A new service from Portland based SparkPlug; TeamSnap brings amateur sports management to Web 2.0.
Anybody who has coached or managed a sports team knows how much work is involved. Managing team rosters, fees and event schedules is a time consuming chore. TeamSnap aims to simply the management of the various aspects of running any sort of team by providing an online destination, a CRM tool of sorts for amateur sports management.
It’s a well thought out and designed site. Built in is support for rosters, scheduling, player availability and payment tracking. Messaging includes a private forum and bulk email distribution lists. Photo sharing comes standard and for those who love their numbers, statistics can also be entered.
But let’s not forget the important things, like who brings the refreshments! They’ve got a section just for that as well.
The service is customizable, features can be turned off if not required and the interface can be skinned in team colors and a logo included.
It’s a substantial niche with few if any competitors. If you are a parent managing a kid’s team or managing something with grown-ups this could be a compelling service. TeamSnap is completely free during its beta stage, with a variety of affordable price plans (including a free version) available post beta.
If you’re not convinced, let Tom Cruise and Paris Hilton convince you otherwise.
There are a number of smaller niche players who don’t have nearly this level of customization or feature set. One being http://www.orangeslices.com. It will be interesting to see if they get the users they need to be successful.
If I were them, I would go after the organizations that organize the events themselves, soccer leagues, baseball, tennis, etc.
Good luck to them.
This is a very niche concept… Now, the trick will be to maintain the popularity in this niche.
I did a quick 1-minute glance at the site (that is all the time I can spend on this) and I am not sure how this is going to help a parent managing kid’s sports compared to traditional alternatives like email/phone/camera.
To me, it seems like I have already heard about something like that… maybe only in Germany – not sure.
http://www.yourteamonline.ca/
is a similar, hockey specific organization site that i use. i signed up for the beta and will check this new site out.
I just discovered this web 2.0 website called SportsPassion.com. A friend told me about the site after his rec league was sponsored by the website. I was impressed right away upon visiting the site by its look–very clean and professional. After playing around on the site for a little while i’m blown away by all the interactive tools that any team has–even a weekend softball team can have all this stuff at their disposal for FREE. I guess it’s kinda like a facebook for the average everyday sports team. This site would really be great for any coach that wanted help organizing their team. Anyway, check it out…btw, my team is the Uni Boys
The trick is – to get a huge ass company to switch to your platform –
Who was the Online presentation company that got IBM to use them? and only had like 20-40 employees? (the contract was for millions) …
– that is the same direction this company has to head – it needs to either have the best or get the best marketing firm it can afford; and hit every MLB, NHL, NBA, etc … owner / manager / water boy it can
Surprising to see Cricket here. Definitely worth trying – for people who are into organizing sports.
mistake to charge users or to even suggest a paid plan now. this will turn away users at the most critical time…. launch time!!!
the name of the game here is early adoption and traction. forget about monetization till later… after you have a loyal and large user base (which you don’t have)
nice idea. execution will be critical if this is to work and before you get a slew of knock-offs.
good luck.
I guess nobody noticed the heads were all Photoshopped in their testimonials!
The Pope on Skates! Hah!
I actually just saw a competitor at a tech event in DC last night, http://www.sportsvite.com. Their motto is a lot better too: “Stop playing with yourself.”
We use a web app called Redzone Leagues http://redzoneleagues.com to do our league website and it’s great.
We use it for football, but you can use it for lots of different sports. It has tons of features like schedules, stats tracking, photo albums, event calendars etc.
Active.com and eTeamz (which Active.com acquired) have been offering this type of service for years and dominate this market. There are a number of other players who have been around for a while too, so I think TeamSnap is going to have to pray that Web 2.0 gradients are so compelling that people switch to its solution.
Mile wide, inch deep. This is like a web 2.0 version of Active.com (a pretty crappy tool as well) TeamSnap looks great, but the functionality is pretty vanilla. You could never effectively manage a competition without adding a ton of custom fields that are non-relational. What about bracketing, scoring, handicapping, timing, etc.? OK for soccer moms…..if you can get them to use it.
Before Active.com, there was Youth Sports Network, which was acquired by MyTeam.com in late 1999 or so, which was then acquired by Active.com sometime later. I was an editor at YSN.com and later MyTeam — it was a great run and by far my best 1.0-era experience.
Being that this is my industry (www.rimsystems.com is my company), I know for a fact that there’s a TON of competition. I personally don’t think anyone has got it right yet (including us…we’re working on it, but we’re a ways off like everyone else). The problem is that every Joe Schmoe who has built a web site for their league thinks every other league will buy it. Active.com/eteamz is the giant here and their product is awful and the competition tends to follow suit. This is a huge market with a lot of room for a lot of different solutions (which is what it will take to overcome the uniqueness of every team and league that exists like Tom mentioned). There are a lot of great solutions out there and in my opinion the more products in this space the better.
Nathan I think made the most important thing. These sites tend to maximize their value when the whole league or organization controls it. They’re most likely going to have the least amount of trouble keeping the content fresh. You can also get a lot of value out of building a community around user content (www.nscsl.org is a great example of this…for a small church league, this site has huge traffic numbers, visitor retention, etc). When you get everyone that participates contributing to the content of the site there’s a lot more value there than one person managing it all.
Good, we need this for our softball league!
Looks like they’re looking to eventually get into League Management as well (www.whois.sc/leaguesnap.com). Our product is called league managment product is called SnapLeague and we’ve been up and running for over a year. I hope they reconsider their future product naming. Maybe I’ll start a company called Softmicro or Hooya!
Ajax doesn’t cure the lack of features. Go to http://www.EasyTeamManager.com and see what ordinary code can do with extraordinary planning and execution.
This site is a syndicated and brandable solution so it will get wider distribution over smaller, less capable competitors. Plus, it’s very easy to use.
I think there are a couple of ways to go in this space, which I agree is a large one. I play on a bunch of teams in addition to managing a couple… a product like this would only work for me if I don’t have to switch between management and player modes… more like a personal sports profile linked to my teams, teammates etc… I have been using the previously mentioned sportsvite.com. It free (the pay model?? Not sure about that move) and I have had few complaints…
I dig snapteam’s ui… seems really clean compared with active.com’s, which I agree with most, is truly horrible… hope snap shows active what happens when neglect your product
I personally love Sportsvite.com. Its also a great place to recruit and have players find you. We are a casual co-ed pickup team, so maybe we are not the target market.
This is a brilliantly done web app. I’d like to see it grow into league management as well, that way instead of just doing my team our whole league could use it. Broader adoption going that route too.
There might be a good deal of competition in this space, but there’s no one who is executing well – that’s where TeamSnap can win.
I think TeamSnap is a great idea. I am sure there are other sites out there that do this, but let’s be honest, none of them are as popular as they would like to be; how many of you have heard of a service like this before? I haven’t till now. Hopefully the Web 2.0 look and feel will help TeamSnap stand out of the crowd. It’s certainly an easy site to use.
There is so much competition in this space you’ve missed some other big players , league minder and schedule star.
With sports management its not really your standard ‘web market’, the approach companies are taking really come down to how you can fit the needs of the state , and conferences.
This is a team management tool, not a league management tool and is precisely what I’ve desired for quite some time.
The design is refreshingly clean and not cluttered with stuff I don’t want and would not use. I am a developer and have been looking for a solution to this problem for years to no avail.
I had not heard of some of the products mentioned above and, after looking at each, none addresses the functions I need. TeamSnap apparently does. The “mile wide, inch deep” comment had me thinking that maybe I wouldn’t drown in a river of software bloat.
“Hopefully the Web 2.0 look and feel will help TeamSnap stand out of the crowd.”
Ian: I think that this is a little bit naive. As we’ve seen in the social networking space, for instance, lots of startups have launched slick social networking platforms that put MySpace to shame, but for all the new “competition”, MySpace is still going strong and few of these slick newcomers have gained any notable traction. A nice design alone is typically never enough to compel a user to switch from one product to another, especially once the user’s investment in the current product exceeds a certain threshold (i.e. the team’s data is already imported into one system, all the parents are used to one system, the team’s service is paid through the end of the year, etc.).
“There might be a good deal of competition in this space, but there’s no one who is executing well.”
hash: how do you define “execution”? Active.com counts Little League, NFL Youth Football, Dixie Baseball and Major League Soccer Camps as clients and they report nearly 3 million registered teams on eTeamz. If they have a poor product, they at least can sell it very well.
Active.com also has a very diverse business and is an Inc. 500 and Fast 500 company. Backers include ESPN, IAC and Lance Armstrong (so they have backing from synergetic entities within the industry they’re serving, not just top-tier VCs). Given the information they provide on their corporate site, I’d be surprised if they weren’t profitable and would guess that they’re likely headed towards some sort of liquidity event in the future.
All that said, I’m not personally impressed with their products, especially eTeamz, but that doesn’t matter. They’ve successfully executed the development of market-leading company, and if I had any idea of starting an online sports management service and making it more than a decent small business, I’d be concerned about Active.com’s dominance (and all the other companies who are trying to be the next Active.com).
Bottom line: developing a nice, pretty product is only one part of the execution equation and it’s not the most important part. It seems that a lot of startups in Web 2.0 focus on building a nice product (or in many cases nice features/functionality) and don’t pay any attention to how these things will actually get “sold” to the target market. There are a substantial number of inferior products that are more successful than their superior competitors simply because the people behind them have a better strategy, more knowledge/skill, the right relationships or a combination of these things. In the case of a company like Sparkplug, which apparently developed this as a side project, I think the best that could be hoped for is this to grow into a small business or potentially to get bought out by a company that is already dedicated to this market. The latter is probably less likely given the number of similar products out there, since it indicates that the technology itself is a commodity; the challenge seems to be sales.
As a side note, it’s disappointing that the quality of reporting at TechCrunch has slipped to the point where a new startup in about as saturated a market as can be found is said to be in a “substantial niche with few if any competitors.” Just as an investor is likely to call BS when a business plan says “we have no competition,” if you’ve found a substantial niche, chances are somebody is already out there at least *attempting* to serve it. If Web 2.0 is getting so dull that TechCrunch has no choice but to profile companies that aren’t really doing anything innovative or don’t have any traction, at least make sure statements about the market they serve are fairly accurate.
That testimonial trick was… well I’m speechless. Is that even legal?
Drama: I think it would be more accurate, perhaps, to say that this is a substantial niche that no one’s filled *really well* yet. Yes there are a few services that have some traction, but only a few, and none of them should be considered juggernauts at this point. Your MySpace example is absolutely correct when it comes to MySpace vs. other social networks (i.e. “slickness won’t overcome traction”) but remember that for MySpace to be useful to you, all your friends must use it. For TeamSnap to be useful, you and you alone can use it. Your “community” is maybe 20 people and if you’re the league owner, you’re the one dictating where that community lives online.
I would look at this much like you’d look at a 37signals product: its mission is not necessarily to grab 80% of the market and hope to make it all back in advertising. It’s mission is provide a useful service *worth paying for* to a substantial amount of people. As soon as you cover your costs, you have a business. I can easily imagine a world where 5000 are paying $5 a month for this (conservative on both numbers). That’s $25,000 a month… not bad for a few employees, a few servers, and some bandwidth.
It’s great to see the recreational sports space getting some love. There are over 110 million people playing sports in the US alone. At Sportsvite we are trying to make it easier for adults to play sports by connecting players and helping them organize and mange their sports teams and activities. Sportsvite is a utility-driven network that supports over 100 different sports (everything from softball and basketball to rugby and disc golf).
If anybody out there would like to try Sportsvite, it would be my pleasure to help you get started and answer any of your questions. Feel free to send me a note at brian (at) sportsvite.com.
Here are a few links..
My profile — http://sportsvi...ayer/littyhoops
My public team profile — http://www.spor...am/Softballteam
My baseball card widget — http://sportsvi...gets/playercard
Enjoy,
Brian
Well said Mike D.
In response to Drama 2.0, there really is no comparison between MySpace and TeamSnap. The business models are completely different. They have different goals, functions and verticals. I think you are missing that.
As a customer looking for a service like this, there are a few things I am going to look at. Ease-of-use, features, and price. I think this is what will help TeamSnap stand out.
As for the Web 2.0 look helping the site? Of course it will. If this was not the case, there would be no style guides/tools out there for designers to use. Web 2.0 is not just about the technology, but design and interface also play an important role.
I’m not sure I would classify the design and interface on TeamSnap something to write home about…
Gabe: Perhaps you should write home more often.
Probably should…my mom misses me
.
That site looks really good I should tell my sisters coach about it
Something else to help out the sports mom’s and dad’s of the world – http://www.cheercards.net. Use their site to create wallet sized team rosters and schedules to hand out to other parents…
This concept has been around for a while. There are many different approaches and will meet different people’s needs and a lot of them don’t charge,
I created http:///www.teamgametime.com to meet my needs and my teammates’ needs. I chose simple functionality (see all of my games for all my teams and respond to any game at anytime) and design because I found that the majority of users ask for stats and messageboards and few consistently use them. The yield was not there for the work and db space.
As for league adoption being the way to go, that’s a toss up. I chose teams only because I would rather get one team using it than waiting for a league to decide it will work for all of their teams.
Will someone get rich off this? Who knows. It seems like the best tools offer a solid service and don’t charge or get a lot of funding.
Either way, there are plenty of tools that do this, but it appears not a lot of folks know about them.
Wish all of you the best,
Randy Ramirez
ill have to keep this in mind since ive always been interested in coaching a H.S. b-ball team.