PokerDIY Interview with PokerSoftware.com

Recently, PokerSoftware.com brought you an interview with the founder of League Ace, web-based poker league management software. The article received rave reviews, so we've decided to follow it up with a look at PokerDIY, a website that allows you to manage poker leagues, set up events, and network with your fellow industry enthusiasts all in one place. The social networking aspect of PokerDIY separates it from the competition.

PokerDIY currently hosts nearly 38,000 poker players in 700 leagues. A total of 7,800 league games have been held and there are nearly 600 poker groups. The bottom line is that it's big. PokerSoftware.com sat down with its founder, Rodney Joyce, to learn more.

PokerSoftware.com: Thanks for joining us! How did you get the idea for PokerDIY?

Joyce: It started off in 2005, when a group of friends and I were playing in a regular poker league every week. As the league's organizer, I would send out an e-mail to everyone trying to arrange a time and place to play. This would cause a flurry of "Reply Alls" and not much would be decided. This was problem number one.

After the game, I would add all of the scores into an Excel spreadsheet and send it out to everyone. As you can imagine, there would be loads of "Reply Alls" with comments that would be lost in e-mails. I knew that there had to be a better way, but at the time, I could not find anything that did what I needed. I am a business analyst by trade, so I thought I would start working on a poker league management site and PokerDIY.com was born.

PokerSoftware.com: What was the biggest hurdle that customers had to overcome in order to grow accustomed to the idea of managing their leagues online?

Joyce: Some people do not see the need to manage their leagues online, so half the problem is convincing them that they need a league management tool. Some people just play poker without bothering to record the score. The whole point of a league is to track your score over time and see who the consistent players are.

Also, some people do not like the idea of their personal and league information being online due to security reasons. I dealt with this from the start in the form of Private and Public leagues.

PokerSoftware.com: It seems like you've really capitalized on the social networking aspect. Have you found that people have been able to network well within the application?

Joyce: This is actually a key point. As a developer, I love the way the web is moving, so this is what I planned for PokerDIY. It is a social network service. The three main components of the site are league management, finding local poker games, and social networking.

People are interacting a lot on PokerDIY and it's great to watch them communicating. Quite often, you will see a new member join the site, then they will join a poker group in their area, and then they will start posting on the walls of other players in the group.

PokerSoftware.com: You also have several site-wide tournaments. Talk about the participation in them so far and the challenges of organizing them.

Joyce: Basically, anyone can post an event or a poker game ad. In theory, if someone wanted to earn money, they could contact a poker room, get an affiliate code, and fund a freeroll. They could then add the game to PokerDIY. We have a lot of RSS feeds of upcoming events and usually the game will be ranked in Google the same day. This means that anyone on the site could play in this freeroll and the host could earn money from signups. We also run a couple of PokerDIY Freerolls which our admins look after.

I use e-mail preferences extensively to try to make sure that only those people who want to be invited are. In the next three months, I am moving everything to our Private Messaging system, so all site communication will be done through PMs. Then, the user can choose if they want these PMs to be forwarded to their e-mail account. This just gives them more control.

PokerSoftware.com: Tell us about the backend of the site.

Joyce: PokerDIY is running on ASP.NET and an SQL DB (2005). It runs on an open source framework called DotNetNuke.com. This means the core is constantly improved and I can focus on custom development and usability.

At the moment, it runs on a dedicated server with 4 GB of RAM, but I may have to upgrade to a webfarm as the load increases. Right now, we are getting almost 1,500 visitors per day and 140,000 impressions per month.

PokerSoftware.com: What feedback have you received so far?

Joyce: It's been really encouraging. Some league owners have even added me on LinkedIn. The gist of it is that it's making people's lives easier with regards to poker league management.

PokerSoftware.com: What plans do you have for the future of PokerDIY?

Joyce: There are a couple of cool things coming up. I don't want to give too much away, but keep an eye out for our Facebook application. Also, I am working on the iPhone/mobile version of PokerDIY. It will not be a content site, but it will allow you to enter your scores from the poker table. This saves you having to record them and upload them later. PokerDIY already integrates with Dr. Neau, Tournament Director, and Simple Tourney Manager. I plan on adding more poker league management tools to this list.

PokerSoftware.com: What else should our readers know?

Joyce: One of the biggest challenges I face is how to display all of the information on PokerDIY to the user. There is such a wealth of information hidden in the menu. I am working on a site redesign to try to bring the important bits to the front. For example, you can browse Google Maps for leagues and games. A lot of people don't know this!

The biggest challenge is actually getting users to PokerDIY. I decided awhile ago that instead of forcing people to it, I would make it cool and useful enough that people will want to use it and tell their friends about it.

Visit PokerDIY Today!