Should I reconsider an in-season tool?

I was discussing fantasy ideas with someone over email, and the idea for an in-season tool came up.

I've built some in-season stuff over the years. Should I try it again?

First of all, let's recap my history with in-season tools:

Projectile v1

In 2020, I ended a ~8 year hiatus from building fantasy tools with an idea for an in-season tool.

The foundation would be projections that rebuilt every day, incorporating the previous day's stats. Layered on top of these daily projections, I created a site called Projectile that would build player dollar values for each day and charts of how player values changed over time.

Over time, I added new, interesting charts to Projectile: I saved ADP from each day, so you could see how it changed over time. I added pre-season projections from FanGraphs, with charts comparing a player's value across systems, and charts breaking down where a player's value came from. Lots of fun stuff.

I also created a Chrome extension that would inject the Projectile dollar values into your league site, right after each player's name.

After a couple of years, however, I decided to shut it all down. The Projectile site never attracted a big user base, which I attributed to a few primary problems:

• I was starting off with a small audience.
• The positioning was confusing. What had started as an in-season tool had evolved to include a lot of pre-season features.
• And, what I thought was the biggest issue: Most people don't have a mental category for "in-season tools."

Projectile v2

While Projectile was struggling, DraftKick was taking off. It seemed to confirm my theory that draft tools were a thing, and in-season tools weren't.

Projectile shut down, but I still wanted to have in-season dollar values on my league sites. So I took the Chrome extension part of Projectile and rebuilt it so that it no longer depended on my website. Instead of using the dollar values generated on the Projectile server, it used the JavaScript code from DraftKick to calculate dollar values on your own computer.

And, instead of using my own daily projection builds, it used the rest-of-season and updated projections from FanGraphs.

It, too, hasn't gathered much interest, despite being a completely free tool. My guesses:

• There is no marketing site for it, only the Chrome webstore, and the webstore is no good for discovery.
• In-season tools are still less popular than draft tools.

Some Reasons to Build an In-Season Tool

With those past attempts in mind, I'm weighing the value of yet another stab at an in-season tool. Some reasons in favor of it:

I've already done most of the work.

Here are some tasks that an in-season tool needs to do:

1. Source high-quality projections
2. Know how to convert projections into fantasy values and rankings
3. Connect with users' leagues
4. Track all the player IDs across those sites
5. Get schedules and daily lineups
6. Adjust for park/opponent (ideally)

Of those, numbers 1-4 are things that I'm already doing for DraftKick. Number 5 looks easy. Number 6 is harder, but also more of a nice-to-have.

Sure, my existing code would need some architectural adjustments. (For example, I re-check source projections as needed when I deploy DraftKick. This would need to be a daily, automated process in-season.) But converting code is one of those tedious tasks that I find LLMs to be quite good at accomplishing.

There are some in-season tools

I had originally thought that people didn't have a mental box for "in-season tools" like they do for draft tools. However, I have to admit that there are a few options.

Razzball offers daily and weekly projections for start/sit, add/drop decisions for baseball. There's no league sync, and I think the target audience are the high-stakes players. Prices range from $25 to $49 per season, with monthly options as well.

LineupExperts does all four sports, syncing with leagues and doing a vast array of similar-ish in-season things. The fact that their values are "points-first" and their projection source unknown leads me to tag their target audience as more casual, but still serious enough to be digging deeper on in-season decisions.

It has historically been a free site, and the anonymous owners appear to be quite good at developing for SEO and supporting the site with ad revenue. However, they've recently started charging: a confusing "token" system for pay-as-you-go or annual plans at $24 to $48 that bypass that.

Over in football and basketball lands, in-season updates are table-stakes for sync tools. Enough so that some DraftKick users got a bit of a surprise when they discovered DraftKick didn't do anything beyond the draft.

Some Reasons to Pass on an In-Season Tool

If I'm more optimistic about the idea than before, I still have some reservations.

Demand for in-season tools appears softer than for draft tools

While I admit that I had previously missed the presence of existing in-season tools, I stand by my original assessment that in-season tools appear to be a worse market than draft tools.

Look at the prices for tools in each category, with price as a reasonable indicator of demand. Many draft tools are in the $50-60 range, with Fantistics charging a whopping $89 for their baseball draft tool. The fact that no one is asking that much for in-season tools tells you something about the market.

Or consider how sites price their draft tools vs their in-season tools: You can pay $89 for Fantistics' draft tool, or you can add-on in-season for an extra $20. It certainly feels like the market valued one more highly than the other.

For DraftSharks (football only), they charge $36 for the pre-season and an equal $36 for in-season. So equal prices for each, even though the season lasts for months, and most people are only paying attention to a few weeks of the pre-season.

And that spells out an optimistic scenario: You can maybe get an equal price for an in-season tool as a draft tool, even though the maintenance and support lasts for months longer.

In-season means continual updates

I really like the cadence of draft season. I ease into it during the quiet early weeks, deal with a peak couple of weeks, and then recover and get ready for the next sport.

Supporting an in-season tool turns that wonderful ebb and flow into an always-flowing river of work.

And in-season means that I'm tracking multiple sports at once. The tool needs to handle the basketball season while I'm doing baseball drafts, and the baseball season while I'm doing football drafts. Then it needs to handle football and basketball seasons going on at the same time!

My biggest fear is that I have to be always "on" if I'm attempting to support an in-season tool.

Conclusion

I'm not quite ready to commit to this idea yet, but it has moved a bit higher on my list. I might see if I can polish up the Projectile extension and add some better marketing. If I did, I'd still probably leave it as free for this year, and see if I could charge something for it in future years.