Vicente Fernandez loves sports: playing them, watching them, and writing about them. He’s also a young entrepreneur whose mastery of social media technology gives him an insight into an untapped opportunity for sports reporting: he created SportsManias, as a Twitter-based content aggregator that provides up-to-the-minute sports news and reporting . The concept was to create a “one-stop shop” for the diehard sports fan that would be continually updated, rather than daily or weekly like a newspaper. “It’s kind of like a Huffington Post for sports,” he says, providing a broader distribution for writers from local papers and local teams. On this week’s “Inside The Entrepreneurial Mind” on ENTREPRENEURradio.org, Vicente Fernandez describes the challenges of designing, financing and scaling a social media sports news outlet.
Vicente founded SportsManias when he was eighteen, and he had an unexpected co-founder – his mother, Aymara del Aguila . Her idea was to create a platform for diehard fans. “We kept talking about it,” he says in his interview with ENTREPRENEURradio. “I really got to thinking about what was out there in the market and what wasn’t out there, and where we could fill a hole.” Many people wondered if the decision to partner with his mother would create an additional level of stress for the venture. But for both of them, their relationship is a unique competitive advantage. “We’re able to be very transparent with one another due to our closeness.” No matter what they disagree on, he explains, they’re able to reconcile and compromise, because at the end of the day, they’re mother and son, and “that relationship is never going to break.”
Vicente and his mother are working together to build an enterprise that combined their individual skill sets and are redefining the sports media industry. For more on Vicente’s story, listen to his featured episode of “Inside The Entrepreneurial Mind,” streaming now on ENTREPRENEURradio.org.
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