Is It Time to Panic?

About a month before the start of this year's baseball season, I had made 50 sales of DraftKick Baseball.

I thought I had found a pretty good playbook: monitor Reddit, post on Twitter, and run some Google Ads. Plus, I'd be building off of an existing customer base from baseball purchasers. I figured if I ran the same strategy for the much bigger football market, I might be able to double my baseball sales.

Instead, I'm sitting at 6 sales for DraftKick Football. And I'm starting to get really worried.

Here are some of my theories for what's wrong:

Football is simpler than baseball

I don't mean that in a derogatory way at all. But fantasy football is objectively simpler than baseball:

• Points scoring means there's no concern for category balance
• The relevant player pool is only about 150 names deep
• There are fewer positions to track

Combine those factors, and a draft assistant like DraftKick is less valuable for football compared to baseball.

Football attracts a more casual audience

Fantasy football and baseball both have a segment of serious players. But, simply due to the market size, there are a lot more casual fantasy football players.

DraftKick targets the semi-serious level of fantasy player. The hardcore fantasy players build their own custom tools. The casual players go with their gut. But there's a sweet spot in between those extremes where DraftKick is really helpful.

So, even though the total market for fantasy football is much larger, maybe I was wrong to expect the market of semi-serious players to be that much larger.

Football is less about the numbers

This one is evident from the differences in baseball and football projections. People have been running baseball projection algorithms for decades, comparing them to a baseline, and sharing the analysis. As far as I know, there's nothing like that for football.

Football projection is much fuzzier, which leads to a looser style of drafting. What reason do you have to trust the numbers instead of your gut?

Football has a more concentrated draft season

This may just be my bias as a baseball fan first, but maybe the window for football draft season is a little shorter?

I was making DraftKick Baseball sales in December and January, before things kicked into high gear in February and really took off in March. Are there more keeper and dynasty leagues for baseball, leading to more fantasy attention in the winter months?

Also, MLB's spring training has about a week head start on the NFL's preseason schedule. If things get going in the next week or two, maybe I can attribute it to this.

Football has greater competition

You can see this difference in the subreddits, where r/FantasyFootball has numerous posts of people showing off a draft tool that they built. That's not nearly as common on r/FantasyBaseball.

I've also noticed it with the tools that offer draft sync. These tools are primarily for football; if they offer a baseball version it is pretty limited.

Final thoughts

At this point, I'm ready to abandon the dream of doubling my baseball sales. I'd be happy with 75% of baseball's sales, but even that is assuming a surge of interest in August.

It probably means that DraftKick is really just a baseball tool, even if a some people also find it useful for football.