The Jason Salas Experience

Tourneytopia, a company out of Grand Rapids, Michigan, produces an ASP.NET control and a hosted application that manages and provides alerts for sports tournaments and other types of bracket-based data. The service is incredibly flexible and customizable, providing numerous options in letting developers and users track their teams in applications like the NCAA College Basketball March Madness tournament, poker, battles of the bands, Wimbledon, and more.

Lead developer Joel Ross talked with me about how his idea has progressed over the years.

We've had exactly 0 complaints about the heavy usage of Javascript with the Tourney Bracket Control. The biggest complaint we got early on was that it was slow. We alleviated a lot of that when we moved to a div-based layout in Version 2. The Javascript was also moved to an external resource, so it gets cached now. Surprisingly, the Javascript hasn't had a significant change since we first wrote it. We've considered revamping it with jQuery, but it's tough to justify a huge change like that when the current method works so well. 

Our biggest task early on with the Tourney Bracket Control was to figure out how brackets can be built based solely from the number of teams involved. Building in that flexibility was time-consuming and painful, but doing it right up-front has paid dividends - without it, we would never have been able to handle the tournaments that The Tennis Channel runs - they have brackets with 48, 64, 96, and 128 players. So far, we haven't ventured away from bracket-based contests, so the round robin formats are out right now. There hasn't been a lot of demand for us to deviate, so we haven't. That's not to say we're against branching out - a confidence pool is something we're strongly considering adding over the summer.

3. One of your first high-profile clients was Playboy.com. What did the exposure do for your business, and what's been the most-requested feature from customers and users to this point? 

Actually, Playboy.com was our very first paying customer. Being able to prominently highlight them on our website immediately established us as a reputable company. Regardless of your thoughts about what Playboy produces, they are a well-known brand and if they're willing to put their name on something, it gives people confidence in that service. 

Tourneytopia runs on .NET 3.5 with a SQL Server 2005 back-end. It actually started as a classic ASP application written to manage the office pool where Brian, my business partner, and I both worked. Before launching Tourney Logic, we ported it to ASP.NET. At one point, it was a redistributable application that anyone could install on their own servers. Publishing a software package turned out to be a major challenge, and after a couple of years, we turned it into a hosted service. Switching from a system that was meant to run a single pool to one that could handle thousands of pools was a pretty big change for us. We learned a lot about scaling applications - we're still learning, actually!

5. Conventional logic (or just blind assumption) leads me to believe that you're heading towards implementing Web 2.0 principles and make your service applicable to mobile users with a serious social slant. Your thoughts? 

Thanks to you pointing out Web Hooks to us, we're looking at what it will take to let our users use our services in their own applications. We've eyed a Facebook application for Tourneytopia for a while, and adding a mobile interface has been on our roadmap for a long time. For both Brian and I, this is an evening and weekend gig, so our biggest issue is finding the time and prioritizing what we want to get done.

Given that we're both primarily .NET developers, Silverlight would be the natural progression for us. I'd love to see a much more interactive bracket with a Silverlight UI, but at this point, the penetration is a bit low, and again, time is our enemy.

Thanks Joel, and good luck!