Website: www.ballhype.com

Interview with: Erin Gurney

How many founders does Ball Hype have and what are there names?

There are two of us – myself and Jason. And we’re married. To each other.

What are the founders’ backgrounds and qualifications?

I have an MBA in finance from Michigan State University and worked at internet startups and then in online marketing at Intuit for the past 5 years. Prior to that, I dabbled in journalism as an undergrad at Yale, and was an editor at a trade magazine following college.

Jason’s the engineer, although he also has an MBA from University of Washington. He’s been working at technology companies leading development teams for the past decade. On the side, he’s always kept busy with personal web apps. One of those, lowpost.net, was started as an NBA sports-blog tracking application two years ago, which became popular enough that he extended it to baseball with striketwo.net and football with faircatch.net. These sites helped build the relationships we needed with sports bloggers to get BallHype off to a running start.

What does your website do?

We help sports fans find the best stories and videos on the web, either automatically through the 2000 or so blogs that we track, or because users post them to BallHype.

When did you launch?

BallHype launched publicly on April 1, 2007. ShowHype, the entertainment version of BallHype, launched six months later on October 15, 2007.

Has it been easy or difficult to build your community?

Both. We tapped into the sports blogging community for the BallHype launch, as I mentioned. The reception was really great and since then the site has taken off. With ShowHype, we didn’t have hundreds of entertainment bloggers who were aware of us at launch, but we’re seeing really positive momentum as the word gets out.

What types of marketing have you done?

Other than hand out a few cards at a Warriors game, none. We have web site buttons and widgets that bloggers post on their sites, or writers will link to stories they find on BallHype, which helps send new readers our way.

Do you have any revenue streams besides advertisemnt? Who is your ad provider?

No, just ads. We are using Google AdSense and testing a couple other ad networks. Revenue growth hasn’t been as big of a priority for us as building the site and community, but we’ll focus more on monetization next year.

Funding: Self funded, Angel Investment, or Venture Capital?

Our daughter’s college fund.

Are you looking for more funding?

No – we’re earning some revenue from the site so we’re going to try to keep it “all in the family” as long as possible.

What is your favorite feature on your site?

The best part about BallHype for me is the content – on any given day there are dozens of really funny, interesting articles on the home page, often from blogs that I didn’t know of a year ago.

What Type(s) of Technology do you use?

The site is homegrown using django and yui frameworks.

Any bold predictions for sports and technology in the future?

Boundaries will continue to blur, as more bloggers will cross over into writing for mainstream sites and publications, and more traditional sportswriters begin blogging. We’ll also see an increasing amount of creative content enabled via technology—video, Flash, mashups, etc. And look for robots to dominate track and field, auto racing, and combat sports by 2020, although it will take them a bit longer to master team sports.

STN’s Take:

For a few months now I have pretty much visited Ball Hype on a daily basis.  You can always find the best stories of the day on there.  Not only is Ball Hype great for people looking for blog articles, its great for new bloggers as well. All you need is a couple of friends to vote on your article and you can get it to the front page. I am sure as they get more popular that will be harder.  I really like the fact that they track over 2000 blogs. Their list actually help me put together STN’s Top 25 Bloggers.

It amazes me that they really didn’t do any marketing and were able to grow the community as much as they have so far. It does make sense that since they already had relationships with other bloggers that it was easy to get the word out. Even if you have a great idea, it is extremely importanty to have relationships with people you are creating the product for.

Anyone else think Erin had a crazy bold prediction? Robots doing track and field, auto racing, and combat sports? I just can’t see that happening in my lifetime but I commend here for thinking out of the box.

If you haven’t visited Ball Hype, do it.