Launch Prep

I'm still anticipating an official roll-out during the first of May.  My goal is to build traffic over the summer so that I can start to bring in new customers for the Fall.  Although I talked it up to anyone who would listen and there were a lot of people who were excited about it, no one contacted me about getting in on the beta.  Ultimately that worked out better as I didn't have the extra pressure to fix someone else's problems.

For the past week, I've been working on the marketing pages, creating explanations of the software.  I'm still going to have to create a sample Organization and let folks in to play around in, but I can easily use one that I've already created for my own use.  I'll just have to make sure that it is PC before I open it up.

I'll be creating a comparison for all known competitors and put that into a matrix.  I was very concerned with pricing.  Ultimately, I would like to make money on this.  Frankly I would rather take this from hobby status to career status.  I have the skills to make it happen, I've been in the Software Engineering industry for over 15 years now.  And I would rather do this than working for someone else.  Right now, my costs are minimal, but when it grows, so will the cost and I have to be sure everything is covered.  I finally settled on $1 per player per season.  One, $1 is not a lot of money for anyone involved.  It makes it very easy for an Organization to add LaxStats without breaking the bank.  They could (and likely will) pass the amount on to the player.  I agonized about charging parents/fans for access and eventually came to the conclusion to charge for that access as well.  The primary reason is that parents and fans who want to follow their childs career won't hesitate paying a few dollars, especially after they've already shelled out hundreds to get them into it.  Plus is a personalized view into a players career, protected from the general population.  You just can't find that anywhere else.

As a whole, its taking more time to come up with the marketing than it did with the other parts of the site.  Mainly that's because I'm a programmer, not a marketeer.

For those of you that have been following this closely, thanks for your support and encouragement.  I've been having a ball.  For those of you who have just joined are are reading this as a historical perspective, I hope it gives you some insight into how this all started and evolved.