Hitpost Aims To Score With Couch-Loving, Smartphone-Wielding Sports Fanatics

Many startups arise when someone notices a lot of people doing the same thing in a disorganized or sort of convoluted way. One example is how Foodspotting came about because so many people were using services like Twitter to share pictures of what food they were eating. In a similar vein, Aaron Krane noticed that a lot of people were sharing pictures of their favorite sports moments as they watch them on TV. And now we have Hitpost.

Or we will soon. Hitpost is set to launch later this month as an app for both iPhones and Android phones. With it, you can easily take pictures of the sports game you’re watching and share them with friends. “Simply put, we create a live social community of sports fans who edit the content instead of ESPN,” says Krane.

Krane brings with him some experience to the table as Hitpost is really a combination of two things he’s learned. First, he’s bringing what he’s learned from the social perspective from his time at Slide, where he worked on the Top Friends application, which was at the time the most popular app on Facebook. And he’s bringing what he’s learned over the past year working on Snapshot, a HTML5-based web application for viewing sports images built alongside Sports Illustrated.

Snapshot was the first product that Hitpost got out the door when it launched a month ago alongside the Chrome Web Store roll out. And they’re going to continue to work on it and support it, but Krane felt the timing was right for them to expand into the mobile space and bring what they’ve learned.

This is our pretty unfettered vision,” Krane notes. He says that sports addicts often pull out their phones every 30 minutes or so when they’re on the go to check up on scores and try to catch highlights of the games they care about. With Hitpost, that content will be delivered right to them in a visual way. This content can be delivered either by what team you’re interested in, what your friends are showing, or based on your location.

And users will be able to add their own commentary to the pictures along the top. This can actually make the images pretty funny. Below the pictures, conversations are had about the games.

But again, why TV images? Why not images from people actually at those games? “This is for what people actually do. People take photos of their TVs. Users are asking for an easier way to do it,” Krane says noting that pictures taken from high up in the stands from camera phones are no good anyway at capturing in-game action.

And Hitpost has some money to make all of this happen. While they’re already making some revenue from Snapshot, the team also raised an angel round of funding last year from a number of high-profile angels including Keith RaboisShervin Pishevar, and Naval Ravikant. Khosla Ventures and RRE Ventures also contributed to the round which came in a little over $500,000, Krane says.

Hitpost currently has 8 employees (and 1 volunteer) and they’re based out of an office in the SoMa area of San Francisco. Look for their app to hit later this month.