The Road to Entrepreneurship...

Last week, I logged onto Mint.com (as I do every morning) to get a snapshot of my finances. While reviewing posted transactions, I noticed a new icon on the top right corner of the transaction summary page - “+ Add a Transaction.” Mint - the free online personal finance service - now offers account reconciliation. You can now manually enter transactions as they occur and Mint will automatically reconcile these transactions after they post to your account. The lack of this feature has been a major complaint for some fellow Mint users to the point where it detracted such users from using the service. While I understand the complaints regarding this missing feature, I am well satisfied with Mint. For me, the benefits that Mint provides outweigh the lack of features such as transaction reconciliation.

Mint, the brainchild of Aaron Patzer, solves the long-standing problem of easy and free personal financial and budget management. It provides a simple solution to a seemingly simple question that most of us have - How much did I spend this month, and on what? Launched on September 2007, Mint attracted more users than any other online solution within its first year, boasting over half a million people opened accounts. Recently acquired by Intuit - the makers of Quicken - Mint continues to flourish as the fastest growing service of its kind.

The major benefit that Mint brought to consumers is that it allowed anyone with an Internet connection access to manage and understand their finances. Mint is able to offer the same services offered by the Quicken (Intuit) and Microsoft Money but for free and securely through a web browser. Personal money management has become demystified and such a benefit definitely contributed to Mint’s early success. Important things to note are the multiple features that make up this benefit. Mint implemented features such as transaction categories, email alerts, monthly spending charts, graphs and so on… to deliver such benefits to the consumer.

There is a relationship between features and benefits. That is, benefits are made up of features. The features that go into a product or service should all serve to provide a benefit because when it comes to products and services, it appears that most consumers look for benefits NOT features when making purchase decisions. Patzer and his advisors recognized this and (I think) focused their efforts on implementing features that provided the most benefits to the consumer - which in the end is all that should matter.

Contrary to the professional arena where the league provides scorekeepers and statisticians, amateur social softball leagues around the Chicago-land area do not officially keep and track game data - such as statistics. It is up to the individual teams to capture and record their own statistics, then update their fans either through their website or blog. This has therefore led a lot of teams to not record game statistics at all, settling instead for just the basic Win/Loss data that is provided by the social leagues. It is safe to say that there lacks the opportunity to easily capture and present detailed statistics for such amateur teams.

It is because of this gap that Sportycus is being created. It will solve the problem of amateur softball teams not being able to capture game data while at the game and present more than just Win/Loss statistics to their fans.

Sportycus is a game data hosting platform that has been designed with amateur softball teams in mind. At its core is a proprietary statistic engine that hosts game data and enables teams to record, analyze, and present their team statistics on their own website or blog. Three features differentiate this platform from the many competitors in this space.

1. An easy to use mobile application that enables live game data capture while at the game. This therefore allows teams to provide almost real-time game casts to fans who are unable to be at the game.
2. A robust set of data mining tools that allow teams to do really interesting data analysis. For instance, an amateur team will be able to know what player has the most runs within a certain park during a particular season or teams will be to compare their data against other teams around the city.
3. A plug-in architecture that enables teams to present team and individual statistics on their own website, blog, or even social media pages such as Facebook Fan pages.

Amateur sports are already social in nature, teams share photos and stories, now they can share statistics too thanks to Sportycus!