February 13 Update

With the Super Bowl finished, football is now completely behind us. Fantasy baseball action is coming faster, which also might mean more frequent status updates here on the blog.

So Far, So Good

If you remember, back at the end of 2022 I published my 2023 baseball sales goals. The basic gist is that I felt like I needed at least 30 sales of DraftKick to feel like it wasn't a waste of time. Hitting 300 sales would be unrealistic to expect, but it could happen if everything went right. And 3,000 sales would be my dream.

At this point, I think I'm a lock to hit the 30 sale target. You can see the full numbers below, but I've sold 20 copies and the peak of draft season is still ahead.

The aspirational goals are still a ways off, but I may have hit my first break with potential affiliates.

Potential Affiliates

This week I was contacted by someone from a very large and prominent fantasy site about running an affiliate program with DraftKick. Basically, they were offering to promote DraftKick on their large and prominent fantasy site.

There's nothing settled with it, yet. But this could be the kind of exposure that really gets me on people's radars. And it's the sort of encounter I said I would need to hit the 300 sale milestone.

New Features

I'm quite proud of my update to add injury notes to players, requested by a potential user. It was one of those rare projects where everything worked perfectly the first time, and it only took about 20 minutes to implement. Besides that, I've been fixing some bugs, handling support questions, and trying to stay active on Reddit.

In the interest of keeping users up-to-date on changes to DraftKick, I did start up a list of DraftKick's Update History. I went back through my software commits since I switched from football to baseball in November 2022 and added everything to the list.

I know I keep talking about holding off on new features, but there are still a couple of biggies on my mind:

Draft Sync

People keep asking about draft sync. A little surprising, considering how rare it is among draft tools. But that ought to be just a good reminder of how desirable it is.

I'm worried about the difficulty of it, even though I've studied how FantasyPros and DraftHero have pulled it off. I'm also concerned about the potential for things to go wrong. How do you fix things if it drafts the wrong player due to a miscommunication with the draft room?

I had the bandwidth to work on this in December, but, of course, there were no online drafts happening then. I hit the same problem if I hold off on this until 2023 DraftKick Football: I still have to wait for the draft rooms in July-August. So these next six weeks are actually a golden opportunity to move this ahead.

Offline Mode

The other big idea would be building a version of DraftKick that is a downloadable program which runs offline, separate from the browser. I think it would be only for paid users. It's the easier of the two to implement, but it may not have the same draw as draft sync.

Looking at them side-by-side now that I've written them out, it seems clear that draft sync ought to be the target. Ideally, getting it out there by March 1.

Improving Projectile's Messaging

Let me mention one other thing on my mind, which is adjusting the messaging around Projectile. The current H1 on Projectile.pro is "Up-to-date fantasy data. Tailored to your league."

When I plugged Projectile on a Reddit post this week, I described it as something like "auction calculator rankings built in to player pages."

That's still maybe not quite the right wording for it. But I've been trying to play around with messaging that emphasizes the "auction calculator" aspects of it. We'll see if anything comes of it.

Sales

Since the last update:

• Projectile: 2 sales ($29.90)
• DraftKick: 7 sales ($209.65), but 1 refund (-$29.95)

Season total:

• Projectile: 7 sales ($134.50)
• DraftKick: 20 sales ($599.00)