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

athletable.com

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

#11

Post by nathanhoad »

ruswick wrote: post #10

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. It seems like a complex solution to a negligible issue. EDIT: More so than the price, the work involved in implementing a syst…

It's certainly not for everyone but it's like the 37signals guys always say: scratch an itch. This has been an itch for a few places I've worked at so I figured I'd make something. Thanks for the feedback though :)

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

#12

Post by pserwylo »

fud wrote: post #2

Cool, using it store our buckyball darts results!

Thank you, for putting the term "buckyball darts" in my vocabulary. I shall take it with me to work tomorrow, and hassle the dev next to me who has buckyballs sitting on his desk :)

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

#13

Post by prawn »

nathanhoad wrote: post #11
ruswick wrote: post #10

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. It seems like a complex solution to a negligible issue. EDIT: More so than the price, the work involved in implementing a syst…

It's certainly not for everyone but it's like the 37signals guys always say: scratch an itch. This has been an itch for a few places I've worked at so I figured I'd make something. Thanks for the feedback though :)

A $15/mo itch though?

We play a lot of office table tennis and even have occasional tournaments with online stats, a trophy, live tweeting, etc. We're looking at rolling our own leaderboard that calculates a running champion (rather than event-based champ) and I'd have considered a once-off fee to use this, but closed the tab at $15/mo. And that's even knowing it would probably take one of us a few hours of stuffing around to build something.

Hope that feedback is useful.

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

#14

Post by pserwylo »

nathanhoad wrote: post #11
ruswick wrote: post #10

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. It seems like a complex solution to a negligible issue. EDIT: More so than the price, the work involved in implementing a syst…

It's certainly not for everyone but it's like the 37signals guys always say: scratch an itch. This has been an itch for a few places I've worked at so I figured I'd make something. Thanks for the feedback though :)

It's been an itch at our work for the past five years, at least for me anyway (Table Tennis is our game of choice).

Unfortunately, this is not the type of thing the boss would be willing to pay for. He'd more likely just get us to build a module for our product to do it - in the vein of our "Pizza Friday" pizza ordering module (Tallies up all of the half-and-half orders, shows a history of orders in the "fat graph" and most importantly, prevents people ordering unless they've done their timesheets for the last two months).

However, I hope it works out, because it looks like a nice piece of software.

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

#16

Post by nathanhoad »

pserwylo wrote: post #14
nathanhoad wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's certainly not for everyone but it's like the 37signals guys always say: scratch an itch. This has been an itch for a few places I've worked at so I figured I'd make something. Thanks for the feedback though :)

It's been an itch at our work for the past five years, at least for me anyway (Table Tennis is our game of choice). Unfortunately, this is not the type of thing the boss would be willing to pay for. He'd more likely just get us to build a module for our product to do it - in the vein of our "Pizza Friday" pizza ordering module (Tallies up all of the half-and-half orders, shows a history of orders in the "fat graph" a…

Thanks for the feedback.

If you never get around to building the module (I was toying around with the leaderboard/stats app idea for a few years too :-P) then you are always welcome to join Athletable :)

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

#17

Post by nathanhoad »

prawn wrote: post #13
nathanhoad wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's certainly not for everyone but it's like the 37signals guys always say: scratch an itch. This has been an itch for a few places I've worked at so I figured I'd make something. Thanks for the feedback though :)

A $15/mo itch though? We play a lot of office table tennis and even have occasional tournaments with online stats, a trophy, live tweeting, etc. We're looking at rolling our own leaderboard that calculates a running champion (rather than event-based champ) and I'd have considered a once-off fee to use this, but closed the tab at $15/mo. And that's even knowing it would probably take one of us a few hours of stuffing…

Yeah pricing is hard. All Athletable trials are 45 days at the moment so I figure I've got a few weeks of pricing tests to work it out.

Cheers for the feedback.

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

#18

Post by Evbn »

fud wrote: post #15
budgieking wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bucky ball darts? I can imagine but please elaborate :P

Here is our board - simple but effective - http://twitpic.com/ber15u

Please share the postmortem after the first person swallows a couple of stray magnets.

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

#19

Post by hooande »

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.

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).

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.

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

#20

Post by jlkinsel »

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...
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