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Social Networking - Monday, July 2, 2007

SparkPeople: 2B Calories Burned In Weight Loss Network

SparkPeople Founder and CEO Chris Downie has show a knack for jumping into markets that are bound to get hot before others realize it. In 1997, he co-founded an online auction company called Up4Sale that grew into the second-largest person-to-person auction site in the world behind eBay. eBay acquired Up4Sale in 1998 just before its IPO.

In 2001, Downie founded SparkPeople after leaving eBay. In 2001, online health was anemic but recently its has become a hot space again with the likes of Steve Case's Revolution Health raising lots of money and buying firms in the sector.

SparkPeople has its HQ in Cincinnati, with Downie now living in Silicon Valley. The launch goal was to build a site to help users to reach goals, any goals but especially health/diet/fitness goals. The site asks users to report the food they eat, and the exercise they do. It then give you tools to turn this information into charts so that you can self-monitor your changing habits at a glance. Plus there are community functions to aid users to stay on track.

For funding, Downie says he has invested about $5M of his own capital in the company over the years with no other outside funding. Downie says that this is not breaking his bank as the $5M comes from investment returns, rather than the principal from the sale of his company to eBay and the IPO dollars he accumulated from that. Moreover, he say that in 2007, SparkPeople will likely be about break-even.

SparkPeople's June traffic numbers look like this:
+ Uniques: 2M
+ Total site visits: 5.8M
+ Page views: 67M

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