One of my weird interests is the business of fantasy. I think about it quite a bit but don't really have anyone to share it with. Except with you, perhaps?
Lately, I've been on a bit of a deep dive on the Sleeper fantasy platform. New fantasy sites don't come around very often. What does it take to find adoption for a new fantasy league site?
Now, I can say upfront, I've got no insider knowledge about Sleeper. I haven't even done a lot of investigative journalism, beyond reading their blog posts.
In fact, I could just be constructing a narrative here that only vaguely resembles reality. So don't take any of this too seriously. I'm just writing down my own notes about some things that I think are interesting about Sleeper.
Sleeper is a relative newcomer to the fantasy league host market. Originally called Sleeperbot, the idea seemed to be an app-first approach to fantasy. (Digging through the Internet Archive, there are even earlier versions of the Sleeperbot website focused on fantasy football news and discussion. A very typical fantasy site, minus any claims to expert analysis.)
The first Sleeperbot first app (2015-2016) appeared to focus on drafting rather than in-season play. For the 2017 fantasy football season, they renamed to Sleeper and launched Sleeper 2.0, the forerunner of their current fantasy league product. It looks like they expanded to basketball in 2020.
Even today, the Sleeper draft experience gets high marks from users. So it's not surprising that the draft room was the initial feature that led to everything else.
When I read some of the early Sleeper marketing, they are often talking about the social features in their fantasy product. They have voice chat and "channels." I'd describe their basic pitch as, "Imagine fantasy football on Discord."
You can see a bit of this angle when they talk about reforming public leagues where there's little interaction and engagement in 2018: Why public leagues suck, and how we plan to fix them
Their trades are also filled with ideas borrowed from social networks: Leaguemates can "like" your players to indicate trade interest. Trade offers can be set to self-destruct after a certain time. (That one's actually pretty good, I think.)
Looking back, I'm not sure if the social aspect was their real selling point. (Maybe it helps, but I admittedly don't have any home leagues on Sleeper.) Whenever I hear someone recommending Sleeper, it's not for the social element. Usually, they are most impressed by the Sleeper interface. Which leads into my next couple of points:
The historic fantasy hosts started with rotisserie baseball and then expanded to other formats and sports. This is notable, because rotisserie baseball is one of the most complicated versions of the fantasy game. You have players with eligibility at multiple positions, daily stats over a long season, harder to calculate scoring, etc. Although they didn't originally support auction drafts, all of those sites put a ton of work to try to capture that segment of the fantasy baseball market. Unfortunately, now that they have fantasy football as their bread-and-butter, their complicated systems are a bit over-engineered.
Sleeper, by contrast, started with fantasy football. Small rosters, points-based scoring, weekly matchups. They have done a really good job on getting the 80% use-case working really well. It seems like a good strategy: Do one thing and do it really well. (Compare to Fantrax, whose motto is, "We have a setting for that.")
But that means that Sleeper does not have:
Here's the concern: It's hard to strap on those complicated features once you've already committed to a simpler model. I can speak from experience building DraftKick: It's much easier to plan for the complicated baseball use-case, and then adapt that for football, than to go the other way.
The wise move for Sleeper, I believe, is to stick with football. You don't need the old-school players. If you do a baseball product, make it simple: Assigned positions. Points-only. Smallish rosters.
The Sleeper blog discusses some basics of their tech choices, which are confirmed by looking at required skills from their job postings. The site is written in Elixir, with React Native powering their apps.
Elixir is one of those language darlings of the programming world that everybody wants to use, including me. In fact, I've always thought that if I built a fantasy league site, I'd build it in Elixir. It's fast, and the primary Elixir web framework (Phoenix) has a beautiful way of updating pages that would be perfect for live stats and standings. So, I have to admit: Great choice.
React Native is another one that's pretty close to what I would choose. You want to give half-hearted support for Android, but know that your primary audience (for U.S. football) will be on iPhones. So, don't hire Android devs, just build something that will work on Android as well as iOS. I have a soft spot for some of the smaller players (e.g. Cordova), but React Native is the obvious choice.
Currently, everything for the Sleeper brand sits at sleeper.com. However, lots of their blog content continues to point to an earlier domain of sleeper.app. (As I mentioned, they originally had the domain sleeperbot.com, but those references have been pretty well erased from the current site.)
Now, one-word .com addresses are surprisingly expensive. (Yet another of my hobbies is thinking about domain names.) Even for a fairly niche word like "sleeper." At some point, they threw a bunch of money at someone in order to get that sleeper.com domain.
But maybe that's the right move for a venture-backed startup with money to burn? Which, speaking of money, brings up...
How does Sleeper make money?
Fantasy league hosting is a business, so there's got to be some kind of plan for making money. Here are some options:
Let's see what everyone else is doing:
As a general rule, the sites that charge for leagues (#4) don't need to plaster ads everywhere (#1). That's Ottoneu, the NFBC/NFFC, etc. Conversely, if you offer free leagues, you usually rely on ads to cover your server costs.
The exception to that rule is CBS. CBS charges for leagues and also shows ads, which is a bit of a loser move.
ESPN traditionally did #3 with their ESPN Insider content. Plus ads (#4) for their free leagues.
Over the past year or two, Yahoo has really pushed their Yahoo+ premium content (#3). But they also have prize leagues and best ball covering #4. And ads (#1), of course.
Fantrax is the best example for premium features (#2), with $100 premium leagues that unlock extra settings. They also get some money from prize leagues (#4) and ads (#1).
One other possibility is that you use your fantasy leagues as a loss leader to drive traffic to your other properties. So CBS can show you their NFL content, ESPN gets you watching their fantasy shows, etc.
Now that brings us to Sleeper.
Sleeper does not currently charge for anything, and they do not show ads. What's the gameplan, then?
They've obviously got some ideas, since they convinced VC firms to give them millions of dollars. One thing they mention is a "Wallet," which would maybe let them take a cut of prize league revenue?
I could also see a move towards sports betting, which would then subsidize their traditional fantasy leagues.
But, as a user, it does make me a bit skeptical. Part of the VC playbook is to lose tons of money while pushing for heavy growth. That can't go on forever. Either the startup goes under (most likely), or it finds a way to start making money. For the user, neither outcome is that great: Either you have no league site at all in a few years, or you have one that is worse than the current version (due to ads or fees).
Sleeper has definitely hit on something for fantasy. Starting with a more modern tech stack and UI has given them an advantage over the legacy players. They've put a lot of thought into the draft room especially.
The comments I read from Sleeper users typically rave about those things, and not as much about Sleeper's social focus. But, maybe that's a key ingredient in the mixture, as well.
The temptation for them is to keep expanding the feature set, but I hope they avoid that path. I think their best bet is to keep the product clean and targeted. As a (primarily) fantasy baseball player, this probably means that I'll be spending more time on the traditional sites.
And, of course, we'll see what their plan is to start making money.
If you're still tracking your draft with a custom spreadsheet or even just pen and paper, you need to try DraftKick.
It is packed with features to help you succeed on draft day:
It's completely free to try out!
Hi,
I'm Mays. I've been playing fantasy since I was in high school (over two decades ago).
My speciality has always been player valuation—converting player stats into rankings and salary values. VBD for fantasy football? Rotisserie z-scores? We go way back. In 2009, I started Last Player Picked, a site that generated fantasy values customized for your league.
You can find me on Twitter at @MaysCopeland or email me at [email protected].