Social media man­agers and con­tent man­agers inclined toward nov­el­ty and inno­va­tion might do well to take heed of the Lock­er­Dome sto­ry – the explo­sive­ly grow­ing social media web­site spe­cial­iz­ing in pro­fes­sion­al sports for pro­fes­sion­al athletes.

For pro­fes­sion­al ath­letes, the startup’s 30-year old CEO and co-founder, Gabe Lozana, explains that a Lock­er­Dome net­work is “like a Face­book fan page on steroids.” And with eight mil­lion month­ly unique vis­i­tors drop­ping by over the last 13 months, he’s not exaggerating.

Lock­er­Dome offers an online plat­form for pro­fes­sion­al ath­letes, sport­ing media celebri­ties and sports brands to ampli­fy their social media pres­ence. Since there are 1,475 of them, it’s clear that it’s become quite the hub for this goal.

A game chang­ing encounter

Things weren’t always so daz­zling­ly suc­cess­ful, how­ev­er. After its launch in 2008, the start­up limped around for its first four years until a chance encounter turned into a game chang­er. Lozano had a con­ver­sa­tion with his fel­low St. Louis res­i­dent Jim McK­elvey – the man who found­ed mobile pay­ments firm Square. The meet­ing led to a rebirth and Lozana re-invent­ed his brain­child as a sports site that would fea­ture pro­fes­sion­al athletes.

And boy did that re-think pay off. Exec­u­tives pre­dict that Lock­er­Dome is on course to attract 20 mil­lion month­ly unique vis­i­tors over the next year. Back in Decem­ber, the St, Louis Busi­ness Jour­nal report­ed that the start­up had passed the 3 mil­lion unique month­ly vis­i­tors mark. Just a fort­night lat­er it had to pub­lish an update that Lock­er­Dome had passed the 4 mil­lion mark.

Unsur­pris­ing­ly, it’s man­aged to raise $3 mil­lion and Lozano is con­fi­dent that by March 31^st   there’ll be anoth­er $5 mil­lion in the cof­fers, bring­ing the total to $8 mil­lion. It’s heav­i­ly reliant on adver­tis­ing, but giv­en that it’s free accounts attract a core audi­ence of afflu­ent 18 to 34 year-old males, Madi­son Avenue is sali­vat­ing like Pavlov’s dogs.

Repeat­ing Twitter?

Lozano thinks big­ger things are to come, and likens Lock­er­Dome to Twit­ter in 2008, the point when it began to real­ly explode and become a glob­al phenomenon.

This ambi­tion is no mere pipedream – his com­pa­ny is get­ting noticed by the sports busi­ness indus­try. Here’s what Devin Lac­erte of sports enter­tain­ment and lifestyle mar­ket­ing agency Octa­gon had to say about it, “What Gabe’s com­pa­ny is doing is phe­nom­e­nal. Gar­ner­ing so many unique vis­i­tors in such a short time is noth­ing short of incredible.”