Colts entering software business?

In the past few days I’ve had several discussions about licensing our social networking software. This is an exciting development, and one that we hoped would happen.

We’ve been building mycolts.net in the most open and flexible manner possible with an eye toward licensing the software to other NFL teams. We don’t expect to get rich on this deal. Not directly, anyway. Instead, we believe that the more teams who have social networking sites the better, especially if we share a common, integrated platform. Integration could lead to big wins for every team through networked advertising as well as common data collection, which could lead to large-scale direct marketing through E mail.

Interestingly, the conversations I’ve had lately have gone beyond the NFL. I’ve been approached by hockey teams, baseball teams, soccer teams a youth education organization and even a zoo! It’s possible that none of these conversations will turn into deals, but it’s interesting to consider the possibilities and challenges.

Mostly I’m thinking about the challenges.

Since we haven’t finished the code yet, we have no idea how much traffic the system will generate. Without that knowledge, it becomes very difficult to predict our hardware and bandwidth needs (for managed hosting). Since these expenses will increase as traffic increases, we’ll need to be very careful.

Still, there’s a way to do this and we’re eager to find it. If anyone out there has experience with launching and scaling ASP solutions, and if you think you can point me to resources that might help me solve my problem, please drop me a line.

On the “opportunity” side, it would be really interesting, I think, to see a diverse group of organizations running our software, especially if we could knit together a consortium to share our experience and our data over time. As a hockey team in one part of the country discovers a great promotion for the auto industry (for example) and another organization finds a great youth marketing initiative, we could share “best practices” and make our on-line and off-line systems even stronger. As I stop to think of it, any affinity-based group is a prospect to use our software. Hmm. Better buy some more servers!!

The last thing we can afford is to get distracted from our main goal, the success of mycolts.net. Still, we can at least talk, can’t we?