Show HN: Sporty – An app for creating and joining sports activities nearby
sportyapp.com
sportyapp.com
As someone who has organized sport groups from small (single weekly pickup games in the mid west) to large (300+ people vying for spots in three games a week in a major city), I've looked into various sport-specific apps. But in the end, I've always come back to Meetup. They used to have more rough edges, but they've gotten much better.
FYI, here are Meetup features I can't live without as a sports event organizer:
- auto-scheduling of games
- option to make RSVP required (drop-ins are just a hassle, b/c then you never know how many people to plan around)
- online payment collection ("Here's my $3" is a waay more reliable indicator of interest/attendance than "I'm in" - this changed everything for us, and covers our facility rental)
- group-wide + member-specific messaging
- an app and account most people already have and are willing to use
Don't mean to sound pessimistic, just sharing thoughts - best of luck!
I have personally seen Meetup used fairly liberally in Korea, HK and Singapore.
We are absolutely going to implement several of the features you mentioned, and hadn't though about some of them, so thanks again!
For example, I'm in multiple FB groups for playing pick-up in my area and see apps like Jogabo mentioned every now and then yet it never seems to gain traction and people just resort to posting on FB.
In the past, just like you, we used facebook groups and/or messages/chats back and fourth to friends.
Hopefully the app will be good enough for people to start out with their existing friends and then more and more people nearby will show up.
Because.... what value does it bring for Joe who's living in SF, that Jane from NY wants to go for a work-out? I think "importing" events from other sites is one option to get things going (still - quite a lot of effort). Other idea - is to start locally, run a big ad campaign, get in touch with sport centers, etc, then "conquer" other cities, one by one.
Good luck! :)
It's also hard when you refuse to use black hat and spammy tactics ;) Hopefully you guys won't have to resort to that.
We have moved out of this space with Jogabo (the meetup for sports... Well for us it was for soccer only). We are now focusing on making a social app for players with a twist of discovery. We think it will solve the chicken and egg problem.
We're not giving up, because the situation is just plain lame as it stands now. Facebook, email, whatsapp just doesn't cut it. We're in Lisbon right now and everyone and their mom plays soccer here yet it's still as much of a pain. The only games we've actually played were through local Jogabo users actually! Happy to tell you more if interested. Just ping me on twitter
E.g. we play weekly, organize the event through Facebook for years but still a pain sometimes. Somebody don't RSVP but still show up, so we are odd. Also Facebook events don't make it possible to limit the number of guests. If you make it really easy to use and useful enough such a level that existing private groups will use it (and they stick because it makes their life easier), new people will come.
If anyone in Seattle wants to play some basketball near greenwood / phinney ridge area, I'm hosting at 7pm tonite at the Greenwood Elementary outdoor courts! Event is public on this app.
Again, not trying to shoot your app down, it is the greatest idea ever, but if you want to spend a significant amount of time on this now, you should be aware of this:
Why did none of these work out? High CPA, incredibly high critical mass and churn. It will be very hard for you to acquire users as the only targeting you can do is "sports", very broad and very competitive. Secondly, your critical mass per city to cover all sports is around 10,000 users. Only then, will your users be able to find activities to join when they want. However, 10,000 users per city is very, very hard to get. This is the main problem why all the social discovery apps even with millions of funding didn't manage to gain traction, see Highlight, Solar.me, Spots, Spontacts etc.
Lastly, as your app doesn't address a certain customer, your users won't be able to identify with the app much and this will make it hard to keep them. Hope that gave some insight.
If you search on Angel list for "meet like-minded people" and you will find some. Here some from the top of my head Spontacts, Sporty, Spots-app, Woofound, Highlight, Sonar.me, Vingle. This article is also very insightful http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/07/ambient-location-didnt-work...
But... I don't have an iPhone. Does it make sense to leave most people out, even for an initial launch? Especially since your biggest challenge will be getting critical mass in different locations.
For us, as a small, bootstrapped startup it's tough to do everything at the same time. It's also very important for us to get the experience right on one platform first, before we move on to different ones.
This is only our version one and we need to look at the feedback to see if we've made the right choices or need to change fundamental things.
Also, some advice on your webpage. I am not going to bother downloading your app. I'm on my computer. However if you geolocated me based on my IP and then said "There are currently 5 games for Today, and 3 for next Thursday, in City Name", then I would be a lot more compelled. I am just skeptical, since a lot of these Show HN posts are duds.
You'll probably run into the chicken/egg problem of launching an app that requires network effects. One way to solve that that I think would work good here is to provide ancillary benefits to installing and using your app over the competitors (meetup). For example, some stat tracking capabilities might be a great differentiator that would hopefully motivate those with pre-existing leagues to install and use your app.
Stats are very interesting. Especially perhaps partnering with some other apps that already do that extremely well. Who knows. Good suggestion.
and yes, stats are interesting (...says the person creating a real-time stats app for amateur sports =)
- I don't have Facebook, how do I create an account?
- Do you really, really need accounts at all? And if you do, can't you at least just show me activities happening around me, and let me sign up later?
I'd love to give more feedback but I'm stuck outside your app.
Will absolutely implement self login and twitter connect in future updates.
Yeah, I do think people could enjoy more than one or two sports, especially for the occasional level. E.g. soccer and basketball regularly, and then perhaps something like running and volleyball a few times a month or something.
We have no idea though, will be interesting to see the data after a month.
- Why navigation bar on bottom of screen?
- Sometimes close is in left, sometimes on bottom. Pick one.
- Overusing the blurred background pattern. Use it sparingly to provide context, or layering.
- 3 dots icon is sharing?
- No search for finding activities
- When you tap a sport, it spawns multiple view controllers. Leads to crashing the app.
I like the consistent use of blurred backgrounds too. However on the sports scroll I'd wait until the scroll has settled to change the background image -- when you're scrolling quickly through the list it can cause the app to stutter.
Great work overall! Your app is beautiful.
You're 100% right on the sports scroller. Will improve this greatly in the future and try to get it really silky smooth. Actually using Path's FastImageCache in today's version. https://github.com/path/FastImageCache
Me and a group of friends used to get together for Ultimate Frisby every now and then, and I had always envisioned an app like this. We used SMS for communication, but that is so limited and you have to exchange numbers, etc. Good job!
I'd presume that most people who are doing sports are fairly active and own a mobile phone.