In my last status update, I was hinting about trying to make a run at DraftKick Football.
As I thought about it more, the thing I was really itching to do was to try out DraftKick in a real draft situation. That wasn't going to happen for a long time with baseball, but football... With my version 1 targets completed by July 25, I decided to go for it. I gave myself one week to convert everything to football.
With a few snags, it took a bit longer than a week. But it's still ready early enough for people to test it out.
My next big push has to be marketing. I'm going to update the landing page with screenshots that show the benefits of using DraftKick. I'm going to experiment with AdWords to see if I can get some customers that way.
I've only got a few weeks of football draft season to see if anything sticks, so I've got to focus on this side of things.
With most of my attention on marketing, I can probably squeeze in at most one significant feature. Then I'll have time this fall to get more things added for baseball season.
Here are nine upcoming features I'm considering:
This would add support for third-round reversal in NFFC leagues, plus let users set any other customizations to the draft order. So they could, for example, swap two team's second round picks, but leave everything else the same.
This would let users pick up players on the Rosters view and drag them to a different position or even a different team.
This would pull in ADP from the major sites (probably from FantasyPros) and project how to wait on picking a player.
Let users set preset or custom tags (sleeper, injured, rookie) that show up on the player screens.
Let users specify kept players by team and by round.
Simulate mock drafts with a pick clock and not-dumb computer drafting.
Show past stats and notes for a selected player.
Let users choose which sources to include in the projections and how much to weight each one.
Connect to an online draft room on each league's site to automatically sync draft results
Okay, so which one gets me the best return on investment?
One tool I like is the ease-impact matrix. I give a score to each potential feature on two dimensions:
It's subjective, but I try to answer each question about these nine features. Here are my scores on a scale from 1-5.
| FEATURE | EASE | IMPACT |
|---|---|---|
| Custom draft order | 3 | 2 |
| Drag and drop | 2 | 2 |
| ADP availability | 3 | 3 |
| Tags | 2 | 2 |
| Keepers | 3 | 3 |
| Draft simulator | 2 | 2 |
| Player detail | 2 | 1 |
| Source selection | 3 | 2 |
| League sync | 1 | 5 |
I viewed League sync as by far the biggest impact feature to add, but also one that is not very easy to implement.
At the opposite extreme is player detail. Adding a player detail view gets me feature parity with other tools, but I'm not sure how much it would affect users picking DraftKick. Adding past stats and generating values for them all also doesn't sound very easy.
There are different ways to view those two scores. You can add them together. Or multiply them. Or plot them on a matrix. I did all of those things, and came up with four basic priority groupings
Neither of these are slam-dunks, but they scored in the upper-half for both categories. I think ADP is my big target for football drafts.
These two require lots of work, but the payoff (especially for league sync) could be huge. Lots of tools do one or the other, but executing both would be huge.
If you draw a matrix, these tasks are the opposite quadrant from the previous group. They may not have a huge impact, but the ROI still isn't bad if it doesn't take too much to implement them.
These will stay on my radar, but they don't strike me as having big payoff potential. They also don't seem especially easy to implement. I'll remember them just in case I change my mind later about their scoring, or once the higher priority features are mostly implemented.
So, here's my plan: Lots of marketing for the month of August. My only feature to work on will be adding ADP and using it to project availability.
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].