When Bryant Barr noticed a decline in Stephen Curry's social media activity within the last couple of years, he approached the NBA MVP and his old Davidson College roommate to find out why that was.
"'It's just too much of a hassle, it's too much noise, there's too much friction to make it worthwhile to spend time doing this,'" Barr told USA Today about what Curry told him.
That's when Barr, who previously worked for Nike and is currently attending Stanford Business School, came up with the idea to build the NBA All-Star his own social media platform. Barr called Jason Mayden, another former Nike employee, to help Curry connect with his fans in a new way. Curry invested in their project and together they came up with Slyce, which debuted last month.
Barr tells USA Today that Slyce is a social media platform that empowers "influencers," like a Stephen Curry, to choose questions and topics of interest with which they'd like to engage people. The platform's technology achieves that by using filters, as evidenced by Slyce using a filter, so that Curry could streamline his conversation about his hometown favorite NFL squad, the Carolina Panthers, during his Q&A with fans.
Barr says that Slyce's filters are 90 percent manual and 10 percent automated, giving "influencers" control, but also allowing for a sliver of random topics to be worked in the conversation as well.
Barr and Mayden want to bolster the filter enough so that it pinpoints the questions and topics that would be of interest to "influencers" for them, but told USA Today that would entail building a vast set of data, and it's too early in the game for Slyce to have that right now.
"(Traditional) communication channels have become extremely one-sided," Barr told USA Today. "And then you have a guy like Steph, who has millions of followers - the only way he can really interact with them is posting a picture and then walking away from the platform."
It will be intriguing to see whether Slyce picks up steam this year and if Curry could lure some of his fellow athletes to join the social media platform as "influencers."
