Use RosterBot To Manage Your Kids’ Little League Team
Michael Arrington
23 comments »
Nothing mind blowing here, but RosterBot will be a welcome application for coaches of kids or adults informal sports teams. It’s simple, it’s free and it works, unlike existing applications (let me know if you know of an alternative that you like).
Like most of the good applications we see, it was created not from a spreadsheet but from the need to solve a problem. In this case, Canadian Ian Bell (founder of the new and improved PubSub) came up with the idea when he got tired of reading through email strings about upcoming games for his hockey teams.
In an email, Ian wrote “Lots of companies vying for domination in this space. My approach is to focus on the core value and really get good at solving the pain most people have around organizing their teams, and not worry about all the other big-ticket aspects such as photo sharing, scorekeeping, etc. Other companies are good at that but they’re mired in the process of making big sales to leagues, etc. I’m hoping I can make the appeal directly to teams, which is far less costly and more viral.”
RosterBot works for any sport, and it takes about a minute to get the team set up and invitations sent out. If you are on or coach a team that can use this, you’ll love it. Otherwise, move on, nothing to see here.
So Ian, when’s the new PubSub launching, anyway?
I like TeamSnap http://teamsnap.com I have been using it for almost a year to manage my adult softball team. They have all the features that I would want.
Tip #1:
Don’t bombard your visitors with advertisements from the get go.
http://www.rosterbot.com/signup
That page shouldn’t have two seperate sets of advertisements. It dettered me enough not to sign up. Not to mention that if people are clicking on ads from your sign up page, it hurts your end goal.
i like TeamSnap too. I have been using it for a while now. One of the only downsides i see from it is it doesn’t offer a league version (although they say they are working on one). Its good though overall.
http://www.teamtexting.com/
This one is simple and cool.
Paris Hilton uses teamtexting.com? are they joking? I cant tell.
http://teamsnap.com/testimonials.php
That’s a good idea, Oliver … my bad for being lazy and leaving the ads in the signup template… removing them now.
Get rid of the google adwords on all the pages…how is ‘how I lost 55 lbs’ or ‘bulldogs ringtones’ or ‘hsfootball combine’ relevant to my beer softball team?
It’s not. Google adwords aren’t a monetization strategy unless google can provide relevant links, which means a lot of content. This site isn’t a content site it’s a web tool, which is fine, web tools are great, by google adwords are just annoying on web tools.
I play poker on my iphone and the entire time there’s an google ad for kenny chesney ringtones. Exact same thing.
I’m clearly bias towards league web sites over individual team sites because I’ve seen all the benefits they bring to a league. RosterBot is onto the thing that is so key about these web sites whether they’re for teams or whole leagues: communicating from the top down. The use cases are simple… When’s my next game? It’s raining out, is my game canceled? We need a sub this week, anyone got any ideas? We built SnapLeague to handle the most important aspects of league communication. We’ve tried to keep it intentionally simple and focused on communication for now. The last thing we want to be is the cluttered disaster that is eteamz.
Even though we’ve tried to keep SnapLeague simple, some of those those “big ticket” features like scorekeeping can go a long way to increase participation. We’ve been doing stats for 7 seasons now on a site I built (www.nscsl.org) and in that time we’ve nearly doubled in size (and we have a waiting list every year). A lot of this comes from guys who play, get their stats online and then email it off to their friends who want to get involved in a league so they can have their stats up too.
I don’t think Ian understands his market very well. I work for one of those companies he talks about and the reason they go for the leagues is because that is where the money is at. The way you truly make money in this space is to get his customers to buy the ads off the sites. Teams aren’t going to do that. All they care about is using it for free. Maybe he is already thinking about it but building in league functionality that intertwines online registration is the key to winning in this space.
Don’t forget to check out Redzone Leagues. Free signup and looks full featured.
http://redzoneleagues.com/
great new blog
http://www.i-guide.ro/blog/Ro/en/
Well..this is great.
The Web 2.0 , wave is reaching the kids now.
http://www.jhatak.com/Buckler/BucklerHomePage.htm
I like it. Nice and simple. It has a couple of features still missing from http://www.myezteam.com (google-map and calendar integration). But from what I could tell, it would only send out 1 email per event. With myezteam, you can have emails sent at many intervals based on conditions. For example, if 2 days before the event you only have 8 players and need 11 for a full-team, you could have it send out an email to the sub-list asking for players as well as to any regulars who haven’t responded.
I too am a fan of TeamSnap. Using it right now and it is pretty good. From the screenshot in tis post, I like teamsnap better on that front by a mile. Plus, no adsense!
I tried to send them feedback but their feedback email address is dead. Also they misspell simple words in their emails and remove the capitals in names. Unprofessional appearance. R Morecook
More bugs fixed! I understand the market quite well, I think… and I see companies getting mired in selling to leagues, as I pointed out earlier. It’s a business model that’s valid for others but which I have zero interest in at the moment.
I think we can solve a problem quickly and easily directly for teams. I don’t want to hire sales staff and create unnecessary overhead when I think there’s a way to propagate this (and there are a lot of us who play sports regularly OUTSIDE of leagues) virally that’s far cheaper in terms of acquisition cost. All of which is quite important since as you’ll see there’s no charge to use RosterBot.
It’s a big market. Lots of room to play and lots of different approaches will work. We’ll see how well Google gets their eye in on content matching for the ads. If they can’t, well, we have other options waiting in the wings.
-Ian.
PS - Enjoy those Kenny Chesney ring tones!
I manage my son’s tennis team with TennisPoint.com. (http://www.tennispoint.com). It has google integration for all my directions and the kids (ok parents) can put in their availability for the matches that up coming. It makes it really simple for me to make up our “tennis teams” for matches. The kids also can put up their photos! It even shows them great stats! Very impressive!
ooops thought it would make it a link - guess not. quick link: http://www.tennispoint.com
I’ve been using Teampages (http://www.teampages.com), which works quite well. It’s overkill in many cases and RosterbBot may well be something simpler.
@Ian
I didn’t say you need salespeople but you do need a league option. This makes your product much more viral. If you have a league option, then the leagues will tell their coaches to use team option. Plus, coaches could setup a team and then tell their league how great your site is to use and suggest using the league option.
There are 2 dominant players when it comes to team websites and they are League Lineup and Eteamz. Both have league functionality. I can’t think of one website that has just team functionality that is a dominant player. There are 10 team sites that have been mentioned in the comments already and I haven’t heard of any of them. Also, neither League Lineup or Eteamz have salespeople.
I’ve been using Team Cowboy (www.teamcowboy.com) — it is free, easy to use, and has most of the features I need. I have also looked at TeamSnap but found that although it has more features it isn’t as easy to use for day-to-day team management. -J