Crossing $1000 (End of February Update)

With 20 purchases over the past two weeks, DraftKick sales have doubled the previous total, raising the total revenue from almost $600 to close to $1200.

Why Share the Numbers?

I've been thinking more about how no one in fantasy baseball posts any kind of revenue figures. It's a different world from, say, the indie hacker community, where people regularly share revenue progress (and difficulties).

Although it makes me a bit uncomfortable, I'm going to keep sharing my numbers. I think too many people who make fantasy stuff are quiet about finances, giving the impression that fantasy provides a living for them. The reality is that almost everyone needs a day job to make ends meet.

I think if more people shared their revenue numbers, it would help set reasonable expectations for people who are wanting to get started.

Features

I thought with my last update that there was a chance I'd get draft sync implemented. I investigated, but I think syncing data reliably gets complicated really quickly.

I did add (by request) some new positions: LF/CF/RF as individual positions and DH (i.e. DH-only, different than utility). I had hard-coded the positions for the "Players" and "Positions" views, but adding these new slots would add too much clutter. I ended up reworking both of those views to dynamically match the league's positions.

I'm getting lots of questions about how to do keepers. That tells me I may need to rethink the keeper options to either be more clear, or to be more streamlined. I'm going to be studying some of the tools to see which ones can do keepers well.

Testing out DraftKick

It's kind of weird to think about, but I don't really know how well DraftKick is going to work until I try it out on some real drafts. With that in mind, I signed up for salary cap drafts on Yahoo and ESPN last week to give it a run.

In both cases, DraftKick ran flawlessly for me. I had no problems keeping up with picks across the two different tabs.

Here's what worked well for me: I'd start in the draft room for the nomination, then switch to the "Positions" view in DraftKick to select the player and get my projected salary (and the market salary). Then I'd hop back to the draft room and stay until the bidding slowed toward an apparent winner. If I was out of the bidding, I'd switch to DraftKick to enter in the player and the (seeming) winning bid. It would take 10-20 seconds for one player to finish and the next to get nominated, and that was my time in DraftKick to study my targets and my future nominations. While in DraftKick, I could hear the sounds in the draft room that would tell me if something happened where I needed to switch back.

Sales

Since my last update two weeks ago, DraftKick has doubled in sales from 20 to 40. No refunds, so I think I ironed out those couple early bugs well.

I'm not tracking my leads, but I suspect that most users are coming from Reddit. That's a positive sign for football season, since the fantasy football subreddit dwarfs the fantasy baseball one.

I did make the affiliate deal I hinted at last time, but (surprisingly) nothing has come from it so far.

Projectile has also done pretty well, tracking at about one-fourth of DraftKick's sales over the past period and overall. But, due to the difference in price points, it managed only one-tenth of DraftKick's revenue.

Since the last update:

• Projectile: 5 sales ($59.75)
• DraftKick: 20 sales ($599.00)

Season total:

• Projectile: 12 sales ($194.25)
• DraftKick: 40 sales ($1198.00)