This past July, three full-timers launched a side project called ScoreYard, a social team management platform. Today, the team (now down to two) announced the release of a new feature: player registration.
“As we spoke with more and more teams and leagues, we were having a hard time nailing down the desired functionality into a single common set of features in regards to stats tracking and league management,” said Levi Rosol, ScoreYard co-founder whose full-time career is as a developer on contract, in an email interview.
“What we were consistently hearing was a need for online player registration. Coaches don’t like collecting a pile of checks and cash from parents,” said Rosol. “If they could streamline that process, it would be a huge relief, and would allow them to focus more on what they love to do. Coach.”
The original platform released in July – one that gives coaches tools to perform team management-related tasks such as tracking stats, scheduling games, and sending announcements – will remain a part of ScoreYard, but with player registration in the picture a revenue model had begun to take shape.
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“We have made a commitment to each other to focus on generating revenue with ScoreYard within six months.”
“Our initial plan was to generate revenue based on a monthly subscription for the leagues,” said Rosol. “We still may go that route as we build out new features, but for the time being, revenue will be generated on the transaction level, giving the leagues the tools they need at no charge.”
To execute the model, ScoreYard is working with WePay, a Palo Alto-based startup, to handle the payment processing. “The beautiful thing about [player registration] is that it gives us a clear place to collect data that the leagues will ultimately use. With players signing-up online, the league then has a full dataset to use to build out team rosters, setup game schedules, and easily communicate with their entire league.”
A screenshot of the Des Moines Bocce Ball Social Club League’s ScoreYard page. Screenshot by Levi Rosol.
To learn more about ScoreYard, we conducted an email interview with Rosol and Mike Templeton, the other ScoreYard co-founder whose full-time career is a social media manager for a Midwest convenience store chain. The two have committed to at least working two nights a week at Foundry Coworking as well as spend time working from home in the evenings and on weekends.
Silicon Prairie News: What’s the status of the original platform with respect to the new feature announced today?
Templeton: Everything we’ve built so far (since our reboot early this year) is still in place. Teams can still build profiles, fans can follow along with games, etc. What we’d built previously was the initial framework, while this update marks the first of our “must-have” features for sports organizations.
With both of us having a limited amount of time to spend on ScoreYard, we have to be careful how we prioritize our development projects. We have lots of ideas for how the “social” side of the platform will grow, but for now this is our focus – once the data gets into our platform it will create a lot of opportunities.
Silicon Prairie News: How many users and active users do you have?
Templeton: We’ve got around 100 users at the moment, though up until now there hasn’t been a lot for users to “do” on the site. Users should start to flow with the launch of this new feature because organizations will be setting up leagues and players will be creating accounts to get registered to play.
Silicon Prairie News: Are you funded or looking for funding?
Rosol: We are not funded. We are your classic bootstrapped company. We both maintain 9-5 jobs to pay our bills, we work out of a coworking facility (Foundry Coworking), and our families miss us. We are not actively looking for funding, however, we are not ruling anything out.
Templeton: Levi answered this well. We’re bootstrapping the company on our own dime right now, though we’d be interested in talking to strategic partners that can help us gain visibility with our target market. One of the best things about running an internet startup is that there aren’t a lot of hard costs involved.
Silicon Prairie News: Anything else you’d like to add?
Rosol: Our focus now is on generating revenue for ScoreYard. We are very interested in speaking with any leagues in the Silicon Prairie who are looking for a better way to manage their teams.
Learn more about ScoreYard’s player registration feature in their blog post: Online Player Registrations Available for All Sports.