Show HN: Athletable - Leaderboards and player stats for office sports | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Athletable - Leaderboards and player stats for office sports

athletable.com

37 pointsnathanhoad24 comments

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.

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 :)

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.

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.

It's been an itch at our work for the past five years, at least for me anyway (Table Tennis is our game of choice).

Unfortunately, this is not the type of thing the boss would be willing to pay for. He'd more likely just get us to build a module for our product to do it - in the vein of our "Pizza Friday" pizza ordering module (Tallies up all of the half-and-half orders, shows a history of orders in the "fat graph" and most importantly, prevents people ordering unless they've done their timesheets for the last two months).

However, I hope it works out, because it looks like a nice piece of software.

Thanks for the feedback.

If you never get around to building the module (I was toying around with the leaderboard/stats app idea for a few years too :-P) then you are always welcome to join Athletable :)

In my group that would use it (a college fraternity), we'd definitely be up for putting in the effort for this (lots of utility derived from trash talking, etc). I cannot imagine, however, that we'd pay $15/month for it.

A related website http://athleague.com/ (runs our school's IM sports) has options to purchase team paraphernalia or related things through their websites. As a college student, I can't say I know much about how that would be monetized in an office setting.

Cheers for the comments. While Athletable is more targeted at companies it would be cool to try and find a way for it to work for schools as well. Can you shoot me an email at nathan [at] nathanhoad [dot] net so we can have a chat.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Cool, using it store our buckyball darts results!

Cheers. I have no idea what that is but let me know if Athletable can accommodate it any better :)

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

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

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

Thank you, for putting the term "buckyball darts" in my vocabulary. I shall take it with me to work tomorrow, and hassle the dev next to me who has buckyballs sitting on his desk :)

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