Stat Sheet helps sports buffs track all the numbers

July 13th, 2009

By Allan Maurer

CARY, NC – Sports buffs thrive on statistics, but just looking at columns and boxes of numbers daunts the most serious fan, assuming they can even find what they want online. Robbie Allen, himself a fan of NCAA basketball with a technology background and business degree from M.I.T., started StatSheet.com to offer more comprehensive sports stats online and present them in more visually accessible formats.

Allen, a one-man band who has started several Web sites and plans a new Twitter-like service in support of his sports stat oriented businesses, funded the sites himself for their first two years. He recently received a $47,000 NC Idea grant that will fund their third year as he develops a variety of ways to monetize his services.

“The genesis behind Stat sheet,” says Allen, “is that I looked at ESPN.com, CBS Sprots and other sites, but there really isn’t a lot there. I’m a big Carolina fan, and you’ll hear an announcer say a Carolina player did such and such, the best since 1983, but if you go online, you can’t find more information, it just isn’t there. I want to make the information available and create Web applications around the statistics so people can visualize them and use them in a more interesting way.”

On his blog, Allen writes, “The purpose of the StatSheet Network is pretty simple. I want to do interesting things with sports stats on the web. My goal is also straightforward: to create the most popular sports-related websites and web applications.”

Launched in 2007, a month after his first child was born, Stat Sheet was like having a second toddler, Allen says. “Things were a little immature, but there was a lot of growth.” Allen did all of his own technology development.

He started with college basketball and did quite a bit with visualization. “I’m surprised not many other companies did much with charts and graphs,” he notes. “Everything in sports is comparable, teams, conferences, players, even referees.”

His efforts have already garnered significant press attention from bloggers, TechCrunch, CBS Sports, The New York Times, WSJ.com, The Miami Herald, Mashable, The Washington Times, and ReadWriteWeb, among other media outlets.

His efforts to use Twitter to enhance what he’s doing with Stat Tweets led to a confrontation with the micro-blogging site. Stat Tweets, which launched in December, was the only single person company to get a Crunchy nomination (out of about 50). Allen and his wife together created 650 Twitter accounts over a weekend and within four months he had 63,000 followers on the accounts.

But then, suddenly, Twitter disabled every account. After a month of working with Twitter, which he describes as “painful,” he blogged about his problems and TechCrunch picked it up. With Twitter still dragging its feet on the problem after two months, he told them to go ahead and delete the accounts and decided to start his own service, www.stat.us.com.

Allen says initially he figured the stat sheet idea would resonate enough with people, but was not sure exactly how he would make money. Allen recently gave a presentation suggesting that much of what people say about entrepreneurship is not true (see: “What You’ve Been Told about Entrepreneurship is Wrong” : http://techjournalsouth.com/news/article.html?item_id=7771).

The idea that you have to know how you’re going to make money before you start an Internet company is another of those wrong ideas.

He has at least temporarily abandoned using advertising on the site to produce revenue.

“Placing advertising on StatSheet does not support my purpose or my goal,” he writes on his blog. “It actually runs counter to both. Based on this simple logic, I’m in the process of removing every bit of advertising from the StatSheet Network properties (including statsheet.com).”

Instead, he is developing a subscription service targeted at media companies with sports sections. “The idea is to bottle up some of the goodness behind Stat Sheet, the charts, tables, and graphs in widget form and become something like a Getty Images for sport statistics.” Buyers could pick and choose the specific items they want to embed and some options would be low cost.