I turned 27 on Saturday.  That doesn’t have much of an effect on HomeField, but I thought I’d run through the events of the past year as they relate to our business…

Product Development

• We got excited about a complimentary idea for a completely separate application and decided to build it, though it was ultimately a distraction.
• However, we learned a lot in the process and that put Dan in a better position to rebuild HomeField for version 2.0 which we released in July.  It was built from scratch (we switched from Google Web Toolkit to Ruby on Rails) and featured a completely new pricing scheme.
• We made one really important adjustment to the way HomeField works.  We allowed our users to “Trade video” to anyone via an email address – whether they were on HomeField or not.  This, combined with our new (lower) pricing model meant sales could ramp from the network effect in the system.  Since then we’ve seen a huge spike in the number of teams we get via video trading.
• In the month of February alone, we did as much in storage as we had done in the entire previous year!
• Finally, among a ton of other great updates, we released the HomeField editor – an often requested feature that makes HomeField a more complete package for coaches everywhere.

Business Development

• A year ago HomeField had maybe 20 customers using what we now call HomeField 1.0.
• We had all the teams of Major League Lacrosse on HomeField and even got a mention on ESPN during the All-star Game.
• We decided to focus on Men’s College Lacrosse as our core vertical from a business development standpoint.  We wanted to get proof of concept in one market before moving on to other markets (other sports/levels).
• It worked.  We saw tremendous growth in the fall… ramping up to over 100 teams even though it was the offseason.
• We’ve now scaled up to almost 500 teams and our conversion rate from free to paid accounts has steadily increased from about 7% in fall ’09 to its current 23%.
• Finally, we’ve spread into other markets via word of mouth.  Without actively marketing to women’s college lacrosse teams, we are already taking a dominant market position.  Up next, men’s soccer…

Company Development

• As the economy recovered, we decided to start fundraising more seriously and I got to meet with two guys I respect a ton – Fred Wilson and Bijan Sabet.  They’re top VC’s with great portfolios and to have their advice and encouragement was powerful for me as a first-time CEO.
• Since then I’ve continued to meet/talk with some excellent individuals, like Andy Swan, Brad Feld and Mark Suster.  All entrepreneurs in their own right, and that’s exactly what I like about them.  I hope I get to work with them more closely someday.
• Finally, we landed an excellent angel investor and more importantly, an active advisor to the company in Allen Morgan – an experienced Silicon Valley lawyer/VC.  His connections are proving invaluable as I now have a ton of meetings lined up.

There are probably a bunch of other important events – biz dev partnerships, product updates, demo events, etc. – but this is the stuff that sticks out.  It’s been a great year for HomeField.  Here’s to many more…