With football in the rearview mirrow, I'm looking ahead to baseball, which is DraftKick's real place to shine. Here are a few updates about where my projects stand.
I gave a shot at a football version of DraftKick, despite it being released a little late in the football draft season, and despite my lack of fantasy football audience.
I only made two sales, but I didn't really have any expectations for it. My Reddit post got me some traffic and one of those sales.
It was also a chance to polish off a few of the features (auctions, custom draft orders, and projected availability) that I was going to implement for baseball anyway. More on that below.
There's about a two month lull between the end of the football drafts and the start of the earliest baseball drafts. Which is good, because I was busy with real life for most of that time.
After the World Series, I turned first to Projectile. I fully intend to keep Projectile going, and I've got it tuned up for 2023 already.
I'm testing out a new unlimited plan for this year. My theory is that no one likes being limited, and they would rather pay extra than to feel like the burden of being restricted. Plus, no one paid for more than a single league last year, so I don't think this is going to eat into any potential revenue.
I'm still unsure of what to make of Projectile. I'm proud of it, and it does lots of things that I personally use for fantasy. But I think it's held back by not fitting in people's conceptual models. Is it a draft prep site? Sort of, but not exactly. Is it in-season values? Yes, but maybe too few care about in-season values.
In contrast with Projectile, I'm pretty pumped about where DraftKick is for 2023. It is basically a complete product, and it's still just December.
Just to review, in my previous roadmapping post, I laid out four categories of possible features to add:
My hope was to have ADP availability for football season. Not only did I succeed in that, but I also pushed out auctions, keepers, and custom draft order!
Since switching to baseball, I've also finished up source selection. I've completed all of my "big" feature ideas except for league sync!
So here's where that list stands now:
League sync isn't going to happen until sites start running baseball drafts (maybe late January). I can revisit it then to see if I have the appetite to attempt it.
That means I may be trying to pick off a few of those low priority features during the holidays. We'll see how it goes.
I've added offline mode as a possible feature. That's always been an idea of mine, and my tech stack is capable of switching between either a browser tab or a standalone app.
So what am I shooting for this year? I'll focus on DraftKick, since I feel like it's the product with clearer product-market fit than Projectile.
I think I need to hit at least 30 DraftKick sales to not feel disappointed about the time I've put in. At $30/each, let's just say $1,000. Now an extra $1,000 is pretty great, but it's still a poor hourly rate for my development time.
My optimistic goal would be 300 sales. I'll need to catch some breaks for that to happen, a couple of the right people mentioning or promoting DraftKick. It would be about $10,000: not enough for fantasy projects to fully support me, but a sign that I'm on the right track.
There are millions of fantasy baseball players (and millions more playing fantasy football). From that angle, 3,000 out of 10,000,000 is nothing. Very doable.
But this is realistically more of a multi-year goal. If I were on a trajectory toward 3,000 sales in 2024 or 2025, I'd be looking at an eventual $100,000/year.
I have a product that I am proud of. Now I just need to get it in front of the people who would find it useful.
If you're still tracking your draft with a custom spreadsheet or even just pen and paper, you need to try DraftKick.
It is packed with features to help you succeed on draft day:
It's completely free to try out!
Hi,
I'm Mays. I've been playing fantasy since I was in high school (over two decades ago).
My speciality has always been player valuation—converting player stats into rankings and salary values. VBD for fantasy football? Rotisserie z-scores? We go way back. In 2009, I started Last Player Picked, a site that generated fantasy values customized for your league.
You can find me on Twitter at @MaysCopeland or email me at [email protected].