I Might Build a Fantasy League Site (and I Need You to Stop Me)

In the weeks between DraftKick Basketball and DraftKick Baseball, I've been publicly musing about a couple of project ideas (see: So, You Want to Build a Baseball Sim and So, You Want to Build a Fantasy League Site).

I am inching closer toward the idea of building a site that could host fantasy leagues. And I need you to stop me if this is a terrible idea.

Just as a reminder: My specific idea is open-source fantasy leagues—the WordPress of fantasy leagues. There would be a free version available for anyone to self-host (cf. WordPress.org), while monetization could come from providing managed hosting (cf. WordPress.com) for people who don't want to deal with setting up their own server.

Let me talk about a couple of the positives I see with this idea:

Sleeper weakness

One of my early concerns with this idea was that, since Sleeper had built a great football product, they would continue their march to include basketball and eventually baseball, basically conquering the fantasy world. People love to complain about Yahoo/ESPN/Fantrax, but Sleeper was the one product that people raved about.

I've started to question that narrative, for a couple of reasons.

First off, as I dug into fantasy basketball this year, I realized that no one cared about Sleeper's basketball leagues. The reason? Sleeper only does points leagues, and head-to-head categories is the dominant basketball format.

As a bit of a tangent, this is always my concern when builders start designing for the simplest game (football) and try to expand to other sports: Your structure isn't built for the harder use-cases, so those either get left off or done poorly.

Anyway, if Sleeper can't make a dent in fantasy basketball, I began to doubt that they actually know the path to world domination.

The second reason for doubt is Sleeper's own self-sabotage. There has been lots of vocal complaining (here and here, for example) about recent changes to the Sleeper app, which pushes sports betting everywhere and dumps fantasy in a corner.

This is also something I've written about before: Sleeper has raised a lot of money from investors, so they can't keep running a free product forever. Going from free to "free" degrades the user experience and user satisfaction.

So Sleeper is showing multiple signs of weakness, which puts it back in the same tier as all of the other league sites. People loudly complain about every site and play on whichever one that they tolerate the best.

There are no sites that people love.

Multiple possible pivots

Here's another reason I am intrigued by building a league site: There are multiple paths to making something profitable.

To use a fantasy baseball analogy, it's like drafting a hitter who contributes in all five categories vs. a one-category specialist. If the former loses one part of his game, he can maybe make up for it elsewhere. However, a guy who steals bases and nothing else is always at risk of losing playing time if his marginal skills slide just a tiny bit. In fantasy and in real life, you want your targets to have multiple paths to success.

My primary idea with this fantasy league site is monetization via hosting fantasy leagues. That seems like a solid strategy (see: CBS, Ottoneu). If you charge $10-20 per team, all you need is a few hundred leagues to replace the salary from your day job.

I'm optimistic about this, but there's at least a chance that a neighboring idea has even stronger market pull.

• What if someone wants to build on my open-source foundation to build their own games? There could be a market for licensing the code for commercial use.
• What if those other founders are non-technical and need someone to develop the customizations for their idea? There could be an opportunity for freelance development.
• If I build a stats service to give live updates, that could be a valuable product on its own.
• It's not a version 1 necessity, but what if it had auto-generated player updates? That's another market that has already been validated by others.

As you can see, it's sort of my greatest hits of baseball ideas. I don't know if any of those would work, but you can see that there are already multiple ways towards financial success. And maybe others would reveal themselves once I started building.

It's the philosophy of small bets. This is a project with lots of promising avenues, although you can't tell before you start which ones will work. Simply starting the project is like placing a small bet on each of them. Then you can double-down on the paths that generate the most demand.

Concluding thoughts

The risk of this is that it is still a really big undertaking.

Even if I get feature parity with Yahoo, people would still pick Yahoo as the easier or cheaper option.

I would need to implement the basics—getting to level of, say, Yahoo fantasy leagues circa 2005. (Although I'm not sure if Yahoo has added much of anything meaningful since then; maybe better live scoring?)

That might be enough to attract the early adopters, especially if the UI could be a bit cleaner than the big players. Then it would be about tackling some niche: leagues outside North America like NPB/KBO, specialized formats like guillotine/vampire, etc. I think within a year or two, you could have a feature set that was better than anyone else.