Cards for Couples

Jason and I have started playing a hand or two of rummy after getting the kids to bed. Figure it would be good to spend 15 minutes a day together where we’re not talking about them or Ballhype. It’s been fun, especially since I am winning. Yes! A game that I consistently beat Jason in. After 9 hands, I’m leading 805 to 565. I’m 97% sure that he’s not just letting me win.

Posted by Erin 02.Aug.07 Relationship Read more Comments (2)

Crunching Numbers

Now that we have three months of solid data to work with, I’ve been spending a lot of time creating  financial models for Ballhype. I used to do this a lot at pretty much every job I’ve had since business school, first because I was in finance and then because I was the marketing girl who used to be in finance. I forgot that you really need to pace yourself with this type of project otherwise you end up paying for it with your wrist, which I have.

But the good news is that we are growing rapidly and if the trend continues we’ll be able to buy Christmas presents this year after all. I’m getting rather used to not spending money, or at least spending very little aside from the mortgage, so any amount of money we begin to earn will feel like we hit the jackpot.

And indeed, this afternoon we put the first Google ads on the site and got our first pennies in the bank. Woo hoo! We are rolling out ads on Ballhype very gradually so that we can experiment until we find the right balance between performance and usability. We’re hoping our users will understand that we need to pay the bills, and if they are in the market for a Barry Bonds bobble-head and happen to see such an item being advertised on our site, they check out the unbeatable price offered by the advertiser.

Posted by Erin 09.Jul.07 Business Read more Comments (4)

What I want to be when I grow up

Someone who has figured out how to make interesting, challenging and fulfilling work fit into her life, including life with kids. Beth Blecherman of Silicon Valley Moms Blog and TechMamas has done it or come as close to it as one gets these days especially if you are an entrepreneur. She was interviewed by Charlene Prince Birkeland of JobMom today, and relates her experience getting back into the corporate world after her children were born. A great read and not just because she mentions Ballhype (which is how I found the interview). 

Posted by Erin 05.Jun.07 Work-life Read more Comments (0)

You know you need a date night when…

You find yourselves arguing about who offered the child alphabet cookies, thereby undermining the authority of the parent who was getting him down from the dinner table. We realized we hadn’t taken a real night off from work in a month, so on Saturday we put the kids to bed and watched Dave Chappelle’s Block Party. Really, really funny and some great music too, from some of my favorite hip hop artists. And you just get the sense that he is a genuinely nice guy to be around. I love how he went back to Dayton to look for some people to invite to the block party (in Brooklyn) who wouldn’t normally go to a rap concert, like the older lady who works at the corner store. Anyway, it was fun to just relax and reminisce about the days when we used to go see bands like the Roots.

Posted by Erin 04.Jun.07 Relationship Read more Comments (0)

Another developer network

We had a great weekend for our daughter’s first birthday. My sister and her family were in town, the weather was mostly sunny, and everyone was healthy which when you have a child in pre-school is rare. Plus, the baby started walking a couple of weeks ago so she’s really cruising along now and finally able to wear the really cute dresses that were impractical when she was crawling, making for great photo opportunities.

It turns out that we didn’t need to take that much time off from work even with visitors because my sister and her husband kept falling asleep by 9pm every night. At first we kept waiting for them to come back upstairs after getting their kids to bed, but then we gave up and just went back to work, which was a good thing because Facebook made a major announcement.

Jason jumped on it and built a Ballhype widget for Facebook, pulling practically an all-nighter to get it listed as quickly as possible. Not surprisingly, many other developers spent the weekend mashing their apps with Facebook, so we’re not listed in the directory yet. The widget is live though, and we’ve posted about it on Ballhype. There are now dozens of Facebook users with the Ballhype widget — what’s the potential for growth here? I hardly dare to dream…

I used to be on the other side of the platform. My first job at Intuit was to help third-party developers access Intuit’s customers, mainly through the QuickBooks Solutions Marketplace. At the time, some people at Intuit held pretty strong opinions on whether opening up the QuickBooks API was a good thing, and how to treat developer products that were competitive with our own. It will be interesting to see what happens with the Facebook platform, this time from the other side of the network. So far it appears that their approach is to truly embrace the potential of an open platform.

Posted by Erin 29.May.07 Facebook Read more Comments (2)

Tid bits

What we’ve been up to: thinking a lot about the next phase of Ballhype, namely turning this into a revenue-generating business. The good news is that so far people have been very open to talking to us, and we’re getting a clearer sense of what the timing and other parameters will be for funding.

I have to keep this short because my sister and her family are arriving any minute after going through a hellish day of travel to get here. I’m looking forward to enforced time off from work this weekend - it’s our baby’s first birthday! And traffic has been growing steadily the past couple of weeks — today we had our second highest traffic day, beat only by launch. It’ll be nice to relax this weekend and not worry about Ballhype too much.

Posted by Erin 23.May.07 Business Read more Comments (2)

Happy Mother’s Day

I just spent the last hour online looking for a florist that can still do a Mother’s Day delivery tomorrow. Finally found one, so I can go to bed without leaving notes all over the house for me to call florists in Rochester (Minnesota) tomorrow morning. I probably would have forgotten to research tonight except that while we were watching the Spurs-Suns game 3, I noticed some flowers on top of the cabinet in the family room, hiding in plain sight. After arguing with me for a few minutes that it wasn’t Mother’s Day yet, Jason got up and gave me the flowers. I figure flowers have a limited shelf life so I may as well enjoy them as long as possible.

It’s a good weekend around the Gurney household for several reasons:

1. The Warriors had a spectacular win over the Jazz on Friday night with an amazing performance by their own human highlight reel, Baron Davis. There is now a decent chance that Jason won’t have to explain his hair to the neighbors or to potential business partners.
2. Site traffic is really picking up. We have Baron’s dunk over Andrei Kirilenko, some incontinent Brewers fans, and Amanda Beard’s upcoming photoshoot in her birthday suit to thank.
3. And, this is not insignificant, Jason remembered Mother’s Day.

Posted by Erin 12.May.07 Relationship, Other Read more Comment (1)

Chagrined

I was going back through my messages from early April looking for the Ballhype member who had asked where he could get a tshirt. I told him we didn’t have any yet but that once we did, I’d mail him one since he was the first to ask. (And now, thanks to the multi-talented Howie, we have a Ballhype tshirt store set up on Spreadshirt.com.) Well, while looking through my inbox, I found a message from another new member who offered to help us out. Here’s the terrible part - I had replied with my email address so that he could send me his resume, which he did, and then I never followed up! It was right when we got slammed with all of the post-launch activity, so I didn’t get to it right away and then it got buried. I gave up on filing my email in mid-April and as a result my inbox is now at 2338 items. Clearly unmanageable, so I will devote some time this weekend to getting it sorted out.

I’m not blaming this on anyone but myself, but part of the problem was that Jason and I were switching between laptop and desktop computers for a while, and when I worked on the laptop, I was using gmail. The thing I cannot stand about gmail is that there are no folders, so if the next work session was on the desktop, my inbox was out of control. And then the next time I’d check gmail, it was difficult to tell which emails I had already read or not.

Anyway, I emailed the guy tonight to apologize and see if he still wants to talk. It doesn’t appear that he’s been active on the site in a while, so my guess is he decided I was too flakey and/or rude. I wouldn’t blame him, but I do hope he gives me — and Ballhype — another chance.

Posted by Erin 04.May.07 Other Read more Comments (0)

A lawyer sat down at a computer and…

started blogging. Our lawyer, Yokum Taku, has a new blog called Startup Company Lawyer. When we started Ballhype, I spent a lot of time hunting around for the kind of information that he’s providing. If you’re an entrepreneur, you should check it out. Of course, you should still consult with your attorney but it’s a much better starting point than doing a Google search.

Posted by Erin 30.Apr.07 Links, Business Read more Comments (2)

Hitting the Books

Ballhype’s finances are pretty basic: no revenue, no payroll, and few expenses. But we still need to make sure that we’re keeping track of everything so I downloaded QuickBooks Simple Start Free Starter Edition. I worked at Intuit for years and am a big fan of their products, and so I’m happy to use Simple Start and even happier that it’s free. It supports up to 20 customers and then prompts you to upgrade once you get larger. We won’t be counting customers in the sense that retailers or agencies do, so we should be able to use this for some time.

Today I logged in for the second time to enter the Comcast bill for cable internet services, and was reminded to register the product. Normally I ignore these messages but this one said that it would eventually be required so I figured I may as well get it over with. What I didn’t realize, however, was that once you start the process, you’re forced to call the customer support line to complete product registration. I really don’t like having to sit on hold - it wasn’t for very long, and the rep was friendly and competent, but I still felt tricked into picking up the phone. Sometimes you just don’t feel like talking on the phone to anyone, friend or stranger. It doesn’t mean you’re in a bad mood, but I could tell that I was forcing myself to be nicer on the phone than I felt like being, out of loyalty to Intuit. Fortunately, the anticipated upsell (hey, I was in marketing too) didn’t last very long.

Rep: how many customers do you have?

Me: none.

Rep: ohhhkaayyy… (mousing to correct screen that gets him to the “unlikely prospect” response)…hold on while I get your new license number.

Nine years ago I started out in finance doing the monthly close for the Intel Inside program, which involved accounting for and accruing hundreds of millions of dollars to help pay for all of those stickers and tv and print ads by computer manufacturers. Ballhype record-keeping should be a cake walk in comparison, and if it ever gets complex enough to be a dreaded task, that will be a good thing.

Posted by Erin 27.Apr.07 Business Read more Comments (0)