Where Things Stand - January 2023

With the turning of the calendar (and the end of the fantasy football season), I can feel the fantasy baseball momentum growing.

I've noticed my Twitter feed picking up. The same sort of tweets that got crickets in November or December are garnering more attention and new followers. Things are looking up.

The Latest Features

I managed to get out several important features since my end-of-year update.

Live SGP

This idea just hit me while I was thinking deeply about drafting one day: What if you compared the projected standings before and after you drafted a player? And what if you could do that for every potential draft target?

I wasn't sure if it would work or not, but I decided to give the implementation a try. And I love it. It makes decision-making so much simpler. One of my goals with DraftKick is "pick with confidence," and Live SGP nails that concept.

I've added a mention on the frontpage, and I even wrote an explainer blog post, Live SGP.

Draft Simulator / Mock Drafts

I don't like the phrase "mock draft simulator." I'm just calling mine a "draft simulator," although I also want to mix in "mock draft" every now and then for the SEO benefits.

Anyway, I noticed this "mock draft simulator" was a common search term on Google, and it got me thinking about prioritizing the feature. I posted about it on Reddit, where people recommended the FantasyPros version.

I quickly realized that I could do better than that. FantasyPros makes little attempt to stop its sim teams from drafting players at the same position, which really hurts its realism.

I built my version with a touch of randomness on ADP, and a hesitation to fill CI/MI/Util slots. I think it works great, and I used it extensively to test out Live SGP.

Drag and Drop Rosters

I got a request to be able to add minor league keepers that don't fill starting spots. I decided the easiest way to handle that was by allowing people to move players onto their bench (or anywhere else).

I thought this was going to be a tricky bit of JavaScript, but apparently drag-and-drop is built into HTML and pretty easy to do. It's a fantastic UI experience.

Now you can:

• Move a player to your bench. For a minor league draft, or for an auction where you might grab a low-value player early that you don't want to count as a starter.
• Move a player to another position. Great for optimizing lineups when someone has multiposition eligibility. If you move a player out of position, it allows it, but highlights the player in red as a warning. Just in case DraftKick misses eligibility from site, or if you want to plan for someone picking up eligibility early in the season.
• Move a player to another team. For in-draft trades.

Feature Freeze

As the fantasy baseball season swings into gear, I feel like stability is my new priority. I don't want to be deploying new features that then break when someone is in an important draft.

So I'll be cleaning up any bugs that come to my attention. And I'll be trying to market DraftKick and Projectile to get as many people aware of it as possible.

Sales

I'm well on track to top 2022's revenue from Projectile.

• Projectile: 5 sales ($54.75)
• DraftKick: 3 sales ($89.85)

I'm feeling optimistic.