Startup of the Day - imleagues

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The BizSpark startup of the day is imleagues, based in the US. You will find below an interview with Greg Myers, Co-Founder of imleagues.com. All the best to them and congrats for being the startup of the day!

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Website: www.imleagues.com.


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Interview with Greg Myers, Co-Founder of imleagues.com

Tell us who you are and your role in the company.

Greg Myers, Co-Founder imleagues.com. As a startup I take on a little bit of every role within the company including overall strategy, design, sales, marketing, and lots of support and testing of new features on the site.

What did you do before creating your company?

I worked in various IT roles for a major US defense contractor, and of course I played a lot of intramural sports during and after college.

How do you feel being the most promising ‘Startup of the Day’ per Microsoft BizSpark?

It’s quite an honor and I feel very proud that the hard work of our entire team is being recognized by a great company like Microsoft.

What is your company’s mission?

We strive to do for intramural sports what Yahoo and ESPN have done for fantasy sports - we make running an intramural program much easier by automating the process and bringing it online, and at the same time we make it a lot more fun and interactive for the students playing intramurals. After running live for just over a year, we are already the official intramural website for 78 colleges and universities and growing very fast.

How did you get the idea for your company?

I had always loved playing intramural sports in college but hated feeling so disconnected – it felt like intramural sports was one of the only things at college that was still done by pen and paper. Once I started talking to intramural directors, I realized there is a whole other side that also needed help: IM directors have a huge task of managing players, games, facilities, etc. and there really wasn’t any good software to help them in that task. So thus the idea for imleagues was born as a way to help intramural directors easily manage every aspect of their program while at the same time greatly enhancing the experience for the students that play intramurals.

Tell us about your funding history. Are you currently looking for funding? If so, how much?

We are in the fortunate position to be fully self-funded and we are not currently seeking outside funding. With that said, if an outside offer came along that would help grow the company, we would give it consideration.

How many employees do you have? How many developers?

We currently have 7 employees, 4 of them are developers.

Are you hiring? If yes, what are you hiring and where?

We’re always looking to add talented people to strengthen our team, but currently the only position we are actively seeking is an ad sales lead to help us bring quality targeted sponsorships to our pages.

Which platform are you building on? Why?

We're a full Microsoft shop; .NET 3.5, MS SQL 2008, Visual Studio 2008. We selected this platform for several reasons. It provides the power, performance and scalability we need, while not sacrificing agility. It's also reassuring to have the depth and breadth of Microsoft supporting the platform.

Where do you see opportunities today in the Software/internet area?

The technology trends are exciting: ubiquitous high speed access, powerful simple to use frameworks, and the growing list of software based services make more things possible every day! So solve a problem that people have! In our case, that was simplifying the task of organizing Intramural sports. This was a big undertaking, but there are plenty of smaller opportunities, you just need to look!

What do you think about the BizSpark Program?

I love the BizSpark program! It has really helped us get access to the technologies that we need to help grow our company as fast as possible.

Do you have any advice for young Software entrepreneurs?

It’s very difficult to do it all on your own. Surround yourself with as many smart, eager people as you can, and make sure everyone on your team knows the overall strategy and vision of the company.

Who’s your role model?

Thomas Edison’s a great role model – he worked so hard on so many different inventions, yet he still said “I never did a day's work in my life. It was all fun.” I think for a startup to be successful that has to be true; if you don’t love what you do it will be extremely difficult to put in the extra time and hard work necessary to make your startup a success.

What’s the ONE THING you would like readers to take away from this interview

Readers should envy college students because now with imleagues.com the intramural sports experience is becoming much more interactive and fun! We’ve taken the intramural process from one where a team comes into the office to sign up, comes back into the office to pick up their schedule, and then just shows up to their games, to one where each player can sign up from the convenience of their dorm room, see updates/changes to their schedule in real time, see how they’re doing in their division and how other teams are doing, find players to join their team, and can interact with each other in a way never possible before.

Published: 12/4/2009 9:03 AM

Company: imleagues