prpetten's comments

prpetten | 12 years ago | on: Github is down

Sources are denying any connection to the US Government shutdown, but some suspect its NSA contractors entertaining themselves during the government downtime.

prpetten | 12 years ago | on: Show HN: Verbal Commits - College Basketball Recruiting

So this is my baby, it started as a small side project for me as I was transitioning from product management back into more technical work. I hadn't written any code aside from some SQL statements in a few years before starting this project. A little over 2 years ago I began the coding in earnest for the project.

I've gotten a ton of really good feedback from the target market of people who follow college basketball recruiting, particularly college coaches, players, and their families. It's now up to 500k in monthly pageviews, with 100k unique visitors per month.

I've gotten assistance from some amazing people who monitor social media and keep the site up to date. I also have scripts that monitor some of the larger recruiting databases to ensure that all of the information is examined.

Every line of code written on the project is my own. It is all written in RoR. Its currently hosted by Heroku.

I'd love to get any and all feedback.

I'm currently working on different strategies to get the site profitable. One is a CRM add-on for college coaches, that I've spoken with a couple of coaches about who seem excited about it. Another is a freemium model tied to new features. I'm also pondering a freemium model which would keep basketball free, but would charge for access to the football info. I'd love feedback on strategies as well.

Also, if there is anyone out there who loves following college recruiting, and would be willing to work for equity, I'm in desperate need of assistance. My future feature list is growing faster than I can code.

prpetten | 12 years ago

Its a site showing the roster for every college basketball team in Division 1 with profiles for every player on their roster, and every HS player they're currently recruiting.

prpetten | 12 years ago

Thanks, I'll take your advice!

prpetten | 12 years ago

So this is my baby, I've spent the last 2 years or so working on it, and I've written every line of code myself. When I started the site, I had rusty technical skills; it had been over 7 years since I'd written anything besides a SQL statement. I've developed something that has really resonated with passionate college basketball fans. I get about 100k unique visitors per month at this point.

I would love any feedback you have on the site if you see anything that jumps out at you.

I would love to find someone who shares a passion for college recruiting to help with the technical work in exchange for equity. The site is written in Ruby on Rails, hosted by Heroku with Postgres DB. If you're interested please let me know, I've got a feature list with some cool ideas on that I need help to develop.

page 1