http://tribesports.com<p>The social network for sports lovers. Create your sports profile, celebrate your achievements, join Tribes, take Challenges, get motivated to do more in sports.<p>======<p>Hi all,<p>I presented on dogfooding at Tribesports at last week's London Hacker News meetup (http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/home/dogfooding). We received some really valuable feedback at the event, so we thought a rate-my-startup post might be of interest here; we'd certainly love to hear your thoughts.<p>About a year ago, we began building a new tool for sports lovers, a place where people can build up their complete sports profile (like Steve's here: http://tribesports.com/users/steve), join Tribes based on their sports interests and take on Challenges to get motivated to do more in sports.<p>We launched into open beta earlier this month, after about 3 months in private beta. You can sign up using email, Twitter or Facebook - a process we've tried to make as easy as possible.<p>A few tech details if anyone's interested: we're running Rails 3 on Ruby 1.9.2, with the following core gems: devise/omniauth for authentication, resque for background jobs, sunspot/solr for search, and capistrano for deployment. For development, we use cucumber for acceptance/integration tests, and rspec for unit tests.<p>Thanks very much for taking a look - and we're happy to answer any questions you might have, be they tech-related or otherwise...
Is there a reason you call them "sports people" instead of "athletes?" At first I thought it was for sports fans, but after poking around the site, only then did I realize it was more for people who were actually interested in doing sports together. Sort of like Meetup focused on sports.<p>Along with that, would it make sense to have also groups tied to specific locales, rather than just topics?
Hey Andrew. I enjoyed the talk (I was the big Irish guy who asked about people potentially gaming the leaderboard).<p>The site looks great and the timing is perfect as I am about to start a pretty significant fitness program in order to loose weight so I'll be relying on you guys for motivation!
I was skeptical at first, but this looks really cool. I just signed up and I'm excited to use it. I had used DailyBurn for a while, but the challenges and social aspects were disappointing. I think you've really nailed those things already. Nice job!
That's a pretty nice site, and I would certainly use it if were not for me having my passion somewhere else.<p>If you don't mind, may I ask how you got your initial users?
This is definitely an "otherwise" - why didn't you put in a clickable link?<p>Like this: <a href="http://tribesports.com" rel="nofollow">http://tribesports.com</a>