(The quote in the title is from rapper Sir Mix-a-Lot in this Business Insider article)
These guys are so good at making noise that I almost feel silly piling on, but since the cat is well out of the bag I wanted to at least confirm the news that Giant Thinkwell is our newest addition to the Founders Co-op family.
We got to know co-founders Kyle Kesterson and Kevin Leneway during last summer’s TechStars Seattle program. They’re insanely creative guys, and at first we weren’t sure what to make of them or their product – a Tamagotchi-like celebrity game called “Raising Uncle Jesse”. But the more time we spent with them, the more we liked what we saw.
When fellow TechStars alum (and former Microsoft and Cranium marketer) Adam Tratt joined the team we got even more excited – as did the gang at Madrona Ventures – and got out our checkbook earlier this year.
The team just shipped their first production game – a Facebook-based celebrity quiz show starring Grammy-winning rapper Sir Mix-a-Lot – but they’ve been hard at work for months on the underlying platform. The core insight is that “conversation marketing” has begun to penetrate forward-thinking corporations but hasn’t yet become the norm for celebrity fan engagement. Giant Thinkwell is building social media tools and infrastructure specifically tuned to the needs of the entertainment business – allowing media personalities to engage with (and monetize) their fan bases in fun, creative and scalable ways that the mainstream tools aren’t well-suited to.
I just learned that Mix-N-Match was featured on Jimmy Fallon last night, so I guess I’ll just shut up now and let these guys do the talking from here on…