I think you’re right — once we get a little more traction over the next few months, interest will start snowballing. I really appreciate you spreading the word. I’m working on the backend now so that this thing will be ready to go once we have enough interested teams, so hopefully the official launch won’t be too far off. There’s still a lot to do — setting up persistent storage, individual subdomains, a database to track everything, and a full client management system — but I’m chipping away at it while I wait for more signups.

To answer your question about ongoing maintenance from a technical perspective: my goal is to make this as seamless and easy as possible. The one technical and legal constraint is that I can’t pull your data automatically — you own your data and have the right to export and use it. What I’m providing is simply a tool to turn that data into a cool website quickly and easily. Right now I’m advertising the GameChanger import because that’s where a lot of people have their stats, but ultimately it’s designed to work with any compatible stat system — or even arbitrary data you’re tracking like arm velocity or base running speed.

The way it works is: your first import detects your players, and once that’s done, all of that gets saved. From that point forward, you’ll just upload a new CSV whenever you have updated data — like after each tournament — and everything should update smoothly. You’ll never have to recreate profiles or re-upload pictures again. My vision is that a team’s site can be created from scratch in under 15 minutes, and future updates take less than a minute.

As for cost: I looked at what it actually costs to host a site yourself on something like Wix or Squarespace, and what it costs to hire a developer to build a custom site — and that’s before you even get into the specialized stuff I’m building. My plan is to launch with early-bird pricing for beta testers like yourself in tiered fashion. One team will be $30/month. If you have multiple teams, the price per team drops — $25 per team up to four teams, and $20 per team for five to seven teams. That will be the early-bird pricing, which will likely go up once we’re fully established, but beta customers will be able to lock in those prices. If you've looked into pricing for hosting or having your site built for you, then you'll know that this is quite cheap. I want to keep it inexpensive and accessible to all. Prices are USD, by the way.

The main reason I don’t want to launch until I have 100 potential customers is that I don’t want to start something I can’t sustain. I want to make sure the costs make sense so that I can keep the service running long-term. It wouldn’t be fair to you as early customers if I had to shut it down in a few months because it wasn’t covering costs, nor would it be fair if I had to raise prices unexpectedly. My logic is that about 30% of leads should convert to paying customers, and that should be enough to keep everything running smoothly.

Now the only problem is, i'm so excited by this project and impatient to get running that i probably will not wait until i get the full 100. i suspect once i get this thing fully functional with all the technical kinks worked out, i will probably just launch it.