Rate our startup: Tribesports - a social network for sportspeople

15 points by andrewmcdonough 15 years ago | 14 comments

http://tribesports.com

The social network for sports lovers. Create your sports profile, celebrate your achievements, join Tribes, take Challenges, get motivated to do more in sports.

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Hi all,

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.

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.

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.

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.

Thanks very much for taking a look - and we're happy to answer any questions you might have, be they tech-related or otherwise...

athst 15 years ago |

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 15 years ago | |

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-...).

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.

Peroni 15 years ago |

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 15 years ago | |

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

imp 15 years ago |

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!

dadads 15 years ago |

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 15 years ago | |

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...

ColinWright 15 years ago |

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

Like this: http://tribesports.com

urbanautomaton 15 years ago | |

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 15 years ago | | |

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.

dsawler 15 years ago |

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

urbanautomaton 15 years ago | |

Good suggestion, thanks. :-)