Roughly eight months after its launch, DFS operator FantasyDraft is preparing for its inaugural football season. And the Charlotte-based company is expecting big things.
They made a splash by securing endorsement deals with Clayton Kershaw and Drew Brees, among others, and sent a message regarding the seriousness of their intentions with a $50,000 NFL preaseason freeroll. CEO Grant Yoder says he’s trying to draw attention to the company’s “player first” focus, which includes larger payout zones, occasional rake free games and limited entries in tournaments.
Yoder spoke with DailyFantasyTalk last week to tell us more about his company.
Start off by telling us about your background and how you ended up in DFS.
My experience is with building online commerce experiences. Most of my team came from that background. We were building online storefronts for retailers and had pretty extensive experience with online customer transactions from start to finish, very focused on the customer experience. We did work for WalMart and Target, and their customer comes first, so we had to make sure that experience was optimal.
And I’ve always been a sports fan. I’ve played sports all my life, and combined with the 15 years of online experience, we took that and brought it into daily fantasy. Our goal is to provide an optimal experience, and that’s kind of our “Players First” mantra. We want to do everything with the player in mind.
We’ve been live since December and working on this now for almost a year and a half. I’ve learned a ton, but it’s basically applying the same principles of a fantastic e-commerce experience to the contest experience. It is an experience, and if you don’t have fun doing it, you’re not going to keep coming back. So our goal is to create the best possible experience and put our players first in every possible way. Whether it’s larger payout zones, or limiting max entries on our featured contests, we’re always looking to put our players first.
You guys have been running some pretty substantial freerolls during the NFL preseason. What kind of reaction are you getting there and how did you decide on that strategy?
We have a lot of folks that are coming in and playing our freerolls and our Players First [no rake] contests. And those Players First contests that we’re putting up—we put those up at different times throughout the day, so they’re not always at three o’clock or four o’clock, so people are constantly coming back and checking. Both of those tools are great for acquiring new customers, and then a good chunk of those customers are playing in our pay games, so they’ve been great tools for us.
And we’ve been growing our customer base not only through email and social, but also through our endorsers. We’re not advertising obviously as much as DraftKings or FanDuel—I’m not sure you could—but we’re leveraging our 12 endorsement deals, whether it be Drew Brees or Clayton Kershaw, leveraging their social media outlets to get to new customers in the industry. So we believe we’re helping to grow the daily fantasy industry, which I believe is very important for us to continue to prosper.
The daily fantasy space is pretty crowded right now and every company is looking for a way to stand out. What made you guys decide to pursue athlete endorsements?
We believe that it’s fun for people to play against people that they see on TV or that they used to watch or idolize. For example, if you have played in our NFL freerolls this preseason, you could’ve played against London Fletcher, Shannon Sharpe, Jimmy Johnson, Boomer Esiason. So again, it’s giving our players something that’s fun, something new. Ultimately, we want it to be an entertaining and fun experience so that you keep coming back. And if you get the chance to play against one of your idols or one of the best quarterbacks to play in the league, we think that’s a fun and entertaining experience, and that gives our players an added benefit for playing on our site.
And obviously, if one of those endorsers has a great social media following, especially a guy like Chris Bosh, there’s a potential for us to acquire new customers from their base of followers and they help us market and promote our services.
Limiting entries in tournaments is something that a lot of the intermediate-level players say they want, but it can be limiting for the site operator. Talk about the philosophy to be player friendly in a way that a lot of new players aren’t going to realize is even to their benefit.
I don’t think new players do realize that players are going to drop in 500 lineups in a very large contest until they actually get in the contest and they see the same user ID listed 100 times in the standings. From our standpoint, we felt like, yes, we need some multiple entries to get the contests high, but not to that magnitude.
Again, it’s putting players first and letting them have a good experience. If you’re going to end up playing against Condia and he puts in 100 lineups and you put in one and you finish one point behind him, how fun was that for you?
We’re going to keep the limits low. We have some guidelines that we’ll use based on the number of entries that we have. And while we may not have those massive contests, we’re going to have over $500,000 guaranteed in Week 1. That’s obviously not as big as the big guys, but it’s still pretty sizeable. And the chance that the average guy can win some of that prize pool is probably greater on our site than any.
Do you have specific numbers in mind as far as entry limits?
We have some guidelines that we’re playing with right now. We haven’t publicized them yet. Our contest (last) weekend had no more than 20. We felt like 20 was a good number. Obviously if we put it at 50 we’d have more people dropping in more lineups and the prize pools could be greater, but that’s the risk/reward as far as the player we’re going after: we’re going to keep the cap low, and the reward is that our customer will have the best experience.
What about the larger payout zones you mentioned? What’s the specifics there?
Every contest that we have with a guaranteed prize pool will always have a quarter of the field getting paid out. Again, it comes back to the more folks that win, the more that have fun, the more that will come back, the more folks will keep playing. The idea is to put the prize pool back into as many customer accounts as possible, so low contest fees and larger payout zones help us do that. We won’t run a guaranteed contest that doesn’t pay out at least 25 percent of the field.
What do you see going forward as the primary hurdle that you’ll have to clear in order to be the company you want to be in five years?
I think it’s going to be meeting the high quality standards that our customers expect. That’s always going to be around. So as you grow and scale, and as the technology changes, it’s always going to be a challenge to provide the optimal experience whether it’s on phones, laptops, tablets and whatever else it becomes. So I think meeting that quality standard that our customers demand is going to always be a challenge, and it’s one that’s fun, because they’re pushing you to do better and improve your site and improve the experience. I think that’ll kind of be our biggest challenge, is constantly improving our overall strengths and just looking for more things that customers want and delivering them. Whether that be new features, more flexible lineups, referral programs—whatever those may be, just continuing to deliver on their high expectations.