Featured Pitch: SodaHead
Web Site: www.sodahead.com
Headquarters: Los Angeles
Year Founded: 2007
Founders: Jason Feffer, CEO, and Michael Glazer, President
Investors: Mohr Davidow Ventures, Tech Coast Angels, Ron Conway, Mission Ventures
Employees: 22
By Jason Feffer
SodaHead.com is the premiere opinion-based social community for user-generated questions and answers focused on discussing today’s hottest topics. Members can join for free and participate by asking and answering questions on a variety of subjects including politics, entertainment, pop culture, music, sports and relationships. Answering questions easily allows members to join discussions, which leads to meeting other people who share similar passions.SodaHead sets itself apart from other social networks because our members stimulate discussions by asking opinionated questions about controversies in the news or everyday lifestyle choices. SodaHead also offers traditional social network features such as customizable profiles, public and private groups, private messaging, blogs, and personal media. When you combine the passionate discussions and social platform in one web site, something amazing happens; members discover and connect with other members on a much deeper level than anywhere else on the Internet.I started SodaHead with my childhood best friend, Michael Glazer. While I served as vice president of operations at MySpace, I’d often call Michael to pitch him various startup ideas. No idea convinced him to leave his senior vice president position at Jefferies & Co., an investment bank. Then one morning, I called him and told him my idea about creating a prediction marketplace based on social wisdom. I envisioned a community site where visitors would answer questions about predictions people made in the news. Michael said, “let’s do it!” but said the site needed to be more social. He laughed at the irony that the investment banker had to tell the guy from MySpace to make it less analytical and more social. He convinced me that to make a site attractive for the masses, we needed to move away from predictions and more toward opinions. This evolved into SodaHead.com.
We had an amazing experience watching the site grow so quickly. In less than a year, SodaHead.com registered over 700,000 members who generated more than 3 million answers and more than 4 million comments. When the site first launched, topics focused mostly on music and politics. The members continue to diversify the topics so we now have discussions for everyone ranging from fun subjects such as sports and entertainment to heated debates on hot topics including the 2008 election and cheating in relationships.
The SodaHead community has developed into something far beyond what I could have imagined. We have members so passionate about the community that they have organized local meet-ups, so they get a chance to see their fellow SodaHeads face-to-face. SodaHead will foster this by sponsoring events around the nation and perhaps internationally. SodaHead recently received $8.4 million in Series B funding, led by Mission Ventures. This funding will allow us to accelerate our growth. In September, we’ll reveal the next evolution of the site including an aggregation of the most discussed news articles from across the Internet so everyone can discuss them in one centralized community. This evolution includes a redesign to enhance navigation, discovery of content and optimize viral marketing. These and other new features will create a more engaging experience around fresh, quality content.We also have some exciting partnerships with media and brand companies that will expose SodaHead to their loyal audience and allow them to engage in discussions on their brands. We believe this will establish SodaHead as the best, most popular web site for people to join a community and discuss today’s hottest topics.
