Wow, that was cool.

About 28 hours ago, we did the non-nuclear equivalent of turning both keys at the same time: we each put a finger on the enter key and pressed it to launch the public version of Ballhype. Immediately we scrambled to get announcement emails ready to send to users and friends and bloggers. And then waited for the first review to get posted… and finally, yes!

Happily, Mr. Arrington liked the site and better yet, predicted that other sports fans would too. Over the next few hours, we got more great coverage which made all of this work worthwhile. We wouldn’t have thought it possible, but the pace picked up even more to the point where Jason and I were talking back and forth and IMing and emailing links and site stats sometimes all at the same time. When we figured the east coast wasn’t up yet and reasonable people on the west coast had finally called it a night, we took a short break for sleep. I slept, Jason got up again after an hour.

Today was more of the same - adrenaline rushes kept us going. I had been worried that our babysitter being out of town would make dealing with launch impossible, but actually I think it was good to be forced to take breaks and sing songs, build lego towers, and read 5 variations on truck books.

It’s very fun to see more people on Ballhype and hear from them. The automated welcome message comes from my account so I generally get a lot of messages from users, which is great. So far we’ve gotten a couple of offers of help, a request for a Ballhype tshirt (we don’t have any), links of new blogs to add, and a lot of great feedback that will shape the roadmap.

Thanks to everyone who helped spread the word today. We know that we now have to live up to your expectations and those of our users - and we will.

Posted by Erin 03.Apr.07 Milestones, Publicity Read more Comments (0)

Rubbing elbows with Gilbert

Well, not really. But Jason made Jamie Mottram and Dan Shanoff’s Top 20 list of influential sports bloggers. Here at the Gurney household, we’ll be celebrating tonight with one Corona each and then getting back to work. Still, it’s great to know that the effort into building those sites (and the backbone of Ballhype’s tracking functionality) is paying off.

Posted by Erin 01.Mar.07 Publicity Read more Comments (0)

The First Demo

On Thursday, we got a chance to demonstrate Ballhype for a couple hundred people at the first year party for Yahoo’s user interface library. It was a good time–much more low-key than the last Yahoo event I attended, though. One of the more interesting demos was from Jeremy Gillick, who presented a YUI extension that produces some cool effects in a very clean way.

We’re still in closed beta, so it was the first real public exposure for the application, and from a technical perspective, it was a great forum. We use YUI extensively throughout the site to handle AJAX requests, auto-complete fields, drag and drop customization, calendars, tabs, and more. It’s a great library with great documentation, and I love the fact that it includes *almost* everything I need (a WYSIWYG editor is my only outstanding request).

In a panic, we printed up some temporary business cards at Kinko’s the night before the event. They ended up looking like the kind of thing you’d cut out of the side of a cereal box. As it turned out, we really didn’t need them. The demo went over reasonably well, and we got several beta invitation requests the next day, which is a good sign that the name is at least sticky.

Posted by Jason 24.Feb.07 Milestones, Publicity Read more Comment (1)