Shnarped Press Kit
Introduction
What is Shnarped?
Shnarped Hockey connects hockey fans to their favourite professional hockey players across mobile applications. Fans can track player news, stats, tweets, and highlights, and actually interact with many of the players themselves right on the app.
Where does the name come from?
Shnarps is a card game played almost exclusively by pro hockey players on buses and planes during road trips. Learn more about Shnarps the card game here.
What is the pound?
Shnarped’s key interactive feature is the “pound,” which allows fans to send a virtual fist-pump in real-time to their favourite hockey players after a great play. Over 80 NHL players – including Jonathan Toews, Brendan Gallagher, and Jonathan Quick – use the application, and after the game these verified players can send fans a ‘pound’ back.
For Shnarped, the pound is how you connect with a player through our app.
Our Mission
Connecting You With The Pros
Shnarped builds sporting communities by creating a positive and encouraging youth-friendly environment that connects pro hockey players with their loyal fans.
Connecting The Pros With Each Other
The nature of life as a professional athlete requires that you move around – a lot. Shnarped enables players to keep in touch with their past teammates and track their careers across multiple professional leagues.
Product Benefits
All-in-One App
Get all your NHL, AHL, ECHL, and CHL stats in one place. There’s no need to check multiple apps if your favorite player changes teams or leagues.
Video Content
Ad-free video at your fingertips
Shareable Content
Watch a great video? Share it with your friends. Get a pound back from a pro? Brag about it on Twitter or Facebook.
Verified Pros
Over 300 players from across the hockey world are already using Shnarped, including names such as Jonathan Toews, Jonathan Quick, Brendan Gallagher, Erik Condra, Kevin Shattenkirk, Andrew Shaw, and more.
Product Features
- Customized News Feed: Set a tracking list choosing as many players you want and receive a custom news feed with news, stats, videos and interactions from those players
- Video Highlights: Every NHL Goal & Scrap
- Featured Video Content: The best of the best is selected every night. The greatest goals, the hardest hits, the spectacular saves, the fights, and anything else you need to see.
- Player Tracking: Add your favorite players to your tracking list for easy access to their stats, profiles, twitter feeds, and more.
- Player Profiles:
Statistics : Last Five Games, Regular Season, Career
Twitter Feeds : Check out what the player has been tweeting about
Stalls : Verified players answer some questions about themselves
Pounds: Send a message (blank, text or picture) to a player for scoring a great goal, making a big play, blocking a shot, being a great guy, or anything you want. Verified pros can easily send pounds back to their fans.
- Shareable Content: The app gives you the ability to share any of our content via Twitter and Facebook.
Testimonials
If you are a hockey fan you have to get the App called Shnarped.
— John Buccigross (@Buccigross) December 9, 2012
If you could interact with one hockey player, who would it be? @shnarped can make it happen!ow.ly/jtvds #checkitout
— Jon Blum (@JonBlum7) March 28, 2013
@kdraper33 @shnarped now download it and fire up an account. It’s actually really cool. And I usually avoid apps.
— Mike Commodore (@commie22) February 1, 2013
“Receiving ‘pounds’ is like extending home-ice advantage and bringing our fans on the road… it feels great to be recognized for your efforts.” Erik Condra, Ottawa Senators
Product Images
Press Coverage
Ex-teammates hope new mobile application Shnarped will become star in NHL (Canadian Press)
Shnarped Hockey App: Vancouver Creation Snags Dragons’ Den Deal (Huffington Post)
Vancouver hockey fan app maker wins $250,000 from Dragon’s Den (Business in Vancouver)
UBC grad’s hockey app wows in the Dragons’ Den (The Province)
Hamilton hockey player shoots, scores on Dragons’ Den (CBC)
Some background information on Shnarped getting on Dragons Den here and here.
Business in Vancouver – New App Helps NHL Players and Fans Kiss and Make-Up
TechVibes – Hockey App Makes Social Media Safe for Young Hockey Fans
MarketWire – NHL Players Using Shnarped to Win Back Fans
Founders
Dustin Sproat is a Chemical Engineering graduate of Princeton University, and an Sauder School of Business MBA Candidate. He played professional hockey in the minors for three years, and co-founded Hockey Players for Kids with Kyle in 2008.
Kyle Hagel is a graduate of Princeton University with a degree in Politics. He is currently in his 6th season of professional hockey and playing for the Portland Pirates, affiliates of the NHL’s Phoenix Coyotes.
Sample Story
What is the story of Shnarped?
Shnarped started as the solution to a problem faced by Hockey Players for Kids (HP4K), a charity that Shnarped Founders Dustin Sproat and Kyle Hagel created in 2009. HP4K has engaged over 100 pro hockey players with kids in their communities, and given the relatively transient lifestyle a hockey player is forced to lead, communications between these members were difficult to maintain. Dustin envisioned a social network linking all the members of the charity together, and thought that adding a unique game-by-game tracker would provide the hook to keep members consistently checking in.
Two years later Shnarped might appear much different than it was originally conceived, but the overall vision remains the same. Dustin, Kyle, and the rest of the Shnarped team truly love being a part of the hockey community. We believe there is something special about the sport that brings people together. From the NHL to dynamites, you can’t win without an entire community of players, fans, parents, and management moving in the same direction. We truly believe in the values and people that embody the sport of hockey, and aim to build a platform that will let more people see what we see, with the goal of strengthening and growing hockey communities around the world.
What sets you apart?
We Know The Pros. As founders of Hockey Players for Kids, we worked intimately with hundreds of pro players in their fan communities. It was here that we learned what motivates pro athletes to engage with fans, how they want to engage with them (i.e.: what level of privacy is required), and how we could scale this to a mass audience while still maintaining the intimate connection the fan craves.
With this knowledge in hand, we crafted a communication platform catered to the pros themselves. Every multi-sided network requires a ‘hook’ to gain lead users before engaging interaction for critical mass. Before engaging the fans it was important to ‘hook’ the pros. In order to do this we first built a data-set custom to what the pros were looking for. Our system of tracking statistics, highlights, and twitter feeds of players as they migrate across multiple leagues gives players the perfect platform for keeping track of their past teammates and best friends. While some players are just getting accustomed to the ‘pound’ interaction and have yet to use it, almost all players that use the App use it very frequently for the data purposes.
Contact Information
If you have any questions, please contact andrew@shnarped.com
Resources
Shnarped Hockey Blog 