TEAMSNAP
About Us
How TeamSnap Began
The idea for TeamSnap began in 2002 when Sparkplug Creative Director Matt Triplett agreed (or was it condemned?) to be the manager of his adult soccer team. Quickly, the problems with keeping his team on track became apparent — too many emails back and forth, too many Excel spreadsheets, and too much frustration. It was at that point that Matt decided that there had to be a better way. So he spent several weeks putting together a very rough version of what is now TeamSnap. It was so successful with his team that he realized the TeamSnap concept could really take off.
Over the next five years the team at Sparkplug juggled an overflowing client workload while trying to develop TeamSnap on the side. After several false starts, including nearly a year of development in PHP that was eventually scrapped in its entirety, Sparkplug committed the resources to building TeamSnap in Ruby on Rails. Six months later, the public beta of TeamSnap was launched.
The Response has been Fantastic
Our intention was to round up enough teams during public beta to get a good cross-section of sports and players, but just by word of mouth and a few enthusiastic blog posts we've signed up exponentially more teams than we were expecting. We've received terrific feedback from our users, both with praise and with great suggestions for additional features.
The most challenging thing right now is prioritizing our development efforts because we have literally been overwhelmed with good ideas. One of our mantras is to keep TeamSnap simple and easy to use, so we balance the need for features and power with the desire to keep it clean, friendly and approachable.
Why We Think Humor is Important
As we all know, marketing is supposed to be about “synergizing market forces”, “leveraging customer loyalty”, “integrating brand strategies” and all that twaddle. The thing is, all that fancy marketingspeak doesn't mean squat when you consider that the vast majority of today's marketing is so serious, misguided, tedious, and/or obtuse that it isn't even noticed by consumers. Our experience has been that serious/boring marketing just doesn’t work very well.
And that’s why making people laugh is something we take very seriously. The funny thing about humor is that it's pretty much universally appealing. (Whereas most folks don't like boring stuff so much. Go figure.) So, when on-target and well-executed, humor can be an outstanding marketing tool. Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk!
Case in point: Our spoof testimonials (which were a blast to put together) have been a huge draw to the site. In the blog press we’ve gotten, every single one mentions them. And if you enjoyed those, you should check out our Privacy Policy. :)
Bottom line: Humor works. It lets people know that we’re real people (just like them!). We believe it has enormous untapped potential for connecting with people, especially on the Internet. Honestly, being funny is such a no-brainer to us, we’re a little mystified why everybody else is always so serious. That’s no fun at all. :)
What's Unique about Us
Our lead designer has no formal design training, our lead developer has no formal development training and our human behavior director was their high school Social Studies teacher. Weird, huh?
All three of them met at a small alternative school in Alaska back in the early 1980's. Terry was a kooky, hippie teacher and Andrew and Matt were geeky high school students.
Years later, after careers in journalism and advertising (Andrew), and technology and teaching (Matt), they began designing and building websites at Sparkplug, which Matt founded in 1997 when he got frustrated working for other people. But they realized that there was a big component missing — the psychology behind the web design. So they hired their former psychology teacher, Terry Taylor, and everything changed.
By taking a human-behavior-centric view of web sites and web users, Sparkplug is able to build sites that people really love to use.
Want to Learn More?
If you have a question about Sparkplug or TeamSnap, just and we'll get back to you pronto.
