PuppyShowdown.com

It’s hard to find the sweet spot, but when you do it’s magic.  I think Puppy Showdown is getting close to finding the sweet spot thanks to all the great feedback we’ve been getting.  I’m working on a number of enhancements and fixes to make Puppy Showdown even more fun and engaging.

So, the good folks at Hacker News gave me a jolt today.  I submitted a link to PuppyShowdown hoping to get some feedback, but ended up on the front page!  I hadn’t anticipated that and, when it happens, it happens fast.  In this case, it happened just as the post was about to leave the “New” submittions page.

It’s always interesting to find out how wrong I was about what motivates people and what confuses them.  Often when you create software you need to guess at these things and then test and evaluate how you did.  I have a tendency to over-think.

I’ve got a few changes in the pipeline. First, after talking to a few people it became clear that the “points become tickets into a weekly raffle” process to decide the weekly winner is all too complicated.  My intention was to make a raffle system where the more points you had greater your changes of [...]

It’s getting close to the official launch date.  I’ve gotten a lot of great feedback and I’ve made a few updates the the site.   There’s still a lot of work to do though.

Winners will be chosen each week on Sunday night.  Once a winner is selected, the weekly results are sent out in the form of an email and will be in your inbox by Monday morning. The email will review how you and your dogs did this week.  If you’re the weekly winner this email will [...]

If all goes well, Puppy Showdown contests will start on April 14th with our first donation drawing the following Sunday, April 21st.  Until then feel free to use the site, but expect some bugs and rough patches as I get things set up.  If you have any suggestions on how to tweak the site (spelling, [...]