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Show HN: Athletable - Leaderboards and player stats for office sports

37 pointsby nathanhoadover 12 years ago

8 comments

ruswickover 12 years ago
The idea is novel, but it's a solution to a trivial problem. Most companies probably don't pay any significant amount of thought to sports standings. Fewer still would take the time out of their day to contend with some sort of system to keep track everything, much less pay for such a system.<p>It seems like a complex solution to a negligible issue.<p>EDIT: More so than the price, the work involved in implementing a system like this is probably the biggest deterrent. Games are a casual thing, and most people will be unwilling to tabulate and record everything after playing.
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hooandeover 12 years ago
Can I ask why you're charging for this at all? The cost to you has to be close to negligible. Even with expensive hosting, I would be surprised if you had to pay more than $200/mo at the height of popularity.<p>You might want to look into sponsorship. No need for banner ads, just create one or two "sponsored by" slots or messages. Give them away at first to your friends or companies you like at first. If the site becomes popular enough that hosting costs are an issue, there will be people willing to pay to get their name out there (office products, other office related software).<p>A lot of people, especially at 37Signals, have this "If you're not charging money for your software, you're a sucker" attitude. That can be true, but it's certainly not the only advice for every situation. A lot of people have trouble differentiating between "growing business" and "cool thing that I made". Unless you have some kind of hidden costs, you might get much more traction by just putting this out there.
jlkinselover 12 years ago
Interesting idea - I wouldn't try to monetize off the players, but gathering data and advertising. You've got an idea that reflects real world "social" - not people posting photos of kittens, but folks who are actually meeting, playing, and interacting with each other. Seems like that data would have a lot of value...
twe4kedover 12 years ago
Looks good, it would be cool if you added some sort of proper ranking for certain games. Something similar to ELO where everyone is ranked and you win more points by beating someone that is ranked higher.
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collypopsover 12 years ago
This is looking very polished already. My biggest barrier to entry was having to go through the invite process for each person in my office, so I'd prefer to have a single form that you can add multiple people to, then submit once. You could even take advantage of the fact that most people in a workplace will have a common email suffix, and pre-fill that.<p>Great app though. I think we'll have a lot of fun with this.
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rockyjover 12 years ago
Nice work, great design. Just one thing imho, the font size of "Athletable" is less than the description so your site name doesn't really "hit" me. The first thing I read on your site is "Pool, ping pong ...". I would recommend making "Athletable" a bit larger.
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zmillmanover 12 years ago
I guess this is a pretty common itch. I scratched our office's with a weekend project. (it's open source if you want to host your own)<p><a href="https://github.com/zmillman/foosball_tracker" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/zmillman/foosball_tracker</a>
fudover 12 years ago
Cool, using it store our buckyball darts results!
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