Since our Private Beta Launch on February 20, here are some interesting statistics we have gathered:

1,291 Arguments Created
67,837 Words Written
2,573 Votes
2,081 Up Votes
492 Down Votes
53 Average Number of Words Per Argument

Most Popular Topic: Politics
Most Active Debate (most arguments): Do you believe in God?
Most Extensive Debate (most words): Should Social Security be mandatory?
Most Definitive Win: The “Health Problem” side in Drug Abuse: Criminal Problem or Health Problem?

Most Popular Argument: “No way, the press slants…”
by Time2Golf for the “No” side of Do you trust the press?
Worst Argument: “I have grown up…”
by MastaDebata for the “Yes!!” side of Do you believe in God?
Most Provocative Argument (most replies): “Meaning I would want to…”
by NikkiHill11 arguing for “Ron Weasley” in Who is your favorite Harry Potter character?
Most Extensive Argument (most words): “Recent researching into much…”
by ChronicHipie for the “Criminal Problem” side of Drug Abuse: Criminal Problem or Health
Problem?

Most Prolific User (avg. words/argument): Austix
Most Words Spoken: blammo
Best Debate Creator: DebateMan

These are some of the things we are thinking of including in our newsletters and later on in a more elaborated CreateDebate Statistics page.

So what “awards” would you like to see posted in the CreateDebate Hall of Fame? What other interesting statistics would you want to know about CreateDebate? Please let us know what you want!!

You can post your comments here or debate about this in this debate:
What Statistics and Hall of Fame “awards” would you like in CreateDebate?

I’m really happy to announce that CreateDebate has scored again! On Friday, we won the March 2008 round of Pitch Dingman. It was a well-run business competition and a worthwhile experience. Five other companies did their best to compete but I’m happy to say that we took home the grand prize. It was really interesting to sit through all of the presentations. There was a biotech company, two other web 2.0 startups, a niche advertising firm and an outsourcing consultancy. It was really energizing to be surrounded by so much entrepreneurial energy.

It was important for us to take part in this competition for a couple of reasons. First of all, we won some more prize money, which is going to help when we begin executing our marketing plan later this month. Most importantly, however, it forced us to spend a lot of time thinking about and translating the value of CreateDebate into a well-rehearsed presentation. We came out of the experience with much better competitive research, predictions for growth and revenue expectations than we went in with. We also made a few great personal connections with some folks that are really involved in the local investment scene.

We are doing our best right now to launch CreateDebate publicly by the middle of April. Once we do, our traffic is going to start booming (especially when you guys get to see some of the new features we’re baking up). At that point, the site is going to require a lot more time and energy, which is kind of hard to believe because we already live and breathe it. At some point in the not-so-distant future I think we’re going to have to take on some capital. Now that I’m confident we have a winning pitch, I feel a lot more confident about going down that road.

Today we entered in our first business plan competition and we won! The competition was hosted by the Dingman Center for Entreprenuership at the University of Maryland.

This was a great start for CreateDebate and we gained valuable experience that we will use in further competitions. Speaking of which, we’ve got another one coming up next week that we need to start preparing for ASAP. Also, it really validated all of the hard work that we’ve been putting in to CreateDebate for the past year. We won a bit of prize money that will definitely help out when we launch in to a Public Beta.

On that note, each day we keep getting closer and closer to launching the site out in to the wild. We are all getting pumped to see what happens to CreateDebate when we launch. Please continue giving us feedback. We love hearing from our users what you like, what you don’t like, and what new features you’d like to see. Use the “Contact Us” form under the About tab to let us know what’s on your mind.

Read more about our victory here.

The CreateDebate Blog is finally up and running.

We’ll use this blog to let you know what’s going on behind-the-scenes at CreateDebate. Expect to see a lot of posts about new site features and development updates. We love to hear your feedback, so please don’t hesitate to sound off on where CD rocks and where it sucks.

Thanks,
The CD Team