By Doug Carroll
GCU News Bureau
The Fan Post, an interactive and customizable product targeted at sports fans, won the grand prize of $3,500 on Monday in the finals of the inaugural Canyon Challenge at GCU Arena.
A three-judge panel consisting of Tom McKee and Scott Blanchard of the Ken Blanchard Companies and business attorney Randall Lindsey heard 10-minute presentations from each of five finalists and followed up with five minutes of questions.
Assistant Professor Tim Kelley of the Ken Blanchard College of Business, whose IDEA club sponsored the entrepreneurial competition, said the finalists were chosen from 44 business plans that were submitted. Second place ($1,000) went to Wild Horse Coffee and third ($500) to Providence Brewing Company.
The Fan Post’s team includes Chris Kirk, an enrollment counselor at GCU, who said the difference was that his company is farther along than the others in the development process.
“The other ideas were great,” Kirk said, “but we have a tangible product ready to go. We’re trying to drive home that we’re about creating a culture online and with the events we’re doing.”
The Fan Post product, most popular in its basketball mini-hoop and football mini-goalpost versions but also available in other sports, needs only exposure to go big, Kirk said. The company is seeking $350,000 in investment capital over the next year, he said.
Blanchard said he was hooked on the concept.
“With entrepreneurship, more than anything it’s attracting other people and getting them engaged,” he said, adding that the Fan Post product “has the capacity to create a following. I could see myself at a tailgate playing it.”
He said Wild Horse Coffee’s custom-made “coffee tricycles” could tap into a similar consumer connection.
The other finalists were Bioenergy Frontiers, a composting service that collects and recycles organic waste, and Error Tec, a company that uses RFID technology to eliminate errors that occur in the administration of medications.
For more about The Fan Post, go to www.TheFanPost.com.
Contact Doug Carroll at 639.8011 or [email protected].
