FamilyLeaf YCombinator Application

A website builder for sports teams/leagues. The first feature we will build is an about.me for athletes. We will focus on on the experience of creating and viewing individual athlete profiles and use the data collected from profiles to help coaches better manage teams.

We both live in Seattle, but Ajay is currently in London for school. The company would be based in San Francisco after YC.

http://wesleyzhao.com/private/tnFwcDCljt

No

Ajay and I have been best friends since 4th grade after our parents fortunately put us in the same 'gifted education' program in Bellevue (suburb of Seattle). We bonded over nerd stuff, got into tech together in high school, and have worked on all our projects together.

We've worked on many projects together that have gone viral and plugged on TechCrunch, Mashable, Time, Geekwire, and even an interview on the Seattle evening news. Our business this summer was AvantCard, an exchangeable branded gift card that we billed as a better alternative to your everyday gift card for most gift card givers: http://getavantcard.com. Our API-hacky projects are numerous and got tons of attention: http: //readstreamapp.com http://grimtweeper.com http://wheremyfriends.be http://tasteplug.com

After 7 months I went from knowing nothing about web development (started using php on GoDaddy) to building sites on a Python/Nginx/Linux stack and learning enough sysadmin skills to manage our own ec2 instances, and being offered year-long salaried positions as a developer. Over those 7 months I've helped build and manage sites that have totaled over 200K users and utilized several API's (Facebook, Twitter, Twilio, LinkedIn, Mailgun, Amazon, iTunes, and Yipit - which I built my own wrapper for and open sourced). Bonus: I also got into Wharton after a suspension for selling weed sophomore year. \n\n At 17, worked my way into a full-time paid position at Zillow where I was in charge of developing their successful marketing and social strategy through blogs/FB/Twitter/etc as well as assembling a team to start a 500+ person technology education conference for real estate agents in Seattle, garnering 20+ sponsorship deals and kickstarting similar events in the region.

We used a comedy twitter account to get meetings with tech superstars who wouldn't have returned our emails. In the week before our YC interview, we started @YC_Y_U_NO as a joke with the tech community and ended up featured on TechCrunch -- and more importantly (coupled with serendipitously meeting Fred Wilson at the airport, who tweeted out Readstream) used cold DM's to build relationships with brilliant startup people, angel investors, and VCs (along with more than a few YC alums/Garry and Harj).

We plan to have a beta by January 2012.

We have not started building yet.

We picked this idea because my sister (a high-school softball star) told me the issues she was having with her online athletic recruitment profile and asked me to make her a better one. Then I discovered that millions of other athletes all have the same problem because their teams were using technology from 1998. I have played club Baseball and Football since 3rd grade, and recently just finished a year of 2 D1 Varsity sports (Sprint Football and Pole Vaulting). I know people need what we're making because 2MM teams use eTeamz (direct competitor), 2MM athletes use BeRecruited, and we've spoken to many coaches, parents, and athletes.

What's new about our product is that we plan to build in social and viral mechanics from the very beginning and focus on maintaining a search-friendly database for athlete data. Older and existing solutions would be much more useful (and more easily monetized) if the data they collected was searchable and organized. Also current website-builders for teams do not allow athletes to create their own profile without a team - we will allow for that and make it extremely easy and beautiful. Along with using eTeamz, coaches currently send forms to players for profile information, get the information emailed back to them, then enter the data into MS Word templates, convert those into PDF's, upload each of them to the web, and manually link a player's name to the URL of the PDF.

Competitors: eTeamz, TeamSnap, LeagueLineup. Potential competitors: BeRecruited, Takkle, MaxPreps, Rivals, Scout, Weplay. Who we fear most: BeRecruited.

Athlete profiles are the most important feature because it interests the largest amount of parties and the data collected from a large number of profiles can be valuable to many people. Perfecting profiles can bring in money from coaches (for converting to a full team site), parents (for recruiting exposure), and recruiters (for access to search the data). As students and athletes, we get the user's point of view: they want a beautiful page of basic stats that they can show to recruiters and look professional. As a 3-sport athlete in high school, and a 2-sport D1 varsity athlete in college, I would have wanted this product for myself. So we're building it now.

We will use a freemium model and make money by charging coaches/organizers $10/mo or $60/yr for premium team sites, charging players/parents $10/mo or $60/yr for premium features/storage on profiles, and charging recruiters $100 for unlimited queries to our database. We can make about $2.3B/yr ($300MM/yr from team sites, $2B/yr for player profiles, and $2MM from recruiters).

To get teams to sign up for websites, we will get players to have their profiles hosted on our site. In addition, we have a database of 600K teams we scraped from eTeamz and can use that to email current unhappy customers. To get players to host their profiles on our site, we will offer a superior product and implement viral mechanics/incentives similar to Kicksend. For instance, an athlete could pay for more video or just get one friend to sign up. We'll also have consistent email and blog tips about dealing with recruiters and marketing yourself as an athlete that will be availably only to teams/athletes with pages.

No

Flower delivery business for spontaneous romance and home/office subscriptions. An exchangeable gift card. An AirBnB for audio, video, and photo equipment (e.g. sound mixers, DSLR lenses, high-end HD camcorders). A Birchbox for organic dried food. A Zappos for sports equipment. A web-based video chat client focused on scheduling meetings (great for office hours). A furniture shopping comparison engine. An API for product data from all retailers with an online presence.

Red Robin is one of many companies who don't realize gmail users can add a period (".") anywhere in their email address and it lands in the same inbox. And because Red Robin now offers new loyalty club members one free appetizer and a free burger every year on the month of their 'birthday,' gmail users can get several free appetizers and a free burger every month of the year (I am 6 down, and 6 to-go).