
Ask HN: Review my startup - hammadnasir
Would love to have your feedback on my startup named Sportal - it helps you find players in your locality for playing any sport you want.<p>Here&#x27;s the link to the app: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;play.google.com&#x2F;store&#x2F;apps&#x2F;details?id=com.getsportalapp.sportal&amp;hl=en
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wsetchell
I'm probably in your target market. I host/organize pickup games in several
sports. I attend lots of other pickup sports. Finding other games, and getting
people to come to my games is a constant struggle.

Kudos for shipping something, that's awesome!

Feedback:

Network effects are working against you. If lots of events are on here, it
might be a useful place to search for sports. If lots of people search for
sports on here, it might be a useful place to recruit people to my events.

Without either, this provides no value to me.

Product:

* As a person who wants play a sport, this app is not useful to me. There were no "events" nearby me to join.

* As a person who organizes pickup sports with friends, I'm not sure why I'd use this over my favorite messaging app to organize.

* As a person who wants to recruit new people to join pickup sports game, this app isn't useful for me. I help "advertise/promote" my pickup games on email lists, FB pages, and a meetup page. Creating an event here doesn't seem worth my time since I'm not convinced that it'll bring in people to play with.

Technical * Facebook login didn't work for me, it said some error about a bad
location or something.

* Loading is painfully slow.

* It crashed after I tried to create a "I want to play sports" event.

~~~
arikr
To OP - read this carefully as this is great, honest, kind feedback. Also, to
OP don't fixate on the technical feedback - the non-technical feedback here is
even more important (assuming your goal is a product people want).

To wsetchell/the feedback giver - kudos on giving great, honest and kind
feedback.

~~~
hammadnasir
Yes, indeed it is a great feedback and I'm taking it into total consideration.

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Communitivity
First, kudos for the app! Creating any product and shipping it is a sucess.

That said, I suggest you take a look at
[http://bestpitchdecks.com/](http://bestpitchdecks.com/) to see some of the
additional information you need in order to make a startup.

Having a MVP is a great start, but if you haven't done customer research, SWOT
market analysis, etc. you don't know whether the app you created is a real MVP
that can progress you down the road to product-market fit, or a collection of
features that you think would be good (and you may be right, but without
customer input, you might not be profitably right).

~~~
justboxing
> SWOT market analysis

First time I've come across this acronym. Googled it to find SWOT expands to
"Strengths, Weaknesses Opportunities, Threats".

Any inexpensive way to do this for an MVP? I'm currently working on shipping
my 1st side-project and am very interested in learing more about how I can
utilize SWOT approach.

~~~
shshhdhs
When you say inexpensive, what do you mean? In terms of time or money?

It's inexpensive to do (just use a whiteboard or piece of paper), but can take
time to get the data and analyze it without bias. Getting feedback from
potential users on the weaknesses & opportunities takes time too.

To reduce this effort, spend 30 minutes to draw up a cursory SWOT and then
continue to think about it while in the shower, driving, on the bus, etc. The
answers will come to you over time.

~~~
justboxing
Thanks. By inexpensive, I meant in terms of money.

Example:

> Getting feedback from potential users on the weaknesses & opportunities
> takes time too.

I know there are individual sites that let you poll users, or send them
questions or surveys etc. But the good ones cost money. I don't mind paying at
all, but wanted to know if there are any good websites / Saas etc that will
help do each piece of the SWOT. Or maybe I am overanalyzing this?

P.S. My project is a niche job board. Any ideas how I could try to do the SWOT
analysis?

~~~
Communitivity
There are sites that let you ask your users questions, and building a mailing
list can help you create your list of users.

I think you'll get much more bang for your buck if you talk directly to
customers though. With a survey you can only ask the questions you know to
ask. The more important questions? They are the ones you don't know yet that
you need to ask. You'll find out about those from one-on-one conversations
with potential users. Very little beats getting out of the office and talking
with potential users face to face.

If you can't do individual user visits then going to a relevant conference and
talking to people there can be similar - just be aware that lots of people
there are rushed.

Regarding a SWOT how-to... a full thing would be a book, or blog post series,
but some tips and URLs follow.

* Strengths and Weaknesses address internal factors.

* Opportunities and Threats address external factors.

* Strengths are things (tangible or intangible) that give you a competitive advantage (e.g., you have an existing business relationship with businesses in the tri-state area).

* Weaknesses are things that might hold you back, hinder your growth, or erode your strengths (e.g., not enough money, not enough technical talent).

* Opportunities are events representing positive shifts in your environment that you could take advantage of (e.g., new technologies, new markets), or areas where your competitors are weak.

* Threats are events representing negative shifts in your environment (e.g., commoditization, a big name like Google entering your niche), or areas where your competitors are strong.

* One technique you can use is to roleplay your competitors. What makes you as them be confident, and what makes you as them be afraid?

* Another technique is to segment your users into personas (fictional user characters that represent with their traits a segment of your user base) and for each use an Ishikawa (aka Fishbone) diagram to do a root cause analysis of what made them choose to buy. Also do the opposite to analyze what could make them pass on buying. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishikawa_diagram](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishikawa_diagram)

[http://articles.bplans.co.uk/marketing-a-business/how-to-
per...](http://articles.bplans.co.uk/marketing-a-business/how-to-perform-swot-
analysis/300)

[http://www.leadershipthoughts.com/how-to-use-a-swot-
analysis...](http://www.leadershipthoughts.com/how-to-use-a-swot-analysis/)

~~~
justboxing
Thank you so much for all the info! I really appreciate the help.

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peterkshultz
My two cents:

\- As a fan of pick-up basketball games, I could definitely imagine myself
using this (in fact, I've read people ask for this exact app). I wouldn't use
it unless there was a good deal of activity in my area. Try and incentivize
first-time downloads.

\- It'll be difficult for people to find your app with the name Sportal--it's
the name of a Bulgarian sports site. Aside from ease of discovery via search
engines, there might even be a copyright issue.

\- Try to get on to iOS as soon as possible to expand your audience.

~~~
hammadnasir
Thank you for giving this nice and small feedback.. I got your points!

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clairity
you've done some nice work on the app! hopefully that was fulfilling in
itself.

(but there's always a 'but'...) most small businesses (startups or otherwise)
are a marketing problem, not a technology problem.

i've seen a ton of event discovery apps like this over the years (i even
worked on one myself! =), and, while it seems logical on the surface for
something like this to exist, such apps almost never solve a burning need for
users.

discovery just isn't something recreational athletes go to an app for. social
networks and search are generally good enough initially. and once you find a
single location or event (in my case, a basketball league), your now expanded
network provides all the further discovery you need (including other sports
you like).

because of this, every casual sports discovery app i've seen either dies or
pivots very quickly.

i would advise you to think about what else you can solve in this space that
doesn't have a substitute product (e.g., don't pick messaging, as that's well
covered by social networks as well).

~~~
hammadnasir
Thank you for the feedback and kind words. :)

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psyklic
I cofounded a social discovery company a while back, so have thought through
similar issues.

Consider a dating site -- at the minimum, it must laboriously onboard a number
of users at each location.

Your site faces a much more difficult challenge -- you not even need lots of
users per location, but you also need them to be continually posting events. I
encourage you to consider how to add value to users even when there is no
constant stream of events (and perhaps even when there are few other local
users).

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gamerDude
I think this could be awesome. Especially for sports leagues. I play some
sports my friends don't play, but there isn't a great way to find a team. And
most leagues have a shitty system to sign your name and hope a team needs a
spare. But all in all, it's kinda shitty. It would be awesome to be able to
join a sports league and connect with everyone else who doesn't have a team so
we could make one.

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insomniacity
Don't forget that Sportal is an existing name (I saw it advertised in the
90s/early 2000s), and people _will_ try going to sportal.com.

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alexkon
How do you grow your local user base in your town?

~~~
hammadnasir
Good question! This is what is needed to be figured out. I'm thinking about
this. Do you have any ideas or advice on this? Please let me know.

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vasilakisfil
I would love the same app for tennis partners :)

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metaphorm
does it do games as well as sports?

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hammadnasir
it helps in finding players for playing outdoor sports and not for mobile or
video games.

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metaphorm
I'm asking about games that would require a similar sized group of people that
an outdoor sport would. board games, roleplaying games, etc.

~~~
hammadnasir
haven't thought about considering board games etc into this but this is
something we can think of integrating in the app.

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bdcravens
An Android app isn't a startup.

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hammadnasir
then what are Instagram, Uber, WhatsApp, Tinder and Snapchat?

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owebmaster
They are startups with mobile apps.

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tehlike
let's not be nitpicky. He apparently wants it as a startup, maybe not as big
as snapchat/instagram, but they all started with an app.

also - how do you know he didn't incorporate the company already?

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owebmaster
there is no point in calling your project a startup if you are only a wannabe
fasting growing app. You can call it but people will appear to contradict you.
And it is not a problem to have an app instead of a startup. I actually think
it is a lot better and less biased.

~~~
nkkollaw
> will appear to contradict you

Sometimes "startup" is used instead of "project". Is it really that big a
deal? All this time wasted over such an insignificant detail.

