We’ve received quite a few e-mails from people asking how friends without e-mail or Facebook can participate in their baby guessing game. I find it hard to believe that people don’t have e-mail, but you never know. It’s also pretty common that people just don’t want to sign up on another website just to guess when your baby will be born. So, we finally got around to adding this feature to the website. Starting today,  pool administrators can now add predictions for their friends and family. You can still invite everyone to enter on their own, but for those who can’t (or for those who are just too lazy) just get their prediction and add it for them!

Add predictions to your baby pool without asking friends and family to sign up

You could print out our baby pool template and pass it around at your baby shower. No one needs to sign up, just collect the form and add the predictions to your pool through the Pool Settings tab.

Here’s how:

1. Login to your account and go to the pool you want to add predictions to.
2. Click the “Pool Settings” tab.
3. On the submenu, click the “Add Predictions” tab.
4. Click the purple button that says “Click here to enter a prediction for someone else!”
5. Enter their prediction info. (You must enter their first name, last name, gender prediction, relation to the baby, weight prediction, length prediction, hair color prediction and eye color prediction.)
6. Click save and you’ll be taken to the All Predictions page and see the new prediction.

You can add as many predictions as you want, just repeat the steps above for each new guess.

Keep Asking People to Sign-Up to Get the Full Experience

I’m sure there will always be people who don’t want to sign-up on another website. But, I also want to remind everyone that there are definite benefits to having an account on the website and entering your own predictions:

1. Get an email notification when the baby is born, so you can come back and see who won the baby pool.
2. Leave a personal note for the family and friends on the message stream.
3. Get updates on the pregnancy if the parents are posting messages to the pool.
4. If you have an account, you can keep a list of all the pools you participated in on the My Pools page.
5. A future update will allow everyone to change their predictions on their own (by sacrificing some points from their final score).

In other words, this feature will make it easier for everyone to participate, with or without email or Facebook, but you should still encourage people to sign up and enter their own predictions. It just makes it more fun!

Having Trouble?

We’ve tested this out and it’s working, but we have a small staff of 2 people, so it’s likely some things might not work properly. If you have trouble with this feature (or anything else on the website), please let us know: help@whatsinmybelly.com

Moving on…

First, I have to say, I love Katie Bower and her Bower Power Blog. Back in August, I was reading her blog and saw that she was expecting baby #2. So, I contacted her on Facebook and asked if she wanted to run a pool on WhatsInMyBelly.com for her readers. We offered to put up some prizes to make it a little more fun for everyone. Knowing how popular her blog was, I kind of expected her to either not respond at all or come back with a “sure… but what’s in it for me?” Instead, she responded and said she’d love to do it and was excited that her readers would have the chance to get some prizes.

Now, I expected this to be a little popular and drive some new visitors to our website (hopefully a few of which would be pregnant and start a pool of their own), but the response we’ve gotten has been well beyond our expectations.

We launched the first version of WhatsInMyBelly back in March and it’s now in version 2. The website was steadily growing as search engines began to pick it up, and other local media outlets like RichmondMom.com and Macaroni Kid Richmond began to mention us. We’re very thankful for any mention we get out there, but when Katie mentioned her baby pool at the end of this post, our traffic exploded immediately. So much so, that people trying to make a guess in her pool took the site down for about an hour until Daniel worked his magic and got things running again.

October has been a huge month for our website in general, but most of that is due to Katie’s baby pool, which now has 729 predictions. This surpasses my baby pool which held the lead at… 56 predictions (weak, I know). As you can see in the screenshot above, each time Katie mentioned her baby pool on our website, the traffic skyrocketed. Even after the mention we noticed about double the traffic we usually get on an single day.

So, to say the least, we love Katie Bower and her website, and we simply can’t do enough to thank her for running her baby pool on our website. 

There is Still A Little Time to Join the Bower Baby Pool

One of Katie Bower's Pregnancy photos. I took this from her blog, so click the photo to see her blog post with more photos.

Now I also have to mention, if you are reading this before midnight on Halloween, and you haven’t made a guess in her pool, we extended the original deadline to midnight on October 31, so head on over to her pool and make a prediction for your chance to win one of 3 Visa Gift Cards. When you’re done with that go bookmark her blog – it’s well worth the read.

Are You an Expectant Blogger?

So, with the huge success of the Bower Power Baby Pool, I think it goes without saying that we want to do this again. If you have a blog (don’t worry about how many readers you have) and you’re expecting, please e-mail me. We simply don’t have the cash to offer prizes for every pool out there, but if bloggers are using our website and linking to us, we’d like to thank you in some way. If anything, we can link back to your blog. So, get in touch with me and let me know if you have a website and you’re running a pool with us. Send me an e-mail: morgan@whatsinmybelly.com

One More Thing – Tell Us What You Want

This is a bit off topic for this blog post, but we are currently planning the next changes and upgrades to WhatsInMyBelly.com and we want to know what you, the users, would like to see improved on the website. If you have a second, please take this survey. The only required fields are the ones where you pick the new features you like the most, so it will literally only take you a few seconds to do it. Your answers will help us decide what to add to the website next.

When you create a baby pool on WhatsInMyBelly.com, you will automatically get automated e-mail notifications about your baby pool, and so will any participants in your pool. This has been a part of the website since day 1. We don’t mean this as spam, we just want users to be able to get some kind of notification when there is activity in their pool.

The default setting of these notifications were set to send all pool administrators and pool users an email if there was a new prediction or a new message in any pool they use.  You could also turn these notification on and off at any time under the “My Info” link after you login.

However, it quickly came to our attention that some people couldn’t find this setting (my fault for putting that setting under such a vague title – UI designers make mistakes too!) and if they were participants in a pool with a lot of predictions they were getting flooded with e-mails they didn’t want. We planned to tweak these e-mails to reduce the amount of notifications everyone received, but as of Monday, we still hadn’t gotten to it.

Well, Monday evening The Bower Power hit us. Katie Bower of bowerpowerblog.com started her baby pool, we offered up a little prize money, and within a few hours we realized we had a bit of a problem on our hands. Baby Bower #2 pool had over 60 predictions in just a few hours. [As I'm editing this post to go live, it's pushing 300!] Apparently the combination of a super popular blog and a little prize equaled a lot of sudden traffic on our site.

We expected a fair amount of traffic but never expected the surge that came immediately after Katie’s blog post went up. Needless to say, Daniel and I went to work around 9:00 Monday night to try and tweak the e-mail notifications and hopefully avoid flooding inboxes with unwanted e-mails. Daniel immediately halted outgoing notifications and instead queued them while we worked

We decided to combine all the individual notifications into one daily notification e-mail that would summarize all the activity in a user’s pools. So, instead of getting tons of separate e-mails, the most you would receive is 1 e-mail per day, if there was activity to announce.

Here is the way the previous notifications looked:

WhatsInMyBelly.com old email notifications

Unless the user turned off notifications, they would get one of these e-mails for every message or prediction in any of their pools. Too many e-mails were going out and I’m sure quite a few people out there were a little frustrated. (In our defense, if anyone actually read the details at the bottom of the email, it did tell you how to turn off the notifications.)

Anyway, so by about midnight Monday night we had a new e-mail notification system in place. We think this will make everyone much happier. From now on, if there is activity in any of your pools you will get no more than 1 email per day with a summary of all activity. You can still cut off these notifications if you prefer (login to your account and click “My Info”)

Here is a sample of the new email activity notifications:

WhatsInMyBelly NEW email notifications

So, for now, we think we have a better e-mail notification system but I’m sure we will have to make plenty more changes in the future.

The Trouble with Popular Friends

Ok, so calling the Bowers “friends” is a bit of a stretch… and by “stretch” I mean they probably read that and now consider me a stalker. I don’t personally know them, but like many of their readers, I consider them friends, particularly after what has happened in the past 24 hours. As I stated before, Katie started her baby pool on the website Monday night and mentioned it on her blog. Today, as people continued to make guesses for Katie and Jeremy’s baby, their traffic combined with a few other sources of traffic, and started to slow WhatsInMyBelly.com down. At one point on Tuesday morning, it wasn’t loading at all. Luckily, Daniel made some changes and had things running smoothly again within an hour.

Monday night was a late night, and Tuesday kept us on our toes, but we’re thrilled with the response everyone has had to The Bowers Baby pool. We can’t wait to see photos of the baby, and see who comes out the winner in the largest pool we’ve ever hosted.

Thank You, Thank You

A sincere thank you to ALL our website users. Thank you for using the website and thank you for being patient while we continue to improve how it works. And, of course, a huge thank you to Katie, Jeremy, Will and Baby Bower #2!!

As you all know, this website is completely free for anyone in the world to use. We’ve spent a ton of time building it and tweaking it, and hope to make it even better. However, if we can’t successfully build up enough traffic to attract a few sponsors and advertisers, eventually this little side project will have to give way to “real” work. As someone who has been a freelance web designer for over 10 years, I’d love nothing more than to work full time on this website and other self-initiated projects. (Don’t get me wrong, I love client work, and I’m eternally grateful for every bit of work I’ve ever received  but after 10 years of bringing other peoples’ ideas to life, I’ve really enjoyed making my own idea into a reality for once.) We’re still a LONG ways from making that a reality, but what we saw yesterday does give me some hope that maybe something could come of this little project.

Thank you all for keeping my little dream a reality … at least a bit longer.

[And one more note: If you have any feedback at all - positive or negative - please e-mail me at info@whatsinmybelly.com or just leave a comment on this or any blog post. I read all comments and appreciate all feedback. We want to make this website the best it can be.]

My son Kyler is 2 1/2 now. He’s the one who caused the initial spark of panic inspiration.

Kyler shortly after he was born in April 2010

Me holding Kyler the day he was born. I probably should have gotten a haircut knowing that a baby was due soon.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get the full website online back then, in fact, I didn’t even get started, so we didn’t get to use this site when he was born. Instead, I created and ran a baby pool with good ol’ pen and paper and posted the details on our family website: The Porters Online. Yeah, it was hard life back in the day. We had to run baby pools by hand. (I wish I had this baby pool template back then.)

So, I’ll skip forward to today. Kyler is now a handfull and without the hours of help from Daniel, this site would still not exist.

Kyler Porter Running (photo by Jessica Oriole Salay of Oriole Photography)

Me and family before Baby #2 arrived (photo by Jessica Oriole Salay of Oriole Photography)

Today, Kyler is really keeping us on our toes.

Kyler on his four-wheeler. Yes, his sun glasses are upside down. That's how he rolls.

An introduction of Kyler wouldn't be complete without this photo of him learning to cheer for the Washington Redskins.

So, that’s my oldest, and the original inspiration behind this website. But, like I said, the website didn’t get off the ground until just this year. Early in 2012, my wife, Ashley, surprised me again with the announcement that we would become a family of four. We had talked quite a bit about how many kids we wanted and came to the conclusion that if #2 was a girl, that would be it for us. With that thought in mind, I decided that I would do whatever had to be done to get the baby pool website off the ground. With a lot of hard work, and quite a few late nights (bonus: training for the newborn soon to come), Daniel, Dan and I got the website launched by March (the first version, at least). That gave me plenty of time to use it before my daughter, Ella, was born in September.

So here she is, Ms. Ella Porter: (Born one month ago today. Happy 1 month, Ella!)

Ella the day she was born

Ella and my beautiful wife, Ashley

Ella Sleeping

Ella posing in her sleep the day she was born. Future model?

Ella Sleeping in the Pack-and-Play

Ella Sleeping.

So I just noticed that all but one of these photos is of her sleeping. I swear she isn’t sleeping 24/7. I guess when she’s awake we’re a little too busy to grab the camera? (Note to self: get more photos of Ella with her eyes open.)

Well there they are. The 2 kids who got the ball rolling on this baby pool website. And I guess we’ll be adding child #3 to the list soon… NO, not mine! WhatsInMyBelly.com, co-founder, Daniel Reibsamen and his wife Emily are expecting their first child in early December. If you’re reading this before the pool closes, go ahead and make a prediction. He seems to think he can beat Ella’s pool of 56 guesses. With 2 months to go and only down by 6 guesses, I highly expect their pool will becoming the biggest yet. It won’t be long before we’ll introduce you to the third inspiration for WhatsInMyBelly.com. Congratulations Daniel and Emily!