What's My Path to World Domination?

Well, maybe not world domination. I can set my sights a little lower. What would it take for me to build fantasy tools full-time?

As a side-project, DraftKick has been an unqualified success. Most people around me don't even know about my fantasy side-hustle, and they would be shocked if they knew what it was bringing in.

As a full-time gig, however, DraftKick would be an embarrassment. You might say it is ramen-profitable, but that would be potentially only because I'd qualify for food stamps in order to purchase my noodles.

My goal for the coming year is to see if I can turn fantasy into a full-time income stream. Roughly speaking, I want to double where I'm currently at.

How do I get there? I see four high-impact growth levers I can pull. I'm hoping that working on all four can turn this into a "real" job.

1. MVP

This year I finally came around on building an in-season management tool to complement DraftKick. It's MVP, a one-of-a-kind tool that lets you view and update your fantasy leagues across platforms.

I've dogfooded it all through this fantasy baseball season and now feel like I could never go back to using the league sites and apps. It's really useful.

MVP is my biggest hope for growth, because it has the potential to 2x revenue on its own: Everyone who uses a draft assistant could also use an in-season tool.

I also have access to those people, because I can offer MVP as a cross-promotion on the DraftKick checkout. Everyone who gets DraftKick will see MVP as well.

Of course, lots of people only care about the draft, so doubling isn't realistic. And MVP has a major shortcoming for lots of people: It's not available on mobile. (Same for DraftKick, but people are more willing to sacrifice ease-of-access for a one-time event like draft day.)

But even if I could get half of DraftKick users on MVP, it is still the biggest growth opportunity I can see.

2. Basketball

The fantasy basketball market is probably around the size of the fantasy baseball market, but it's a distant third in DraftKick sales.

The nut that I haven't quite managed to crack is how to actually bring in more fantasy basketball players. I am hoping that MVP is one of the ways to do it, as an in-season tool would bring me to feature parity with the major tools for the game.

The other driver will be improving my own fantasy basketball expertise. Using MVP to compete more seriously this season should help with that.

3. NFC leagues

We're getting into smaller areas of improvement, but areas that still have potential.

Early returns on my State of Fantasy Football survey show a very small percentage of people play in NFC leagues. But this population has one important quality: They have announced that they are willing to spend money on fantasy.

Actually, there's a second important quality: They love to yap on Twitter. That gives me a chance to get in front of a decent number of them.

I need to integrate DraftKick with NFC drafts, and MVP with NFC leagues. Conveniently, their leagues are quite standardized without lots of the settings that make other platforms complicated (keepers, pick trading).

My main resistance to integrating these in the past is... well... I'm cheap. But I just need to pony up for a league at the cheapest entry so I can figure out how to do the integration.

4. IDP for Football

Early returns on that same survey above suggest that IDP may be 10% of the fantasy football market. Those leagues are not served well by most fantasy tools, including DraftKick.

DraftKick is actually pretty well-situated to deal with IDP, though. My Price Guide algorithm handles any kind of position you want to track, and I already handle positional differences across platforms for basketball.

One concern: Defensive players are not especially high-impact in fantasy. Maybe a tool that handles IDP isn't especially valuable to lots of those drafters.

Adding it up

Okay, let's try to do some napkin math.

What's the best case scenario for revenue growth from each of these levers? I said MVP was 2x. If basketball matched baseball, it's maybe 1.5x. If NFC drafters have an outsized likelihood of purchasing, I could see a 10% bump (1.1x). And, if IDP is 10% of football, let's say 1.05x for DraftKick's revenue. Hitting all of those would be 3.5x current revenue (2 x 1.5 x 1.1 x 1.05).

That's maybe a bit optimistic. What if each was only half that? 1.5x, 1.25x, 1.05x, and 1.025x would be 2.018x. Bingo! There's the doubled revenue I'm looking for!

Next steps

Here's what I'm doing:

• Finish out MVP Football by Week 1 or 2. Email all DraftKick Football purchasers to announce its availability. Paywall after Week 4.
• Use MVP to play out basketball leagues on Yahoo and ESPN.
• Sign up for an NFFC slow draft and use it to build the DraftKick and MVP integrations. I'll also sign up for an NFBC slow draft early on for testing.
• Add IDP support to DraftKick and MVP. Do it now while leagues are open rather than waiting for next year.