Love sports? Love Bananas?
Well, hop to SportsChimp, a hot-or-not for sports lover. The concept is very simple – all you need to do is place your bets (root for your favorite team), predict winners and win banana bucks from your friends.
The service is super intuitive to use and within a few days of launch, SportsChimp has recorded more than 3,000 challenges – thanks to nicely designed virality features in the product.
What’s really cool about SportsChimp?
Product messaging, I say. The well designed messaging simply brings out the passion around sports like IPL etc.
Take a look at some examples:
That is, the moment you place your bet, the app sends out a ‘super opinionated/flaming/humorous’ message on your Facebook status (flaming for your friends, if they are supporting the other team) and will instantly invite a ‘click’ – i.e. an intent to check what exactly is it all about. That pretty much sets the tone of the app usage and for those who aren’t comfortable with Facebook notifications, you can turn them off in the settings page.
Check out this introductory video
Do give SportsChimp a (banana) spin and share your feedback/suggestion with the team. In terms of future plans, the team will expand the service to other sports over the next few days, but for sure this is one of those services which Cricinfo should have had (also reminds me of rivals.com, which Yahoo acquired and did nothing about it)!
Long story short, a very well designed implementation of passion we all have around sports teams, mixed with virality of social.
What’s your take?
– Tweet ref (in the screenshot above).