31–40 of 50 posts
Why an app? This is an online service not a sodding "app".
Why does something have to be an online service, and not an app? I'd presume that most people who are doing sports are fairly active and own a mobile phone.
This is launch day and I'm absolutely thrilled to get it out into the wild! Appreciate any and all feedback! :)
Me and a group of friends used to get together for Ultimate Frisby every now and then, and I had always envisioned an app like this. We used SMS for communication, but that is so limited and you have to exchange numbers, etc. Good job!
Congrats on shipping! That's an awesome achievement. You'll probably run into the chicken/egg problem of launching an app that requires network effects. One way to solve that that I think would work good here is to provide ancillary benefits to installing and using your app over the competitors (meetup). For example, some stat tracking capabilities might be a great differentiator that would hopefully motivate those w…
and yes, stats are interesting (...says the person creating a real-time stats app for amateur sports =)
For soccer, do you know Jogabo app? Why don't you partner on specific sport community apps intead of making all sports in the same time with Sporty? It will be harder to have a critical mass for all kind of sports and avoiding the chicken and egg problem.... PS : Do you really think everybody can/like play at amateur/occasional level more than 1 or 2 sports?
I'm curious what you say to people who ask "Why not Meetup?" As someone who has organized sport groups from small (single weekly pickup games in the mid west) to large (300+ people vying for spots in three games a week in a major city), I've looked into various sport-specific apps. But in the end, I've always come back to Meetup. They used to have more rough edges, but they've gotten much better. FYI, here are Meetup…
This is launch day and I'm absolutely thrilled to get it out into the wild! Appreciate any and all feedback! :)
How are you solving the chicken and the egg problem that plagues most location-based apps? For example, I'm in multiple FB groups for playing pick-up in my area and see apps like Jogabo mentioned every now and then yet it never seems to gain traction and people just resort to posting on FB.
It's also hard when you refuse to use black hat and spammy tactics ;) Hopefully you guys won't have to resort to that.
We have moved out of this space with Jogabo (the meetup for sports... Well for us it was for soccer only). We are now focusing on making a social app for players with a twist of discovery. We think it will solve the chicken and egg problem.
We're not giving up, because the situation is just plain lame as it stands now. Facebook, email, whatsapp just doesn't cut it. We're in Lisbon right now and everyone and their mom plays soccer here yet it's still as much of a pain. The only games we've actually played were through local Jogabo users actually! Happy to tell you more if interested. Just ping me on twitter
Again, not trying to shoot your app down, it is the greatest idea ever, but if you want to spend a significant amount of time on this now, you should be aware of this:
Why did none of these work out? High CPA, incredibly high critical mass and churn. It will be very hard for you to acquire users as the only targeting you can do is "sports", very broad and very competitive. Secondly, your critical mass per city to cover all sports is around 10,000 users. Only then, will your users be able to find activities to join when they want. However, 10,000 users per city is very, very hard to get. This is the main problem why all the social discovery apps even with millions of funding didn't manage to gain traction, see Highlight, Solar.me, Spots, Spontacts etc.
Lastly, as your app doesn't address a certain customer, your users won't be able to identify with the app much and this will make it hard to keep them. Hope that gave some insight.
As always, this is the greatest idea ever, spontaneously meeting like-minded people/social discovery. Hundreds of startups have tried it and this idea pops up on the HN front page every couple of months. However, it has never worked out. Again, not trying to shoot your app down, it is the greatest idea ever, but if you want to spend a significant amount of time on this now, you should be aware of this: Why did none o…