Website: www.picktastic.com

Interview with: Tim Sears

How many founders does Picktastic have and what are their names?

Picktastic was founded by two longtime friends and sports enthusiasts; Tim Sears and Brandon Corry.

What are the founders’ backgrounds and qualifications?

Tim and Brandon both have extensive backgrounds in Software Engineering, particularly within the context of the web.

Tim works in product development and consulting for a web agency in Portland, OR called ISITE Design. There, he specializes in mid to high-end content management system implementations for a variety of clients, as well as custom websites and applications.

Brandon has a background in Software Engineering for startups before the bubble burst earlier this decade. He is currently based out of Seattle, where he writes software to provide cross-platform accessibility for mobile devices.

What does your website do?

Picktastic empowers sports fans with a way to back-up their sports-related trash talking by challenging them to prove they can predict which teams are going to win. They are able to up the stakes of their picks by wagering points they earn from successful picks against other members who pick against them. Over all of that, though, it provides a community where casual and die-hard sports fans can interact and compete against others.

When did you launch?

Picktastic lauched on October 30, 2007.

Has it been easy or difficult to build your community?

Both, really. We’ve received a lot of great feedback from our community, and they have been very enthusiastically responsive to the direction we’re taking the site. Many of our features have been very effective; what’s difficult is now determining which of the many ideas on our plate will help keep users plugged in the most.

What types of marketing have you done?

Our culture has been very grass-roots, and our marketing strategy has reflected that as such. We’ve relied a lot on word of mouth, as well as features to help our users spread the word about our site. Since our site is so young, many of our campaigns are still ramping up, so much of our future strategy will depend on how successful our smaller kickoff campaigns go.

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

Currently, our primary revenue flow is from advertising. We are using Google AdSense, and will be gradually adopting other models of advertising going forward. Our primary focus in these early months is growing the community, though. Call it a luxury of being a self-sufficient startup.

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

100% self-funded. We are both highly creative and resourceful entrepreneurs, and have been able to achieve our initial goals without outside investment.

Are you currently looking for funding?

We are not actively seeking funding at this time, as our 6 month and 1 year milestone projections don’t require it. Given the right circumstances, though, we would consider it.

Do you use point spreads? If not, why?

We don’t use point spreads in the interest of appealing to a broader demographic of sports fans. While most fans are likely familiar with how spreads work, we set out to create an environment where users could contribute content freely and easily without having to overthink things. We found through our alpha testing that even without spreads, picking very well for a week of games can be quite challenging. For example, since the start of our alpha testing last August, only one user has picked a perfect week of NFL games.

What is your favorite feature on your site?

My personal favorite is the Friends Leaderboards. Like our standard Leaderboards feature, which allows you to compare and contrast your accuracy against other users by different sports and time ranges, the Friends Leaderboards gives you a much more personal view of how you’re doing by ranking you up against your friends list. It also makes it easier for you to brag to your buddies about being the best.

What type(s) of technology do you use?

We built the site using ASP.Net 2.0 / C# on SQL Server 2005. On the front-end, we’ve separated presentation and content with XHTML and CSS and are using prototype and moo.fx for some of the AJAX and animated effects you see throughout the site. Also, if you look closely, you’ll notice we’ve done some pretty wild stuff with transparent png’s to achieve the color-coded effect for different team-specific elements.

Any bold predictions for sports and technology in the future?

I think we’re really beginning to see the birth of the mobile age. Internet users are demanding their content to be delivered more timely, and mobile devices are the most eligible vehicle for that. In the not-so-far future, we’ll begin to see mobile content in sports switch to be much more about collaboration, and less about simply information retrieval.

STN’s Take:

Picktastic is a great-looking site. The User-Interface is very easy to use. We really like the fact that when you make a selection it is automatically entered without you having to actually hit a submit button. It is much better than a lot of the sites we use right now for our picks. We thought it was really interesting how Tim discussed why they don’t use point spreads for their picks. You can tell they have done their homework. The site is a great place for the casual fan to have a place to see how well they pick.

We have two suggestions. One would be to build in a private function so people that run pick pools can do it right through the site. The “Friends Leaderboard” option may work, but I think they should set up a more formal option that says “set up private league” or something like that. This would allow them to gain a much larger user base. The second would be to build the exact same system with spreads so people have a choice. As a casual better gets more involved with picking games, they start to discuss spreads more. At least that is what happened with our friends.