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Chapter 1
Sports Reference Inc
www.Baseball-Reference.com
Your name: Sean Forman
Company name: Sports Reference, Inc.
(Main website is Baseball-Reference.com)
Website URL:
http://www.Baseball-Reference.com/
The site is affiliated and hosts on our server
Pro-Football-Reference.com, Basketball-Reference.com and
BaseballBooks.net.
Your company / website vision statement / goal:
The fastest, most accurate, easiest-to-use sports statistics on the
Internet.
What you sell / services you offer (brief description of your company):
Baseball-Reference.com is an on-line version of the ten pound
encyclopedias containing complete statistics for every major league
season.
Using a background database and extensive linking, we have added far
more features and stats than could be contained in a single book.
Have you always wanted to run your own business? What were some of your
previous jobs / companies?
This is actually a part-time job. I'm a college professor in math and
computer science. I've actually been surprised at how much I've taken to
running a business. I've become a voracious reader of business books and
enjoy the planning process more than I thought I would.
Have you got any qualifications? Please tell us about yourself
academically?
I have a PhD. in applied math and computational sciences from the
University of
Iowa.
How / when did the idea of your website / company come about?
I started it in Feb. of 2000. I was frustrated by the lack of easy to
use websites for baseball stats and decided to give it a whirl. It has
grown organically since then.
If you could give readers of this book one piece of advice when starting
up a business, what would it be?
For an online business, really, really stress out about usability. A
desirable service that is very easy-to-use will attract users.
Who are your role models / mentors and why?
I read anything by usability gurus like Jakob Nielsen and Peter Merholz.
I enjoy marketing books by Doc Searls and Seth Godin, and I am a sucker
for O'Reilly books.
Excluding yours, what company / website do you like / admire the
most?
It probably is cliché, but I'm blown away by the services provided by
Flickr and Google. I always feel that a website should be intuitive to
use and almost always my guesses on how to use their services are
correct. They also work hard to get the details right. Little things
definitely add up on the web.
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