rocket. They're running an online community where kids play together exploring science and history. And in Vancouver, we're downloading the whole story of Mike Tan and his website TeamPages. He wants it to be, you guessed it, the Facebook of amateur sports.
As always, we have two business brains here to talk about our trend. This time it's Leila Boujnan and Evan Carmichael. So Leila, tell us, what are your credentials in the web world?
Well, I'm a CEO and the co-founder of Idee Inc. We are a software company and we do for images what Google does for text.
Hmm, interesting. Okay, so Evan, what about you? I know you're very busy online.
I'm the founder of EvanCarmichael.com and we're the most popular Canadian best The base website for entrepreneurs, and everybody from Michael Gerber to Donald Trump writes for the website.
Very good. Well, I'll be very curious to hear what you think about Mike's plan and team pages. Is Mike in good shape to make big bucks with a website for sporty types, or will he be shut out? Let's watch.
Mike Tan isn't a pro athlete.
Hi there, guys.
But he's planning to score big.
Just promoting a brand new website called TeamPages.com. My name's Mike. I'm from a local company called TeamPages. The big goal of TeamPages is to one day become a big site like Facebook or MySpace.
Mike's putting the grass back in grassroots marketing.
Watch your back, Paul.
Pushing all-in-one websites for amateur sports teams.
They can put up their schedules, their photos, their videos, their scores. Parents can arrange carpool rides. Just letting everyone know we have a free barbecue down there.
Two of Mike's buddies from school, Adam Pomblad and Derek Storey, are also working practices, games, and the grill to bring people to the site.
At the end of the day, for most internet companies, it's all about the number of users you have. And right now it's really important that we try and get as many users as we can before we run out of money.
Like Facebook, TeamPages is free and makes money from ads. Problem is, TeamPages isn't making enough to survive. Back at the office, money has Mike worried.
We've raised about $650,000.
Almost all of that has been spent on development.
Still need to fix this annoying date bug.
And the team is running on empty. Techie Adam looks after 1,200 websites on his own.
I'd love to raise financing. If we had that, we could hire some more people and take some of this pressure off me. I just want to say thank you for the metrics.
After 3 years, there's only enough money to last another 3 months.
How are we doing with TeamPages Pro?
So the plan is to use free sites to lure users in.
We'll do some real testing with their credit cards.
Then step 2 is to get them to pay up for an updated pro version.
We can take subscriptions? Yeah, man, we're there. Sweet. Awesome, huh? That's sweet. The advantage of the pro model is that it gives us an additional revenue stream on top of advertising. At the end of the day, that gives us additional profit and as well. That's what our investors are looking for.
The new version will cost users $55 per year. While Adam works on the design, Derek works on selling subscriptions.
When we create games or change schedules, the system will actually generate an update email to every single player who's affected by that change.
That would be pretty cool, actually.
He's trying to get entire leagues and associations to sign up all their teams at once.
Bye now.
Bye-bye. Soccer BC alone has 120,000 members, which equates to about 8,000 teams.
Scoring 3,000 paying teams would be a huge win.
If we do that, we break even. If we don't, well, we're going back to the well and trying to raise more money.
Later at the home office.
The logo up here looks good. Sports websites made easy, okay.
These partners/roommates share some odd rituals.
Want me to feed you? Go on, hit it!
Oh God.
There's no time for joking. The next day, Mike's meeting with his board.
In terms of sales, we're currently behind our sales targets at the moment. The sales cycle is taking a little bit longer.
Boris Wirtz is one of Mike's biggest investors.
I think the real market is in the youth market.
Mike has to prove the company can make money on sales.
Certainly a continuous pressure on the team. There's not a lot of margin for error here.
The sales effort will continue. Next, Mike and Derek look for some promotional help from a hot Vancouver ad agency called rethink.
You know, you guys don't have tons of money, right? We're not going to be doing TV ads, there's not going to be any billboards.
So using a partner such as Boston Pizza, but it could be anything, we are going to talk about the search for Canada's Coach of the Year.
The agency wants to hook Team Pages up with a sports-friendly restaurant to help cook up some sales.
Well, thank you guys, that's great.
Landing a big partner would also impress potential investors.
But with a partner like Boston Pizza, it really brings a lot of credibility and a national exposure that we need to bring it to everyone at home.
Credibility is part of what Mike needs to sell. He's looking for over $1 million from a venture capital firm in the morning.
Even after doing 15 of these pitches, I'm always still nervous the day before or the night before.
He can buy more time for Team Pages to grow if he can win over this investor.
It's very much like dating, I guess you could say, in that every investor is looking for something different.
The next day, when you come to 200 teams per week, it doesn't take long for Jim Charlton to ask about paid memberships.
How many of those teams will be paid teams?
Within a week, we've had 5 signups.
It also doesn't take long for Mike to make his ask.
In terms of financing, we're looking for, or we need, $1.5 million to scale this business and to grow this business and to make TeamPages a success.
I'll take that away and, uh, Do some work and we'll get back to you.
Thanks so much, Jim.
Without better sales, $1.5 million is a lot to ask for in an economy like this.
They've got to really step up their marketing to get that acquisition of users.
For now, it's back to the beach and bringing in users.
I feel we're heading in the right direction. There's always the concern at the back of my head that we're going to run out of money, we're going to run out of time before We can make TeamPages a success.
We watch the story of Vancouver's Mike Tan and his dream to turn his company into the Facebook of amateur sports. Our two very cyber-savvy people who totally understand the social networking phenomenon, Leila Boojnan, the CEO of eDay Inc., and Evan Carmichael, the man behind Canada's most popular popular website for entrepreneurs. So both of you should know before we start talking that Mike has signed up 8,000 teams now. It was 1,200 when we were filming. And about 5% of those new teams are actually the paying customers. So Leila, what do you think? Is this a good idea, TeamPages? Is this something people really need?
Well, I really like it. I think that only some people will actually need it. It's highly, highly specialized. So maybe the specialization is a bit of a curse, but also a blessing because you have a very targeted audience to go after.
Yes, so you think it's a good idea. What about you, Evan? What do you think of the way he's actually running the business, this charging $55? Is that gonna work?
$50 a year is not a lot of money, so to get $1 million in revenue, you need to have 20,000 teams to sign up for that. What I would prefer if I was a VC looking at these guys is how do you make $50 a month? How can they add more value to the service so that somebody would sign up up and pay recurring revenue so it's not only $50 a year.
What other things do you think they could do, Evan, to get a little more money into the company, makes more revenue?
A big thing is they have a lot of competition, so how do you stand out? One of their biggest competitors in terms of being the Facebook for amateur sports is a company called Tackle. They partner with Sports Illustrated, and so Sports Illustrated is actually a co-owner of the business, and they help promote the brand. So my recommendation would be to go out and find the equivalent.
So have a partner. But now this was One of the surprises when I started working on this episode was that these very, very popular websites are not making money like YouTube. The popularity isn't profitability. Why is that? What's the problem, Leila?
Popularity does not equal revenue generation. If you look at YouTube, for example, they are monetizing 4% of the total video content that they have and they generate a few hundred million dollars, but they are not profitable. And it's the same for Facebook.
But everyone always says advertising is the way to make money online. What about that, though, Evan? I mean, do advertisers really love to pour loads of money into online?
There's a couple trends happening online. The first, a lot of the big brands are moving towards online. They're moving away from traditional media— TV, print, newspapers are having a hard time. Everything is moving online. The downside is social networking, the ad rates have really plummeted. The reason is the same people come back to the websites over and over and over again. They know where the ads are, and so they don't click on them anymore. So as an advertiser, I'm not gonna spend my money advertising on Facebook or whatever it is because people aren't clicking on my ads.
When you look ahead at this trend of making money with social networking or on the web, what's the next thing coming up? What's hot right now?
Mobile, really. I have seen a lot of projects in the mobile space going from sharing images on a mobile device, from shopping, from finding directions, and all of these combined together for consumer solutions.
The biggest thing I see is around bargains. People want to find bargains. People don't have as much disposable income as they used to. So a great Canadian example is a company called redflagdeals.com, where people post different bargains that you can have at different retail outlets or enter coupon codes in on different websites, and you can find the best bargains out there on the internet.
Bargains during an economic downturn, that's an Excellent idea. Alright, well, thank you both of you for all those great comments. Now stay there. I just want to remind our viewers how they can win a subscription to Profit magazine. Just like Fortune Hunters, Profit is full of good information for entrepreneurs, and we've got 5 subscriptions to give away on every show. If you can answer a question about the Teen Pages story, go to our website and enter the Profit contest. And now it's time to play Hit or Miss. All right, this is your chance to test your instincts. I'm going to tell you about a business concept, web-related, from somewhere else in the world, and you say whether you think it's a hit or a miss. And we have just 2 minutes to see how many we can scroll through. So, ready to go?
Absolutely.
All right, number 1: Get off my case. A new British website called thenag.com is getting on your case, helping people lead better lifestyles by sending them a monthly nagging email. Users get a monthly reminder to eat better, recycle more, or donate to charity, and can either act on their nag or just click delete. Leila, does that sound like a hit or a miss?
That's a miss. Nobody needs another, you know, nagging device.
That's a miss for you, Leila. This is a site. Thenag.com has nagged Yahoo into naming it one of their top 10 finds of 2007. Celebrities are using it. Who knew? Alright, number 2, love to meet people, new people, but hate the COVID charge and expensive drinks on the bar scene? Then check out a new California website called MingleNow. The site makes it easy for wallflowers to log on and mingle in their virtual nightclub. The best part, no techno music. Evan, dot-com clubs, hit or miss?
I'd say it's a miss. The alcohol is not real.
You are correct. Despite early success, the parent company was bought by Yahoo and they shut this virtual club's doors in 2007. All right, number 3. You look like me. Think we're related? MyHeritage is an Israeli genealogy website that's taking family trees to the next level with face recognition technology. Plug in a picture of yourself and the site trolls their database for users with similar features and can even be used with other photo sites like Flickr, Facebook, and Picasa. Family photos, hit or miss?
I'd say that's a hit.
Why?
Um, finding, you know, your relatives online and finding who you look like or who you resemble is a pretty big online hit.
Absolutely right, huge hit. It's available in 25 languages, has over 25 million million worldwide users. Alright, number 4. From New York City comes a site that would have the Sex and the City girls two-stepping in their Manolo Blahniks. ShoeTube is a video sharing website for, you guessed it, shoe addicts. Users can chat, upload, blah, blah, blah. Hit or miss?
I'd go with miss. I'm not into shoes. It wouldn't be my target market.
It is one heel of a hit, Evan. The site launched just a few months ago. It's already scored a major partnership deal with Nine West. So there you go. You're each One for two there. Well done. Lots of fun. Thank you for being here.
