Matthew Smith of Real Estate Fan Pages stands in downtown Des Moines in the opening scene of his pitch video for the Dream Big Grow Here contest. Screenshot from myentre.net.
Edging out second place by more than 500 votes, Matthew Smith of Real Estate Fan Pages is the winner of Central Iowa division of MyEntre.Net‘s statewide Dream Big Grow Here contest.
Smith, the owner of S&G Real Estate Investments, will take home $5,000 from the local contest facilitated by the Business Innovation Zone and move on to compete in the statewide competition for a chance at $10,000.
Thanks to our sponsor
Locusic, the “Pandora for local music,” finished second with 3,187 votes.
“It means a lot,” Smith (left, photo courtesy of Smith) said in a phone interview this morning. “It means a lot to see an outpouring of support for me personally, and for this project, that support was very heartfelt and meant a lot to the business.”
Smith said he has done extensive market research and formed a team and that Real Estate Fan Pages plans to launch into beta in 60-90 days. The $5,000, he said, will be put straight into development, ongoing business expenses and project management.
“It is our dream to become the premier provider of Facebook applications for real estate agents and supplement that with the necessary continuing education on how to leverage the power of Facebook’s social media to increase their sales and build their brand,” Smith said an email interview yesterday.
When asked what he did to get out the vote, Smith replied: “You name it and we did it.” The efforts included spreading the message to bank tellers, title companies and law firms. Smith also bought an easy-to-remember URL, vote4matthew.com, that redirected to the voting page. At one point, he said, “I was upgrading from a medium to a large snow cone to get the snow cone guy to vote.”
Three of the five regional competitions for Dream Big Grow Here are still active and can be found at dreambiggrowhere.com. Cedar Valley is the other region closed, and its winner was Adrenaline X Mobile Laser Tag.
Also worth noting: a startup providing a similar product to Real Estate Fan Pages but for artists — RootMusic’s BandPage — raised a $16 million Series B round yesterday. As Smith builds out and launches his product, we’ll be sure to follow along.
Here’s Smith’s pitch video:
Note: Silicon Prairie News is a media sponsor of Dream Big Des Moines