I’ve been interviewed by Jane over at Debt Management.net. It’s been a while since I did one of these but it’s always fun to take some time and answer questions that I haven’t thought about it a really long time.
Anyway, other than some flattery on Jane’s part, the interview is pretty interesting and you should check it out.
Brad Marley, who provided a great guest post on parenting last week interviewed me for his site, so if you’re curious to learn more about the mystery man behind this site, check it out.
I think I come off rather well, although it was interesting thinking about these questions because it made me realize a couple of things:
1. I really love books and haven’t been reading enough of them lately
2. Being interesting is very hard, but incredibly important
A while back I got the chance to interview Gary, the guy behind TheBaseballCube.com. What Gary did sounds simple: he took data that was publicly available and compiled it in one convenient place.
In this case, the data just so happens to be baseball statistics—something I’m obsessive about. So when I found his site, I was like that fat kid in the old Willy Wonka movie—I was seriously freaking out.
I love this idea of something so simple becoming such a huge success with time, skills, and a lot of hard work. I’ve written about Gary and his site before (The Secret to a Good Blog and a Good Business), so make sure to check that out too.
The interview runs a little long, but I recommend you stick with it. There are some good lessons to be learned about ideas, monetization, and some of the sacrifices that come with starting something like this.
How did TBC get off the ground? What prompted you to start the site and do all the work that it required?
I had always been fascinated with the Internet and I grew up a baseball junkie and so it was a marriage made in heaven to combine the Internet and baseball. That, a compulsive urge to keep track of things, and the inability to set reasonable boundaries were the 3 major inputs into the birth of the site.
The site started out as a hobby. I was always a fan of the limitless possibilities of the Internet as a tool for information and research and never thought much about making money on it. Just the idea of putting some code to an html file and seeing my work publicly on the Internet was a rush enough for me. But I’m never happy and so a site with only 2001 MLB stats became a site with 1998-2001 stats and then I added a bit more.
At what point did you realize, “I can make a fair amount of money from this?” Did that change your motivations at all for the site?
At the time, everybody was talking about making money on the Internet and the common misconception was that all you needed to do was put up a web page and the people would come. Of course, that is completely false. With only basic content that could be accessed in numerous other locations on the net, I had nothing additional to offer to the web community and I found that the only way I could get traffic was to post (spam) message boards or newsgroups about the site.
I learned quickly that this goes against Internet etiquette but I found that it would give me a spike in traffic. Getting 50 people a day was a rush but if I wasn’t posting spam, the traffic would drop to zero.
If I had to change anything, it would be that I thought about advertising and revenue way too early in the life cycle of my site. With only a handful of visitors each day, it was the wrong time to focus on ad placement on affiliate advertising but it’s what I was doing. I didn’t respect my visitors and I even had pop-ups and my thought was very short-term.
It was about the time that the search engines started to index my pages and a particular event in the baseball world caused a spike in traffic and a subsequent spike in revenue. Such a simple concept but there it was, right in front of me. Traffic = Revenue.
I can say with all honesty that money was not the initial motivation of the site but it was the justification of the time that I put into it. At first, this was just something that I had to get out. I needed to build a baseball almanac for some reason. The possibility of revenue justified the time that it took.
How did you know (if you did at all) that so many people would want to check out college, minor league, and major league stats, all in one place?
After a few months of stagnant traffic with only Major League stats, I realized that people didn’t need to come to my site since the baseball stats were available almost everywhere else on the Internet. Besides, the media sites that had up-to-date, pitch-to-pitch stats, there were other historical sites that did a much better job than I did. I had to admit that when I was on the net searching for baseball stats, I wouldn’t use my own site. That opened my eyes.
After all, I was a baseball fan and if I didn’t use my own site, why would somebody else?
And so I spent a few hours every day adding historical minor league stats for all current major leaguers and I sat back and said, “There, nobody else has that.” But what really opened my eyes was the feedback. Every now and again, despite the low traffic, somebody would commend me on he fact that I had minor league stats mixed in with the major leagues.
Nobody else had that. And then one day, while in a classroom where I was supposed to be listening intently, I had a vision of a web site that not only included major leaguers, but one that included minor leaguers and their historical stats.
At the time, I didn’t realize it would take off the way it did but I did find it incredibly interesting and I found that I was surfing my site more than I ever had before. Though it was an immense amount of work, I found that traffic was rising every day and so was the revenue.
The feedback gave me some insight into what people wanted to see on the web and I expanded on it a bit more.
What was the hardest part of putting in all the work you put in to the site? Were there other things you felt you neglected during that time? Was it worth it?
The hardest part was justifying the amount of time that I put into the site to my girlfriend at the time (now my wife). Spending almost every waking hour in front of a computer copying stats from a book for a hobby that was earning about 50 cents a day was difficult.
It never felt like a job but the pull to be somewhere else was always there. I neglected my health, eating lots of junk food and I neglected my girlfriend. All of this on top of a full-time job. It was a difficult time but in the end, I would say it was worth it because the extra revenue from the site on top of my current full-time job (not in baseball) allows my family to live a bit more comfortably then if I didn’t have the site.
Thanks Gary for taking the time and if you’re a baseball fan that had never heard of his site…you’re welcome. Also check out my other post on Gary and TBC.
You know those nights where you go to sleep REALLY late? When the alarm goes off and you’re so confused you think it’s the smoke detector? And when you get up you can’t believe it’s time to go to work?
Those days suck—you know you’re going to be dragging ass all day long and it’s just the beginning.
But I’ve noticed that a lot of the time (not all the time), those are the days that I get the most done. It’s almost like I’m a different person:
What’s going on here and what does it have to do with playing golf in the freezing cold?
Over Thanksgiving break, my father-in-law asked me if I wanted to play a round of golf with him, even the temperature was in the low 40s. He convinced me to go and I wound up playing one of the best nine holes of golf I’ve ever played. And I was freezing cold most of the time. Why would I play better when I’m struggling against the cold when I can’t play nearly as well when it’s a balmy 75 degrees out?
Golf is a very mental game, and trying not to overthink what you’re doing and what you want to do is often the hardest part. But I was so preoccupied with the cold and trying to stay warm, that I didn’t have time to worry about keeping my arm tucked, staying level, and giving my knees a little flex.
I just went up there and swung away. And I played much better than I usually do. Here’s proof from a fancy study:
In a 2008 study psychologist Sian L. Beilock of the University of Chicago divided novice and skilled golfers into two groups and instructed them to perform a series of golf putts. The researchers encouraged members of the first group to take their time, whereas they exhorted members of the second group to swing as quick ly as they could. Novice golfers performed less accurately when speed was emphasized, but skilled golfers showed exactly the opposite pattern: they performed best when told to execute quickly and faltered when advised to take their time.
What’s going on there?
Both are classic examples of overthinking.
Sometimes we just need to get our heads out of the way to do a good job at something.
Here’s Joe Torre talking about one of his pitchers:
Manager Joe Torre said Schmidt looked a little unsure on the mound.
“He’s thinking about mechanics, and sometimes you over-think that stuff,” Torre said. “The last thing you want to do, whether you’re a pitcher or a hitter, is think about your mechanics when you’re out there.”
Any writer out there knows what this is all about: that’s why pre-writing and shitty first drafts are so important. They help writers get out of the way and get into the flow.
Should you stay out late partying every day to become a more efficient/exhausted employee? Sure, it might be fun, but it won’t last.
Instead, try to create controlled distractions that will prevent overthinking without taking you completely out of your game. I would suggest:
It may sound counterproductive to be distracted, but give it a try and you’ll see how much more efficient it is that being hyperfocused on what you’re doing.
