How it all started…
Whenever I tell people how TBB got to where it is today, they always seem very interested, so I figured that I would post it for everyone to see.
I’m going to have to go back about 2 years to where it all started. In 2007 I was trading Future E-mini’s on the S&P 500. After a couple months of doing this I realized that I really didn’t enjoy staring at graphs and charts all day. I wished that there was a more fun way to earn cash doing something, and that’s when I had my “Aha” moment. I came up with a concept to build a website that would allow people to play games against one another for cash.
With the concept in hand, I went to GoDaddy.com and started running through any URL’s that I thought would be fitting for the business. I cant remember what URL’s I came up with, but when I typed in thebattlebegins.com and it was free, I was shocked. I was almost 100% certain that it would have been bought up by some movie company (some alien vs earth or evil versus good movie), or some political campaign website. This was actually my first time ever buying a domain as I had never owned a web business before. I was actually hesitant to spend the $9.99 to buy the domain because I wasn’t sure if it was going to be worth it (Quick tip: If you find a domain you like, just buy it. They are so cheap and you never know if someone will buy it from or conceive a concept the fits the name. Google GoDaddy coupons for some good deals!). I remember asking my brother if I should buy it. I ran the concept by him really quick, he didn’t really have much to say, but I bought it anyway.
The next couple of months I would learn a very important lesson. NEVER, EVER, EVER contract out work to a web design and development firm (Don’t crucify me yet… read on). If you need a quick website done to show off a few products you offer, or a simple e-commerce site, a web firm works fine. If you are building new web software, then avoid web firms at all cost. You might think that it would be cheaper than hiring a full time employee, but it is not. I’ll get more into this in a future post, but long story short, I over paid once for a site that never got finished (they screwed me over), then I overpaid again for a site that wasn’t necessarily bad, but because it was a contract job. When the site was done, so was the support and future of the business. Web software needs constant support. I will be tweaked over time to fit how customers actually interact with it. Everything that is designed before a customer interacts with it is simply you assuming how customers will interact with it. Back to the story…
The first launch of The Battle Begins was in 2008 with the concept of cash gaming. We were live for about 4 months, launching in November. This version of the site featured a flash application that was similar to Battle.Net. It allowed users to /whisper each other and join “Battles” where they could arrange their cash games. It also featured something called Battle Points which was points that users could gain over time by participating on the website to redeem prizes. The business model was to generate revenue based on advertisements. After running the website for 4 months and massing about 2,000 registered users, we decided that the site simply wasn’t going in the direction we wanted. The business model was flawed, and the application wasn’t built right.
It was a bit disappointing to shut down the site so early, but we had brought on a new partner, Matt Johnson, and had much bigger plans this time around. I met Matt through the old site, which is pretty much all the good that came out of building that site. We started chatting on the site and when I found out that he worked at WeGame (at the time) I got really intrigued. I never thought I would find someone as motivated as Matt. The day I met him, we set up a Skype meeting and he was pretty much instantly down to join of the team. It didn’t start as fast as it could have because my company was in talks with another company at the time, but the company wouldn’t be what it is today without Matt.
Matt later introduced me to a book called Getting Real and a company called 37Signals. When I read the book and took a closer look at 37Signals business model, I was floored. It made so much sense and it worked so well that I look back on my old site now and all that pops up in my head is “What was I thinking?!”.
We decided that we didn’t want to just be a gaming community, we wanted to be a software company and sell web-based applications to gamers. The first application we decided to make was a tournament application. Tournaments were our first priority because the old website ran 4 tournaments. These 4 tournaments brought the most traffic to our website, and engaged our users on a level that no feature built into our site had. Hosting the tournaments however was a headache. Players didn’t show up, we had to design a bracket (which cost $300, including CSS/HTML), players registered through a forum post, etc. Needless to say, it wasn’t as organized as it could be, but we also had to do everything from scratch. This prompted us to create a much more simple way to host tournaments, thus Battle Center was born.
Battle Center took us about 6 months to launch. The first thing we did once we conceptualized Battle Center was start designs and look for a developer. That’s where Bryan’s story at The Battle Begins starts. Matt introduced me to Bryan as an extremely capable developer who hadn’t been discovered. As with Matt, we Skype’d up that day, and the next day Bryan was developing. This may or may not have been poor choice. On one hand, we look back and think we should have planned a little more, but on the other hand, we see how much we’ve learned because of the mistakes we’ve made. It was the first time our Matt and Bryan had ever worked on such a big project. There were definitely a lot of things we hadn’t anticipated for, and looking back, we probably could have launched this app 2-3 months sooner if we had the knowledge we do now.
Here we are, roughly a week or so into launch with a new partner Leon Gaban as our community manager. Time to build the future, care to join us?
