Company: Fantrax
Launch date: October 2008
Became full-time operation: 2006
No. of employees: 8 (Some part-time)

There are many players in the fantasy league management space that the general playing public probably never hears about. That’s due in large part to the big three: Yahoo!, ESPN and CBS Sports. Lee Kleiner and his band of programmers, however, brought to market a slick site that supports a lot of sports and lets you play for free. The president of Fantrax took some time out this week to tell FSB.com about the creation of their system and where the company is headed.

1. Your site talks about starting with “a group of fantasy sports enthusiasts.” How big a group was this to start, how did it come together and what kind of programming experience was brought to the table?

There were five of us at the start, soon after to be seven. As highly skilled software developers, we felt our talent was being “wasted” in the corporate world, which largely lacks innovation and the desire to incur the time and expense to build top-quality software. We felt that if we could find an industry with a high barrier to entry due to software complexity, and where we could build a vastly superior product and have the capability to sell it, we would have a winning combination. Not only did fantasy sports fit the bill, but several of us were already seasoned fantasy sports players. Our team primarily consisted of highly talented and very experienced software architects and developers working in the corporate sector.

2. How long was the “vision” for your platform discussed before you began to develop it? How long was it in development before going live?

We started development on a prototype quite quickly. The product was in development for approximately 5 years before going live.

3. The league-hosting universe is dominated by some of the biggest names and outlets in sports media. What made Fantrax decide to seek a place at the same table? What kind of goals have you set along the way for realistic audience size?

We saw the fantasy sports industry as underserved by the (existing) providers in several ways. Firstly, there was no multi-sport, multi-language leader consolidating the market. Secondly, the technology that the existing providers employed would make it very difficult to extend their products to the kind of customizability we felt was necessary for a true commissioner product with global reach. We also believed that some of the big players were unable or unwilling to offer sports that were not already part of their established business. For example, we didn’t believe CBS would offer Premiership soccer, because they don’t broadcast it.

We set modest growth targets of 50,000 users in our first phase (which we have now surpassed), and significant accelerated growth targets in our next phase.

4. What kind of startup costs went into Fantrax, which features an impressively broad and probably labor intensive platform? How have you gone about marketing the service?

The cost to build such a platform is quite immense, as anyone in the commissioner product business would understand. We have been investing primarily in (research and development) thus far, but are now ready to ramp up our marketing spend. So far, targeted web marketing, cross-promotional activities and, of course, word of mouth have been successful for us.

5. What sports did you offer at the start, and what has been the timeline for adding to that lineup? How do the user bases for your various other sports compare with that for NFL?

Although our platform has always supported all sports, we released NHL hockey and NBA basketball first, since they were a little simpler in their intricacies. We have been able to add new sports in very short order — typically about 3-4 months. That timeline has been even shorter for adding new leagues in sports we already have (e.g. college football and college basketball).

Although NFL is the leader as expected, we are getting solid traction in all our sports (except golf so far, which we released this season in Beta), and our usage in other sports relative to NFL is higher than industry standards.

6. Fantrax prides itself on free offerings, but doesn’t that limit your growth in a marketplace that is so loaded with big-name providers? What kind of revenue is generated by the pay-to-play games?

From the beginning, our strategy has been to balance the user-growth capabilities of offering a free service with the revenue that comes from offering premium products. We will always offer some form of free commissioner product but plan to offer premium products for a fee in the near future.

7. Your site says “free forever,” but is there a level that other revenue generation has to sustain to make that doable?

We have plans to roll out some very exciting “premium” (fee-based) products and contests that a very large number of fantasy sports players are going to use and participate in.

8. The site also touts the speed with which user-requested changes are implemented. How often are such adjustments made, and what have been some of the most significant alterations asked for by users?

New features are added pretty much every week, sometimes several in a week. The product roadmap is a healthy mix of user requests and our own innovations. One recent example is the capability to replicate the player pool across divisions, so each division can draft from their own pool, as opposed to a single pool for the entire league. Requests for this feature came from the football users.

9. How has your rate of audience growth been each year?

About 300 percent.

10. What’s next for Fantrax? Any new sports on the horizon, new wrinkles in the business plan, etc.?

Some of the upcoming sports offered by Fantrax are soccer, Formula 1, and cricket. We are also adding new language translations for our worldwide audience. Plus, we have an exciting lineup of premium products and pay-to-play contests.

Company: Insider Sports Media, LLC
Launch date: 2006
Became full-time operation: 2006
No. of employees: 4 partners and 8 contract writers

College football has grown rapidly in recent years and remains among the leaders in growth potential on the American fantasy sports scene. Whether college basketball holds similar promise is still unclear, but the founders of Insider Sports Media are strong believers in both. One of those three founders, Alex Esselink, took some time to tell FSB.com about the company he and his partners are growing from their start at CollegeFantasyFootballInsider.com.

1. Fantasy college sports have only really entered the public conscious over the past couple of years. How long have you guys been playing it, and how long have you been doing so online?

Our first foray into fantasy sports was in 1999 when we started a BCS conference-only fantasy football league. NFL fantasy football was just starting to hit its stride, but our group always loved the college game, so we started the league. We built a crude website to manage the league and wrote some content. And that was eventually the springboard for our first site, CollegeFantasyFootballInsider.com.

Initially all of our scoring was still done in excel. We’ve been using online league managers since around 2006, but we still love excel.

2. What made you see a market for college fantasy content when that segment of fantasy players was comparatively miniscule?

Heading into it we didn’t really know what the market for college fantasy sports was, we were two engineers and an English teacher that weren’t connected to the industry at all. But what we did know was it was a vastly underdeveloped market, and it was something we were passionate about. We also knew there were other folks like us craving information.

3. What was your goal from the outset, and what kind of time and startup costs went into the launch?

Our start-up costs were pretty small compared to most. We built Insider Sports Media (originally CFFinsider.com, LLC) on sweat equity. Although we outsource some of the writing, web design, etc., most everything we do — from coding to content — comes from the inside.

A lot of startup fantasy companies seem to have large startup costs. Either they’re launching new tech-heavy fantasy games or trying to get noticed quickly with a big marketing budget. We are proof that you don’t need to have large investment capital to build a site and get noticed. You just need a lot of time, patience and some really understanding wives. A lot also goes on behind the scenes on a daily basis to make sure we are hitting all aspects.

4. What have been some of the benchmark moments/changes for your company so far? What partnerships have you developed?

Without a doubt, our relationship with Rotoworld really helped us out early on. Not only from a financial standpoint, but it also helped us become better at what we do. None of us were writers going into this. But we all had an intimate knowledge of college football. We’ve basically been learning the rest as we go. But without the push from Rotoworld early on, we don’t think we’d be where we are today.

Last year was a big year for us as well. We completely revamped our CollegeFantasyFootballInsider.com site from the inside-out. We started in January 2009 and launched just under the wire before football season in August. We added a lot of user functionality, such as picking your own player trackers and scoring inputs, as well as doing weekly projections for every player on all 120 college football teams.

We also felt it was time to expand. We had a great Content Management System (CMS) on the backend so we used that to launch CollegeFantasyHoopsInsider.com last August and NFLDraftDayInsider.com in January of this year.

5. How does Insider Sports Media make money?

Most of our revenue is through advertising on the site. Content licensing is another revenue stream.

We’ve beefed up our technical capability and built our own CMS that we are looking to market to those looking for help in that area. Having a system built specifically for your needs gives you so much more flexibility than a number of the pre-packaged blog systems out there. Our technology is definitely a strength for our current sites and future sites.

6. How has fantasy life changed for you since the well-publicized decision by CBSSports.com to add player names to its college football fantasy game?

Our site’s traffic has more than doubled each year since 2006. We can only assume this is a CFF-wide trend, but it’s hard to pinpoint how much of that increase is due to CBSSports.com’s decision to use player names in their game. We’ll see the biggest boost when the broadcast networks start integrating fantasy into their programming, like we see in the NFL. ESPN started doing it a little bit last fall, but it was late on Friday night. Of course, they’ll have to drag the NCAA kicking and screaming.

7. Fantasy college football has gotten a big bump in the past couple of years, but basketball not so much. What led you guys to launch College Fantasy Hoops Insider last year?

For the same reasons that we launched the football site. There seems to be a group of hardcore college fantasy basketball fans out there and very little information geared toward them. Of course, we love college basketball. It is still small, but so was college fantasy football when we started five years ago. We believe fantasy college hoops will grow, especially as more sites develop games centered on the NCAA tournament.

We also got a little bit lucky. We were able to find writers that are just as passionate about college basketball as we are about football. They are doing a remarkable job.

8. How does the growth potential for the college basketball market compare with that for college football?

It’s a matter of making the game approachable for the average college basketball fan, and I think our industry has a lot of work to do here. The NCAA tournament will always be the main event in this sport, so we aim to build on that and give people a reason to pay attention earlier. The potential is certainly there.

9. You’ve also recently added NFL Draft Day Insider and will soon collaborate in the launch of LeagueRunners.com. What do you hope to accomplish with those outlets?

Draft Day Insider was a very natural extension of what we do every day because we follow college football players from the recruiting stage all the way through graduation. So we thought we had something to say about the NFL Draft and maybe we’d bring a different perspective than some of the other draft sites. We had always done some NFL Draft information on our college football site, but we felt it could stand alone.

The biggest challenge for us here is we are entering an already-developed market. There are countless NFL Draft sites. However, we feel the way our site is laid out and the extent of the information it provides — from draft history to current player news — makes us different. Most sites concentrate on one or two elements, we want to give NFL Draftniks one place to get it all.

League Runners is a project we’re working on with Roto Ethos Media that will basically serve as a website resource for fantasy league commissioners of any sport. Insider Sports Media is going to supply most of the technology and Roto Ethos will focus on the content side of things.

10. What else should we expect to see from you guys going forward? Do you have any designs on hosting fantasy college sports, which still doesn’t enjoy a wealth of league-hosting sites?

Our goal is to help the college fantasy football and basketball markets grow in any way we can. So the plan is to encourage more league-hosting options to enter the college market and working with firms that are developing new games instead of building games ourselves. We may run some contests from time-to-time, but that is not our core business.

We’ve been working with a few of our partners on ways that would make it easier for someone a little hesitant to take the leap to give CFF a try. We can’t count the number of times we’ve heard someone say “there are too many teams,” “it’s illegal” or something similar. If we can change the perception that college fantasy is harder to play than NFL fantasy, then we can count on continued growth in the market.

We are also always tinkering in the off-season. So we’ll have some changes coming to CollegeFantasyFootballInsider.com based on user feedback, and we’ll be refining our system more and more. We’re excited, but we are still a ways away from any announcements. We don’t want to over-promise and under-deliver.

If you are even the most casual of sports fans, work in an office or live somewhere in the United States, you know what March means on the sporting calendar.

It’s “madness” time in college basketball, when brackets abound and pools are plentiful. Xerox Monday — after Selection Sunday — takes many of us to the copy machine so that we can take way too many cracks at building that impossible perfect bracket.

RapidDraft.com, however, wants you to consider a different way to pick your teams: via fantasy draft.

“Innovation is the key to growth in the world of fantasy sports,” said Jeff Thomas, CEO of World Fantasy Games. “Most fantasy companies offer a bracket contest. Nobody has a draft. Applying our patent-pending social gaming model to the NCAA Tournament was a natural, with on-demand live drafts inside our virtual-world draft room. RapidDraft is true differentiation in the marketplace and can complement a bracket game on any fantasy site.”

RapidDraft Hoops Madness pits a consumer against three avatars backed by expert opinion and strategy. The four teams tip off with a 16-round draft in which every NCAA tournament team is selected. (The two play-in participants act as one team here. And yes, NCAA, that is a play-in game.) The “Fantasy Pros” draft according to specifications set forth by this site, SportsBuff.com and Sara Holladay — best known as the FF Librarian.

“I’ve never had the chance to combine fantasy sports with March Madness, so I’m excited to see that RapidDraft has stepped up to the plate and taken it to the next level,” Holladay told FSB.com. “Everything is better with a touch of fantasy.”

Once the four fantasy squads are drafted, you score points for every victory by one of your NCAA teams. Points are awarded in a seed-times-round format — meaning a second-round win by a No. 4 seed, for example, would garner 8 points. Another 1.5 bonus points are available each time your total score for a round beats that of a Fantasy Pro team in your league, up to 4.5 bonus points per round.

“I love the unique concept that RapidDraft has come up with,” said Jim Day, an avid fantasy gamer, founder of FantasyFootballWhiz.com and host of multiple shows on BlogTalkRadio’s The Fantasy Sports Channel. “The draft is something you just don’t see on any other March madness contest and will provide another exciting way to play one of the most enjoyable and exciting tournaments in sports.”

In the end, of course, you’re really competing against all of the other human players, with 50 guaranteed cash prizes and a $2,500 grand prize. That’s not a bad return on a free entry. Consumers can draft up to twelve times each, three times per draft position.

The different format might scare off a bracket traditionalist at the start, but the system still awards you for properly projecting which higher seeds will stick around longer and grabbing a Cinderella or two. Just imagine how many points George Mason would have gotten you back in 2006, or Davidson just two years ago.

It’s a new twist with different layers of strategy for experienced bracket fillers, yet Hoops Madness is still easy enough for the beginner or casual player. At its base, this is still just a game in which you pick the teams you think will win.

As more and more people grow familiar and comfortable with fantasy games, though, it might just prove a format that catches on big-time.

“Consumers will play both,” Thomas said. “If you follow college basketball and you love the excitement of a fantasy draft, RapidDraft Hoops Madness is for you.”

Should you decide to play along, here’s a bit of unsolicited advice: Don’t wait too long to take a shot on Xavier. A top-15 team in KenPom.com’s rankings for adjusted offensive efficiency, the Musketeers have a decent-looking draw. As a 6-seed, they could score 36 Hoops Madness points by winning just three games. A No. 1 seed, by comparison, would tally just 21 by winning the title.

(Note: FantasySportsBusiness.com is owned and operated by World Fantasy Games.)

A roundup of items recently posted on the FSB News page.

– 365FantasySports.com, which specializes in short-term fantasy contests, has added daily college basketball games to its lineup this season.

– Soccer is the clear dominant international sport, and cricket has seemed to be on the rise the past couple of years, but don’t forget about rugby. The Irish Times hasn’t with its fantasy game for the 6 Nations tournament.

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