The Hurrdat and opendorse team at the Hurrdat open house last Friday, with co-founders Blake Lawrence and Adi Kunalic on the far left and right, respectively.
Hurrdat Social Media celebrated its second birthday last week with an open house and the reveal of its new software company, opendorse, which is set to launch in early 2013.
Opendorse was formerly known as The Hurrdat Athlete Engagement Program. Hurrdat, which is based in Lincoln, recently rebranded the software for scalability with the help of Pipeline, the entrepreneurial fellowship in which Hurrdat co-founder Blake Lawrence is currently participating.
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Hurrdat will remain a social media agency, exploring other ways to do online marketing, co-founder Adi Kunalic said. He said the basis of opendorse is it “helps brands connect to influencers.”
The software aims to reduce the amount of time and energy it takes for athletes to send out tweets promoting products.
About 120 professional athletes have signed up so far, Kunalic said, but the company is hoping to scale the software to eventually include bloggers and celebrities as well.
“We have connections with athletes,” said Kunalic, who along with Lawrence is a former University of Nebraska football player, “but influencers in general are the target.”
Here’s how opendorse works: A brand and an athlete put together a pre-negotiated contract regarding the number and nature of tweets the endorser will send out. The brand writes tweets about its product for the endorser, and those tweets are filtered through opendorse for approval. The endorser then chooses if he or she wants to send out the tweet.
Since we last checked in on Hurrdat’s digs in the Haymarket district, the company has expanded its office space and added five contract employees.
Kunalic said opendorse is looking for investment and hiring a couple of software developers to meet the needs of the new endeavor. He said “a lot of people are interested” in investing, but he declined to discuss specifics.
For more information on opendorse, check out the video below.
Credits: Photo from Hurrdat’s Facebook page. Video courtesy of opendorse.
