Ask HN: Review bettingly.com • Hacker News Board

I have some experience with fantasy sports, and my two cents is that it seems like you'll have a hard time getting traction. Although fantasy sports are popular, you're not really tying into any existing fantasy games. You're creating a brand new game from scratch, and that will be hard to do.

As a user, I couldn't care less about it being "social" or not. It's either going to be fun or not fun. I think the landing page should be overhauled to somehow show me why it would be fun. I wasn't convinced enough to join.

Also, I don't know what country you're targeting, but it's probably not mine (U.S.). Maybe if I were interested in cricket, soccer, or tennis, I would be more likely to join.

Edit: I tried clicking on the links for upcoming events, and they all redirected me to the home page. I wanted to browse around the site before joining but I wasn't able to.

Re: Ask HN: Review bettingly.com

#15

Post by mendicant » Thu, Mar 10, 2011, 4:19 PM UTC

Looks like a ton of fun.... but I don't follow football, cricket or tennis.

If there was American Football, hockey and basketball I can think of at least 10 people I'd send this site to right now.

Also, kudos to including a real user signup alongside the facebook signup.

Re: Ask HN: Review bettingly.com

#16

Post by Kuiper » Thu, Mar 10, 2011, 4:23 PM UTC

I was going to suggest registering betting.ly since it seems like an obvious domain hack, but it looks like it's already taken.

Re: Ask HN: Review bettingly.com

#17

Post by bhickey » Thu, Mar 10, 2011, 4:25 PM UTC

This is fairly common in the UK. Over here people use real money instead of funnymoney.

Re: Ask HN: Review bettingly.com

#18

Post by mohsen » Thu, Mar 10, 2011, 4:28 PM UTC

just a suggestion

for your richest players, if they don't have any change then the decimal points don't show up and the rows don't align as nice. maybe add that in there.

as i said, just a suggestion.

Re: Ask HN: Review bettingly.com

#19

Post by psb » Thu, Mar 10, 2011, 5:23 PM UTC

love the idea (partly cause I considered doing something like this previously). Here are some things you could do - Give the top performers a diary where they explain their thought processes about their bets, show what wagers the top betters have made (individually and in aggregate), and allow your users to join "teams" ie "team London" might compete against "team Liverpool". Also I would specify a fixed weekly bankroll to make it a fair competition. Anyway, best of luck!

Re: Ask HN: Review bettingly.com

#20

Post by qeorge » Thu, Mar 10, 2011, 5:28 PM UTC

railsbob wrote: post #8

dclaysmith wrote: post #4

I like the idea and would probably be interested... but I fall into the group that hates using Facebook to log in and prefer a short registration. There is not a chance I'd give access to my Wall and the "any time" access. Add a standard login process and I'll check it out.

Thanks! We have enabled email signups now :)

Looks like you've got it covered, but I thought this worth mentioning anyway. Facebook has a new registration/Connect option that can fall back to a normal form for those w/o FB:

http://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/registration/

Implementing it today on a client's site, its not too bad.