Coming off a $5 million Series A fundraising round in June, SportsLock CEO Todd Heyden has reason to be excited about his product.
One of the latest comers to the fantasy space, SportsLock is among a growing field of operators offering variations of the daily game. Their angle: brackets. Heyden believes the ability to create and customize brackets will introduce a social element he believes is lacking from typical daily fantasy sports.
Heyden spoke with DailyFantasyTalk recently to tell us more about his company, what’s coming up, and why he believes there won’t be a third site on par with FanDuel and DraftKings.
Since you guys are doing something a little different, why don’t you start just by telling us about SportsLock from a broad perspective.
Broadest, 30,000-foot view: SportsLock in 2015 wants to be the best place to take action in sports. That’s exactly who we’re trying to be. The goal for 2015 and beyond: we really want to make this product the best place for friends to take action in sports.
Look, we’re consumers. I’ve been playing fantasy since I was 9. I’m 32 now. And when my co-founder and I got into this business, what was existing in the daily space, for us as consumers, wasn’t good enough. And when we looked at the traditional fantasy market, we were just getting very bored of playing the same way year in and year out, especially when that game is really built more for the football audience than it is for other sports—which again, is another problem in the space.
So we decided, as crazy as it may have seemed three years ago, that we could actually completely disrupt and revolutionize this space. And that’s really what we’re all about here at SportsLock. It’s about sports fans building products for sports people. It’s about figuring out a way to build the best place to take action. And if you’re a football fan, let’s deliver the best product for football fans. Or if you’re a basketball fan or a golf fan or a hockey fan, let’s not decide that the best solution is the one that works across all platforms, but instead, let’s actually build the best thing for those fans.
That was the overwhelming theme that what we felt as consumers that companies weren’t doing in the space, and that’s why we got into the market.
So you guys have a new app coming soon right? What’s new?
We launched this thing in March and have taken the last few months to now add another build to the app store, because the one that we (sent this week) is really a complete facelift.
The product that we’ve been doing for the last five months was basically another edition to daily. Look, the daily guys have done an incredible job. But as consumers, we are not the biggest fans of just one-day contests. We believe we have the best product, even in one-day, but as consumers, we believe that there’s something bigger that we could tackle. The first version was either one-day, two-day, or three-day contests, and you play those in either two-man, four-man or eight-man brackets. Now, with the new version, we’re going to start extrapolating out those brackets, meaning that instead of having our biggest tournaments being just three days, there will be tournaments that are bigger. Meaning that instead of having just one roster format, we want to introduce unique game concepts, so it doesn’t have to be the same roster, which to us, just doing that the same way over and over, it gets a little stale. We want to make different game types more fun, and so we’re releasing new game types as well for the sports we offer.
And then it’s about the Android. Right now we’re iOS only, but by this football season and not too long from now, we will have a product that’s available to the Android users as well.
And when will the new iOS version be available?
Our estimate, after Apple does its job behind the scenes, is that (next) week we will be going live with our 2.0 to the world.
The daily fantasy space is obviously very crowded right now and you guys are competing in that market. How do you see yourself separating from the pack?
Our goal as operators is to not just directly, but also indirectly create new things in the space. We want to build a third market within fantasy—your daily, your traditional and then us. Whether you call it short duration or whatever, there shouldn’t just be two markets, and the third one, the way we look at it, is going to be massive.
And the other thing is the interpretation of the UIGEA law has just been replicated so many times by people trying to be another FanDuel or another DraftKings. Those guys do what they do great, and personally, I really don’t believe that even in that size of a market with a few million people, that there’s going to be a third player. I really don’t.
You’ve got to be very different in the space, and that’s what SportsLock’s trying to be. Look, if someone wants to win in one day playing against a whole bunch of people in a salary cap, they’re never going to find that at SportsLock. That’s for sure. We will never do that. I believe somewhere down the road we’ll find that one of those guys (FanDuel or DraftKings) is better—the technology is better, the interface is better—and we’ll promote those guys and vice versa. It seems like we’re competing against daily, but the fun part for us is that we’re really trying to build something brand new in the industry.
So if we removed any restrictions, what would you most like to do within the space?
As you look at the gaming industry, you’ve got e-gaming, you’ve got fantasy gaming, you’ve got casino gaming. I think really for us, since we love the market we’re in, the goal for us would be how can we internationally change the game when it comes to fantasy once we’ve made a big splash here in the United States. So as opposed to saying ‘hey, I want the restrictions to be looser,’ I think it’s about improving on a space that’s very exciting to us, that essentially allowed me, my dad and my grandfather when I was nine years old to connect with each other. And that all comes down to what our most important message is, which is the ‘why’ of fantasy sports and the social element.
And in the case of a company like ours, an innovative, younger business, we want to think differently and change things up and mix up the pot in order to progress this market. CBS wasn’t doing it. Yahoo wasn’t doing it. Look at what Yahoo just did. They launched their daily app and they copied what already existed. It’s almost disappointing, but that again is why we are excited about what we build.
In 2016 we’re going to roll out a couple of things the fantasy market has never seen before and will be really, really different. So we don’t really focus about what’s going to change with the laws. For us, it’s really about UIGEA staying put and not changing, because we feel like we know how to build the biggest company in fantasy within those laws.
What’s the biggest hurdle that might prevent that from happening?
The hurdle would be the technology, right? I mean, we’re a tech-sports company, not vice versa. We’re a technology company first. So you want to add more features, but as you become a deeper product, you’ve still got to keep it very simple. And so the hurdles for us are internal.
The hurdle for me is not, ‘oh my God, we’ve got two daily companies who are going to spend $700 million in advertising across every single sports network.’ That’s not our hurdle. The hurdles for us are more can we continuously get the right team and add the right technologists and keep building with the new technology that’s coming out which therefore reduces our cost when we want to build up our servers in order to coordinate real-time drafting between hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people at a time. Those are the things that no one’s ever done before.
We feel like we’re in a good spot. No fears on our end.