For FantasyAces co-founders Bryan and Trent Frisina and their father Tom, gaming has always been a family affair. Twenty years ago, Tom was bringing advanced copies of John Madden football home from his job at Electronic Arts for his sons to game test. Recently, the focus has been on Daily Fantasy.
With Bryan and Trent overseeing day-to-day operations, the trio formed Fantasy Aces in 2012 and officially launched with the 2013 baseball season.
In the two years since, the site has become one of the most successful in the sector’s second tier. Bryan Frisina spoke with DailyFantasyTalk recently about trying to establish FantasyAces as the clear No. 3 site in DFS, some new product offerings, and what Yahoo’s recent entry to the space will mean for the industry.
Golf is one of the fastest growing sports in daily fantasy, and you guys recently started offering it on your site. How’s that going so far?
Golf and college basketball are the two sports we’re adding for this year, and golf’s been awesome. It’s great to have a new sport and we’ve also hired somebody who’s an expert in the industry, Jeff Collins, as our product director. He’s been with us for the last three to four months, and he’s spearheading that attack, and it’s been great. Obviously, it’s a little unique, having it only one time a week, and having only four majors where all the big golfers come out, but it’s great to have another sport, and obviously you can see what DraftKings has done, having Millionaire Makers for the PGA. The opportunity is there for PGA to explode and become maybe even a top three sport in DFS.
Has it been an immediate hit on your site or is it something that you’re hoping to bring along slowly?
It’s a new sport and it takes time. Golf isn’t going to be performing like baseball, basketball or football by any means, right from the start. But once you educate your user base, you provide a great product and stable pricing and payouts and everything, they’ll come, they’ll be retained. And as you grow, more and more people will be like, ‘OK, we can go to Aces and play golf.’
Yahoo’s entry into the sector has created a lot of buzz. What do you think the presence of such a well-heeled competitor means for sites like yours and the industry as a whole?
Knowing the sheer number of fantasy players out there and the small fraction that are playing daily, obviously Yahoo has been tracking this for quite some time and finally realized that it was time to get their foot in the water. So, they’re coming in and getting their foot in the water before the NFL season so they can iron out some of their kinks. But the bottom line is it’s more awareness. We feel it could be seen as a positive, in that you’re going to start educating all those seasonal players who have been playing the last 20 years or whatnot on Yahoo. Once they start playing daily, they realize, ‘Wow, there’s multiple sites out there.’ And the average player plays on three to five sites. Every site’s going to have their uniqueness, and if we can stay on the cutting edge with our product (we’re launching our mobile app in the football season and we’re excited about that), if we offer compelling sports, phenomenal customer service and a cutting-edge product, we see no reason why we can’t be in the fold with the top three, top four sites in the industry.
We have no choice but to embrace it. We’re not going to step down and go, ‘Oh my gosh, the sky is falling, Yahoo is in the game.’ We’ve seen Sports Illustrated come in, we’ve seen USA Today come in, and those aren’t fly-by-night companies. Those are legitimate companies and to be honest with you, we feel we’re light years ahead of those two right now. And so, we’ve always been in the fold as the No. 3 site in DFS and we’re going to continue to be in that talk.
DraftKings and FanDuel are spending loads on marketing and player acquisition. How does a site that can’t afford that type of strategy compete for players’ attention?
There is an education process for a lot of the people coming into the daily fantasy sports space. So once you create the brand, create the awareness like (FanDuel and DraftKings) are doing by spending millions of dollars on major advertising on television, radio, etc.—and we actually have some plays in radio, as well—but once the players get in and start to understand daily fantasy sports, they start to wonder what else is out there. And FantasyAces is right there positioned and looking to be the No. 3, if not considered the No. 3 currently. With our uniqueness and our roster setup and our salaries being really dialed in and user-friendly, we offer a lot of flexibility in your roster build, so you’re not going to be really restricted. We also have a game contest offering called Salary Pro that the casual user will really enjoy, because you’re not restricted by the salary cap. You can actually go over or under the cap and be rewarded or penalized depending.
And we’re going to do something new with Salary Pro, and this is kind of breaking news: We’ve had the same scoring for two years, and what we’ve found is that 80 or 90 percent of the people are just going to take the bargains and take the points. So what we’ve done now is kind of incentivize you to go after the heavy hitters; almost building an all-star lineup and not being so heavily penalized. Whereas previously, people were just taking the value. Now we feel like we have it much more dialed in for this coming NFL season and for all the sports moving forward with Salary Pro.
What else do you feel differentiates FantasyAces from your competitors?
When you look at the competitive aspect of the landscape, we want to be on the cutting edge with our user interface, and the app that we’re going to be rolling out in football season. We feel Salary Pro is a unique contest that differentiates us. We feel the more people come to our site, the more comfortable they’ll become with it and start to embrace it.
We also have live final championships. We did a live final for NFL that was very successful in Orange County. We had all of our players flown in, 13 players, stayed up in the Balboa Bay Resort, with $100,000 going to the winner of the grand prize. So we’re going to continue to push the envelope with our live finals. We’re going to do it again in the NFL season, and I think you’ll be hearing more about that soon.
As we head into a highly anticipated football season for DFS, what are you most excited about?
We’re excited about our position. We’ve been grinding at this for the last 2 1/2 years and we’re real excited about where we are today. A lot of these companies think they can just come in, throw up a site, have a little bit of cash and go ‘It’s a no-brainer.’ Well, it’s not. This industry and any start-up takes a lot of determination, will power and persistence, and behind that you have to have the people and you have to have the product. Without the people and the product, you’re not going to be where you want to be. Well, fortunately, we launched a product that was successful. It was functional and stable, and people enjoyed it. We have the right people behind the product: myself, my brother and a nice staff that we’ve been building out for the last six to eight months and a few more hires that are coming on before the NFL season starts. We’re going to continue to push the envelope. Once this app gets launched, once our live finals start getting the glamour and awareness that we want, those are going to be cutting edge live finals that we’re really excited about.