When friends of ours were getting ready to have their baby, Captain Awesome decided that he would create a Baby Pool for them so that friends and family members could make guesses as to when their little one would arrive. From that, his website Pregnancy Pool came about. He worked extremely hard on the site, and now, since little Pooh Bear will soon make his arrival, it is finally time to make our own pool. What is it you ask? Pregnancy Pool is a FREE and fun way for family and friends to get involved in guessing when your little one will arrive.
When The Captain started searching for online baby pools he was very disappointed in what he found. He really saw it was a missed market. There were some, but they were either costly, or too hard to figure out. That’s why when he set out to create his own Baby Pool , he wanted it to be free and easy. And that my friends is exactly what he did.
To start, all you have to do is sign up and go to “CREATE POOL”. Here you are able to name and make the rules to your own pool. For ours, we decided that guessing the baby’s weight would be the tie breaker for those guesses on the same date. We also decided to take it upon ourselves to spice things up a bit and have people make a small wager with their guess. We are collecting $5/ guess, but keep in mind that it isn’t done through the site. We are doing that privately on our own, and you certainly don’t have to do that. But since The Captain loves to gamble, it fit us nicely!
Once the pool is created you are free to share your own personal pool site with your friends and family! You can either go to the buttons at the top of the page and share that way, or you can copy and paste your link to an e mail and send it out to them that way. Once your friends get the link they create an account and go to VIEW POOLS and find your particular pool. Then they make their guess!
They can even leave you a little note or comment. It really is that easy.
Now for some fun! I created a Pool just for you my readers! If you go to VIEW POOLS it is appropriately called Afterthealter . I thought it would be fun to see what your guesses are! Especially since you have shared this journey with me. It’s time for all you people in hiding to get involved! Go ahead..make a guess! I promise I won’t even be mad when you guess that I will go late with a big 10 lb baby!
I am extremely proud of Captain Awesome for creating this beautiful site. He really worked hard, and I think it will be a big success. So if you know anyone expecting a baby in the near future please pass along the www.pregnancypool.com website!
Best wishes on the upcoming delivery of your baby! (You were above me at SITS today.)
I hope you don’t mind a little feeback on the site. I don’t know if you did any formal or informal feedback testing, but as a marketer, but when you first go on the site all the important information is hidden (you have to scroll down). I actually gave up and left the page and cam back only to find out how to search for a pool. Second, the top and bottom of the page are very different (top has the cartoon, bottom is much more fuzzy/different feel). You might want to make the layout more user friendly. Lastly, and please don’t think I am trying to be rude, but the baby cartoon might be a little off-putting. It’s really not the most attractive baby, and you need to think that prospective mothers and fathers will be starting these pools. You need to think about if this is the best, most compelling and attractive graphic for this target audience. Anyways, feel free to reject my suggestions but as a professional marketer I thought I’d give my 2 cents.
Thanks for the suggestions! I”m going to have Captain Awesome respond to this. He agreed with you on the baby thing…we were definitely looking for feedback so thank you!
L,
I love feedback! It really is appreciated since this is the first non-blog site I have created.
The reason for the info being below the fold is that this site is being ran for free so income is based solely on ads and for that reason I made the decision that above the fold was going to be some ads.
Notwithstanding I could clean up that header a bit – thinking about taking out the sharing module and shrinking the size…maybe instead of 2 horizontal banners one large ad box? I kind of like the ugly cartoon baby but its because he is ugly, however, I can see how it is a little different than the clean look of the whole site.
I really do appreciate all inputs!
I just checked out the Pregnancy Pool site and it is awesome! Great job, Capt. Awesome!
That is so Great! Its awesome that your husband can create such a neat website. Thanks for stopping by Spotted Smiles. I appreciated your comment.
What a great idea! That’s so neat that he was able to create something when there wasn’t a website to do what he wanted to do. Fun!
Well i think, it’s very brilliant. I’ll tell my wife about this Pregnancy Pool site. It could be something useful to fill her spare time while on maternity leave. Thanks to Captain Awesome…