

YC Summer '07 Draftmix launches: Faster Fantasy Sports for Fun or Profit - dhouston
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/05/draftmix-faster-fantasy-sports-for-fun-or-profit/

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brezina
I can't wait for the TechCrunch story 2 months from now that declares Draftmix
profitable. Knock it out of the park boys.

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zach
Ah, clever as hell. Nice one. Must have been rough getting it launched if it's
taken until Week 9 of the NFL season, though.

Once you get far enough into the entrepreneurial side of being a technology
entrepreneur, you appreciate brilliant hacking of business markets. This is a
great market hack.

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mattmaroon
It definitely is a bigger project than we realized going in.

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zach
I run a league on Fanball and I'm humbled by the prospect of how out of hand
"create your own rules" leagues can get. There can literally be thousands of
feature points. And sure, you can put together a simple fantasy site easily,
but there's still a steady creep of features you want to have. So I could see
how that would be the case.

I imagine you guys are using Rails and ran into the same issue I did with my
real estate statistics, which is that there is no particular framework for
running and caching "baked" statistics over data in Rails. I've thought about
how to generalize and abstract some of the stuff I've done with that into a
plugin, but it's probably not going to happen anytime soon.

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mattmaroon
Yeah, it seems fragment caching is the way to go, though for live updates
we're going to have to do something a little more elegant.

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jsjenkins168
If these guys can eventually monetize a small portion of each buy-in, that
could be big. Are there are plans to incorporate real money in place of the
fantasy dollars?

This could also be big with young college sports fans. Have you guys thought
about targeting this audience via a facebook app? I'm sure there are already
plenty fantasy sports fantasy sports fb apps out there though..

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mattmaroon
Yes and yes.

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myoung8
Quick question for you guys: what's are the legal rules regarding paying to
enter a game and winning money from it? Did you have to jump through any hoops
to make that work?

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myoung8
Nevermind, I can answer my own question (via the TechCrunch article):

"Now all this may sound fine playing fantasy sports for fantasy dollars, but
doesn't bringing real money into play amount to internet gambling? No, says
co-founder Matt Maroon, who points to the fantasy sports exemption in the
"Internet Gambling Prohibition and Enforcement Act". The act, which was a big
blow to sites like PartyPoker, specifically exempts "participation in any
fantasy or simulation sports game or educational game or contest". Fantasy
sports is seen as a game of skill and played for a fixed cash prize. Although
a quick perusal of the exemption leaves you feeling they're at least bending
the rules."

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dhouston
congrats matt, chad, john and russ!

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mattmaroon
Thanks. John is mad you stole his karma :)

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brianmckenzie
Hmmm...I think my friends and I will be spending a lot of time on Draftmix.

Great concept, guys, and best of luck!

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downer
I.e. Draftmix is a DOS attack against your own startup?

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schoudha
Cool idea, but I think the audience is limited.

Which VCs did these guys land after YC?

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vlad
Congrats!

