One of the big winners at this summer’s Fantasy Sports Trade Association conference was SidePrize. The Atlanta-based start-up quickly made a name for itself by taking home the Shark Tank, Elevator Pitch and Hackathon awards.
Helmed by Adam Wexler, SidePrize’s angle is to allow team managers in existing season-long leagues to compete against their league mates in one-off competitions for cash prizes.
Wexler spoke with DailyFantasyTalk recently about where the idea for the company was born and what’s next for SidePrize.
You won a handful of awards at the most recent FSTA conference in June. One of those was for the best elevator pitch. What is the elevator pitch for SidePrize?
SidePrize brings the daily element and excitement to your season-long fantasy league.
Short and sweet, and it seems to work. You’ve already built a relationship with RotoWire. Can you tell us about that and how it works? And do you have any others in the works you can talk about?
Fantasy players on Rotowire’s MLB Commissioner platform can see a SidePrize section in the left panel of every page, and this section includes the ability to place challenges or make deposits and withdrawals. In terms of this football season, there’s certain partnership integration announcements that will come out when the time is right, but I’ll make the first mention of one formal partner for this fall here at Daily Fantasy Talk: Head2Head.com. We’re excited about working with them as their typical demographic of fantasy players is a great match with our sweet spot: veteran fantasy players who tend to have more money than time.
How and when did you get the idea for SidePrize, and how were you able to get it off the ground?
The origin of SidePrize dates back to a prior business concept that we called Virtual Commissioner. The original premise for Virtual Commissioner centered around making the commissioner’s life easier. When we dug deeper and discovered great existing solutions like LeagueSafe, we decided to go down a different path. I thought about personal experiences of playing fantasy. Too often fantasy players exhaust great amounts of energy over the course of the season for minimal financial gain. The common refrain amongst friends on their weekly matchups is ‘put your money where your mouth is.’ SidePrize brings that concept to life. As we say, winners get paid, and friendships get saved.
How would you answer those who say the SidePrize concept is pushing legal boundaries?
Before we went too far down the path, we wanted to get clarity as well. We hired some great folks from the renowned Dentons Law Firm to explore potential legality concerns. When they came back with their legal opinion, we felt reassured the niche that SidePrize is paving has great potential. This notion was validated when we won the only two awards handed out from our industry peers at this summer’s Fantasy Sports Trade Association conference.
You’re off to a fast start as a company. What’s next for SidePrize, and what do you expect for the coming football season?
We’re gearing up for a big fall. We suspect there’s a lot of season-long players that are intrigued by the daily concept, but believe it’s too time intensive or intimidating as Eilers Research confirmed. We’re bringing daily to them and chopping up the long pro sport seasons.