Why a Baseball Startup?
My co-founder and I are building a company, Blue Seat Media, entirely focused on building apps for baseball fans. This is why.
But first, I must start with a core value system that informs everything we do. A simple motto: Be Good.
Be good people, work with good people, build good products.
Another important aspect of our value system is that we are completely bullish on the future. The future is full of unprecedented potential to positively affect many aspects of our everyday lives. Another way of saying this is that there exists unprecedented opportunities to do good things and spread that goodness to a lot of people. This is what drives us: a common goal to maximize that potential, convert it to good energy, and use that power to make a positive impact on our world through good design.
Now, technology is at the center of this opportunity and we are lucky enough to live in a very, very exciting time in technology. We believe this time of innovation can open up new ways to experience our world in a richer way than ever before. Just like good design, good technology seeks only to enhance our experiences, not distract us from them. The irony of technology is that, while being the hero of innovation, all it really wants is for you to completely forget its existence. It’s sort of like a man who makes a beautiful chair and only wants you to sit in that chair, get lost in a book or a conversation, and not think about how the chair was built.
Our everyday experiences are what make up our memories and these memories make up our life story. Our company, Blue Seat Media, is focused on ways we can design better technology to help us tell better stories.
So, why baseball?
Well, baseball is an American institution that has a long history of great stories. I’m amazed at how many people I talk to who can remember a baseball game in such vivid detail 10, 20, 30 years after it happened. One of my favorite baseball memories was when I was probably 8 years old. My mom woke me up one morning and surprised me with tickets to an afternoon Reds game in lieu of school that day. These weren’t just any seats either, they were blue seats. Those of you who grew up going to games at Riverfront Stadium surely understand that sitting in the blue seats was a big deal.
These stories are incredibly meaningful. What if we could build apps that use iPads and iPhones to immerse us deeper into those experiences? Could these apps “plus” our memories? And not only that, maybe these new devices connected to the internet could help us organize and archive those memories so they last forever. What does it look like in 30 years when I tell my grandkids about the time Jay Bruce hit that walkoff home run to dead center field on August 28, 2010, sending the Reds to their first postseason in 15 years? (I got goosebumps just typing that.)
These stories are meaningful, yes, but why? We believe that good memories have two very important elements: place and people. We have a few hunches about how to maximize those elements in a baseball app, but first we must make a case for niche products.*
To be continued.
*A Case for Niche Products
By focusing our energy just on baseball, we can design unique and elaborate digital apps for this group of the population, therefore creating exponentially more meaningful experiences than Facebook and Instagram, services built to reach the masses. Products like these are good and we believe they could act in the future as an infrastructure for niche products. If a product like Facebook is laying the groundwork for the city, niche products are the buildings.
(If you’d like to download the image above as a wallpaper for your iPhone, iPad, laptop or big-ass monitor go here: http://www.inkdryercreative.com/daily/archive/integrity)
