The Final Spring Push

I've got a chance at $4,000 in DraftKick sales. Can I make it in the next week and a half?

Last time, I was wondering whether sales might peak early (week of March 5) or late (week of March 19). The difference in trajectory could land final sales between $3,200 (early peak) and $4,000 (late peak).

Updating my chart, here's where things stand now:

Sales kept climbing last week (week of March 12), which got me past my low-end goal of $3,200. With a pretty good week so far this week, I've crossed $3,600. I'm now thinking that topping $4,000 is a reasonable possibility.

I still don't have good conversion tracking, so I'm left guessing at my best sources of traffic. I've done less posting about DraftKick on Reddit, other than having the link in the State of Fantasy Baseball survey (which, no doubt, drove quite a few sales).

Other than that... My affiliate sent in 3 sales this past week, the only ones generated so far from that relationship. It must be that my Google ads are kicking in a bigger portion of my traffic, plus some residual impact from Reddit posts off the first page.

Features

I made quite a few small quality of life enhancements to DraftKick

• When you select a player in an auction, the bid amount automatically selects, making it easy to type over it with the winning bid.
• The same thing happens after you select the winning team; focus jumps back to the bid with the amount selected.
• When the bid amount is in focus, hitting "Enter" does the same thing as clicking the "Draft" button.
• There are now two views of the Rosters page. I added a view that is narrower but taller, useful for leagues with more than 12 teams.
• There is now a zoom out feature that helps squeeze in all of the data on smaller displays.

There have also been two major features:

• Team-specific budgets, for handling trades involving cash or for budget penalties against certain teams
• A draft pick editor for trading draft picks

State of Fantasy Survey

Background

One idea I've had for a while is a survey for fantasy baseball modeled on the Stack Overflow Developer Survey. I've always had lots of personal curiosity: What's the biggest fantasy platform? Do more people play on ESPN or Yahoo?

A secondary motivation is a sentiment from fantasy baseball Twitter that the community talks too much about NFBC, when that's not what most people are playing. But no one has ever had good numbers on that.

Finally, I've wondered, as someone selling fantasy products, about how people spend on fantasy. Are people moving financially over to DFS and now sports betting?

Making the Survey

My initial feeling was that I needed to partner with one of the big fantasy baseball content sites to get the survey in front of the most people. I'd write a guest post about the survey and another post with the results and analysis. In between, they would spread the word, using their team of writers and their audience to promote the survey. I would get a successful survey, and I would get backlinks to DraftKick from the byline of my guest posts.

In what turned out to be a fortunate flaw, I couldn't find email addresses for the people at those sites I wanted to contact. I wasn't sure if this was the sort of thing that could be discussed in Twitter DMs. I ended up sending a pitch to one of them at an "info@" email address, but never got a response.

I gradually realized that my need for a partnering site was mostly a self-confidence issue. There was no reason that I couldn't run the survey myself. It might get fewer responses, but a huge response was never really the goal. (Without sampling, it was never going to extrapolate into absolute numbers.) Plus, I could honestly request retweets and shares that had the potential to boost my own following.

The survey opened last week, and so far I've gotten over 200 responses. I didn't want to do a lot of DraftKick promotion on the survey, but having it on this site is connected with last week's record sales of DraftKick.

I'll leave it open until the season starts, then write up the summary and analysis.

And I'm (once again) thinking about asking to do a guest post on a big site with the analysis... I don't think it is self-doubt this time. But it will be too late to pick up any DraftKick sales, so the exposure (and backlinks) could still be the biggest gain.

Sales

Since the last update:

• Projectile: 2 sales ($19.90)
• DraftKick: 56 sales ($1,662.20)

Season total:

• Projectile: 18 sales ($260.95)
• DraftKick: 121 sales ($3,608.95)