The original release of racecast.io was built in a weekend. It used a Google doc as its database and, for the most part, was just a static site. However, the _idea_ of racecast.io was born back in 2015 while I was sitting in the newly renovated Terminal B at Newark Liberty International Airport. The very first prototype was a wall of black text on a white background, more of a spew of weather and racing data than anything else. It had all the workings of a full toolIn fact, there are pieces of that original prototype that still haven't made it into the app we know today.
The public launch in April 2022 was the minimum viable product, something to put out on the internet to gather feedback and see if the idea held water. We launched with just under 300 races and it was simply just the weather on race day as predicted by whatever service we were using at the time. Over time, historical weather, course maps, race descriptions, and FAQs made their way onto the race page and the Google doc continued to expand to over 500 races. Email and phone subscriptions were added, but in the true spirit of "build things that don't scale" those were all manual updates I sent out myself every morning leading up to a big race.
Building the Community
The biggest ask (beyond obvious weather errors) was the ability to create an account on racecast to manage subscriptions, follow races, and interact with others in the community. The current google doc as a database wasn't secure enough and couldn't scale to hundreds of user accounts, so a real database had to be attached to the site. Building from the ground up to drop in-place with our existing wealth of data, that database was added and racecast is now growing slowly with invite-only user accounts. This is the first step to building community tools for posting questions, news, asking questions, and subscribing to race updates. These features are still in the works, but if you want early access to some less-than-perfect features, you can request an invite here.
Redesigning for Mobile
The majority of our traffic in the first year came from mobile devices. While not unexpected, the existing site did not respond as well as we would have liked - things were too big, data was all over the place, and tables just didn't render correctly. While rebuilding the site to add the technical capaiblities, we naturally rebuilt the front end to be more streamlined, mobile friendly, and pleasing to look at. We're still working on some of the finer details, but the redesign has been live for a month now and we're excited to see how it continues to evolve.
What's Next
Racecast is continuing to grow and we have a backlog of features we're super excited about. New focus is being put into our news and marketing to help drive engagement with our community and start conversations on what is working and what needs to be improved. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter to stay up to date on the latest, and if you have any feedback on how we can improve, please reach out at [email protected]!
Thank you for being a part of the racecast community!
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