

Show HN: Athletable - Leaderboards and player stats for office sports - nathanhoad
http://athletable.com

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ruswick
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 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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nathanhoad
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 :)

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prawn
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.

~~~
nathanhoad
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.

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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.

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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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twe4ked
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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nathanhoad
At the moment the ranking algorithm is a blur between ELO and the one used for
Tennis. I'd like to eventually give people the option per sport to decide
between a few different ranking methods.

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collypops
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.

Great app though. I think we'll have a lot of fun with this.

~~~
nathanhoad
That's a good idea to have the bulk invite. I might show a different form for
when the account owner adds the initial players and then the single form for
when there are already a few players.

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bwilliams18
That's more work than you need to do, just provide two options-bulk add, or
single add...the person is smart enough to know which to choose.

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rockyj
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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nathanhoad
Hmmm good idea. I might have a play with those sizes and see what I can work
out.

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zmillman
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)

<https://github.com/zmillman/foosball_tracker>

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fud
Cool, using it store our buckyball darts results!

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

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

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

