Rate our startup: Tribesports - a social network for sportspeople

http://tribesports.com

The social network for sports lovers. Create your sports profile, celebrate your achievements, join Tribes, take Challenges, get motivated to do more in sports.

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Hi all,

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.

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.

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.

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.

Thanks very much for taking a look - and we're happy to answer any questions you might have, be they tech-related or otherwise...

They're auto-generated, and aren't enabled in "ask HN" OPs (as I understand it, at least). I guess this is to prevent people link-spamming...

(Edit - thanks for providing one. I'm another dev at Tribesports, by the way.)

Well, exactly. That's why people often put in a "reply" that includes a clickable link, and I was wondering why you didn't.

Alternatively, why not submit a link to the site as the URL, and your question as the title? Submissions that don't include links have a ranking penalty, so you're doing yourself down by submitting it the way you did.

Ah right - we weren't aware of the ranking penalty. Previous "rate my startup" submissions were pretty universally non-linked ones, so we went with that, assuming direct links were specifically frowned upon for these posts for some reason. Live and learn...

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!