Baseball Beauties, it was just an idea!

annaanisin — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 18:15:33 +0000

Now that I have a small following I thought that I will write about
how I came up with Baseball Beauties. Like anything in life there were
a few phases and lots of changes involved before Baseball Beauties
evolved in to what it is today, and it will continue to evolve as all
ideas do.

Last March I was working as an Executive Assistant at a small
Investment Banking Firm and wasn’t too thrilled with my job or where it
was going. I’m the kind of person who needs to be busy, creative,
motivated and moving at all times, so a simple desk job is not for me (even if it involves having my own office) I
need to be out and about, meet new people, etc… You get the point!
Seeing how unhappy I was at my job my boyfriend decided to created a
job for me. Being a BIG baseball fan he decided to take a risk and buy
in to a bunch of MLB tickets. His idea was that I can resell them and
at the end we can make a profit. This way I will be busy selling, he
will have access to all these games and I can learn a bit more about
the game. We also thought that we may start offering people packages of
some sort to go with their tickets.

At the beginning of the season I was OVERWHELMED! I had SO MANY
tickets to sell every day, and it took a little while for me to come up
with an efficient system where I could get rid of them quickly. I
listed some on StubHub and the ones that didn’t sell on there, I sold
on Craig’s List (in the city where those games took place) the
tricky thing about that was, you can’t trust people which you meet
on-line; in return I got stiffed out of payment a bunch of times and
people didn’t trust me, lots of tickets did not sell… However after
about the first 2 months I got a system down, and the tickets were
selling easier and I gained some loyal customers in each city where we
had tickets.

Last Year we had tickets to: Yankees, NY Mets, Seattle Mariners,
Anaheim Angels, Minnesota Twins, Cleveland Indians, Detroit Tigers and
Oakland A’s! (if you look at all the games that these teams had every day, it’s a lot! Sometimes I have 20 tickets to sell in one day!)

This year we cut it down and have: Premium & Regular Yankees tickets, Mets, Angels, Twins (looking forward to their new stadium in 2010) and Diamond Oakland A’s seats (anyone looking for any of those teams let me know, we have great tickets!)

I’m looking forward to the Pre-Season Cubs vs. Yankees games! This
doesn’t happened often and will take place in the new Yankee stadium!

Mariners, Tigers and Indians weren’t good sellers last year and are
also really easy tickets to come by, so we decided to cut them this
year.

Going back to Baseball Beauties. At first we thought that we are
going to start another only ticket website, but with big dog
competitors like StubHub, we didn’t think we had a chance of success. I
was already thinking of idea for my own website and having the baseball
theme made me think of Baseball Cheerleaders (Baseball is one of the only sports that doesn’t have cheerleaders!)
So I thought that we can make a website for baseball cheerleaders, or
something along those lines. After doing some research I found out that
there really isn’t anything out there for women who love baseball.
There are TONS of BLOGS but no specialized networks. I always enjoyed
50′s pin-up photography and thought that we can incorporate that into
this website. I had so many ideas floating around in my head, now I had
to put them together!

But before having a solid idea of what this website is going to do
or be like I had to come up with a name. The name had to have Baseball in it and it took me a few days to come up with Beauties (sounds old school, and goes with my pin-up Babe Ruth theme) There it was! BASEBALL BEAUTIES was born!

This was my first idea for our logo. My friend Elena helped me bring
it to life! Once I had the name down and a company logo, I started
figuring out what thing website was going to be like. At first we
thought that we were going to incorporate MLB ticket sales into
Baseball Beauties somehow. We are still thinking about doing this down
the road. We are on a budget and a solid ticket application was an
additional 10K (so we’re holding off on that for now)

Initially, i wanted Baseball Beauties to be an educational website
for women, where they can learn about baseball, and subscribe to our
BLOG & I thought that we would pick women to be featured Beauties,
who cheer for their favorite MLB teams.

I found a photographer and immediately started shooting pinup style
pictures. While selling tickets, I ended up talking to lots of baseball
fans and sharing my idea. It seemed to me that Baseball Fans needed a
Network, a Social Network where they can meet other fans and well…
simply talk about baseball. I know that we have MySpace and Facebook
and hundreds of other Social Networks out there, but nothing for
baseball fans. Baseball Beauties is a niche network targeting people ONLY
interested in Baseball. As I was deeply invested into the Baseball
Season, I began to become fond of the game itself. A friend of our gave
me an excellent book to read:

It is such a great read for anyone who wants to learn more about baseball. I ended up reading it twice (and will be reading it once again, before the season starts!) and I got copies for a bunch of my friends and even my Russian grandmother, who does not know anything about baseball. It Takes More Than Balls
got me excited about baseball and I started working on more concepts
for Baseball Beauties. I added a HIS/HERS BLOG, BASEBALL NEWS, Ball
park food recommendations (you can rank your foods too) and most of all GROUPS (members will be able to created tons of groups and talk about whatever they like!)
There is A LOT MORE ideas that I incorporated into the site, but you’ll
just have to wait and see them when Baseball Beauties Launch in April!

It’s funny how something like MLB tickets can turn into something so different and BIG!