

Rate our startup: Tribesports - a social network for sportspeople - andrewmcdonough

http://tribesports.com<p>The social network for sports lovers. Create your sports profile, celebrate your achievements, join Tribes, take Challenges, get motivated to do more in sports.<p>======<p>Hi all,<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Thanks very much for taking a look - and we're happy to answer any questions you might have, be they tech-related or otherwise...
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athst
Is there a reason you call them "sports people" instead of "athletes?" At
first I thought it was for sports fans, but after poking around the site, only
then did I realize it was more for people who were actually interested in
doing sports together. Sort of like Meetup focused on sports.

Along with that, would it make sense to have also groups tied to specific
locales, rather than just topics?

~~~
urbanautomaton
Hi athst,

Thanks for your comment and questions. We went with "sportspeople" because our
research showed it was regarded as meaning "people who do sport" in the most
places - in the UK, for instance, "athletes" is often (but not always)
interpreted as referring specifically to people who do track-and-field
athletics.

You're quite right, we're not aiming to be a sports fan site - we're very much
focused on the sportsperson/athlete. We're not really a Meetup-for-sports,
though (although obviously it's great if our members find new sporting
partners on the site, and many have already). In fact a huge amount of
interaction is between people who are never likely to meet; a Scot who cycles
100 miles before breakfast encouraging a mother-of-two who's working towards
their her 5k, for example. It's been great to see how our users will give
motivation freely, no matter what someone's level.

On the question of locale-specific Tribes, we certainly have a few of these,
and users are welcome to create whatever Tribes they would find useful. We
also have event-specific challenges for specific marathons, which are
naturally localised. What we've found, though, is that our users seem to
respond best to Tribes and Challenges that are globally relevant; things like
the get fit without joining a gym Tribe (<http://tribesports.com/tribes/get-
fit-without-joining-a-gym>), or the 5 minute plank Challenge
([http://tribesports.com/challenges/hold-the-plank-pose-
for-5-...](http://tribesports.com/challenges/hold-the-plank-pose-
for-5-minutes)).

You're absolutely right, though, more location-specific resources for users
will be a key feature in future, and it's certainly something we'd like to
develop further.

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Peroni
Hey Andrew. I enjoyed the talk (I was the big Irish guy who asked about people
potentially gaming the leaderboard).

The site looks great and the timing is perfect as I am about to start a pretty
significant fitness program in order to loose weight so I'll be relying on you
guys for motivation!

~~~
andrewmcdonough
Thanks for your comments. It was a good question at the meetup, and one we get
asked regularly. We will definitely help motivate you. If you sign up, let me
know your username and I will make sure we give you support. I'm
<http://tribesports.com/users/andrew>

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imp
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!

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dadads
That's a pretty nice site, and I would certainly use it if were not for me
having my passion somewhere else.

If you don't mind, may I ask how you got your initial users?

~~~
urbanautomaton
Hi dadads, thanks for your comment.

Our userbase has expanded from an early base of friends and family, then
through active seeding within carefully picked sports communities, and moved
forwards with a great response from users themselves; our invitations system
worked very well for us in the early stages, allowing users to send out
exclusive invitations to their friends.

We've been really lucky to have such great early adopters - getting a power
user or two early on is a huge motivation, gets you excellent feedback on what
is and isn't working, and really makes the community feel alive, which is what
keeps people coming back...

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ColinWright
This is definitely an "otherwise" - why didn't you put in a clickable link?

Like this: <http://tribesports.com>

~~~
urbanautomaton
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.)

~~~
ColinWright
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.

~~~
urbanautomaton
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...

~~~
ColinWright
Indeed.

My suggestion would be to create a landing page for HN readers, and then link
to that. Put something attractive (but accurate!) as your title, and submit a
link to the landing page. There you can solicit opinions and suggestions, ask
for comments, explain your reasoning, _etc._

That would also be much more readable than a large slab of darkish grey on
lighter grey.

Just my thoughts - I don't speak for the management, and have a tendency to
strong opinions, unsupported by facts.

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dsawler
Interesting. You should also post this on reddit.com/r/fitness.

~~~
urbanautomaton
Good suggestion, thanks. :-)

