MattMaroon.com

We were featured on TechCrunch yesterday. The rest of the group was laughing at how the article was focused around me, as if I created the whole site myself. I didn’t really get that impression, but I’ll take it. What can I say? I’m our Steve Jobs. (Luckily for me, I don’t really do all of the work myself, as we wouldn’t be launching until about 2012 if that were the case.)

Our logo got a bit cut off, but Nick did an awesome job with the screenshot showing our team page, which I think is our best looking. For the most part the article is fairly accurate, except for linking to the wrong Internet Gambling act. I think that one never even passed. Oh well, nobody who reads TC really cares about the UIGEA anyway.

He’s very right about CBS. The payouts there are ludicrous. At the $500 buy-in level the rake is over 40%, and at the $15 buy-in the rake is as high as 72% (depending on how many teams you buy). At least, that’s how they appear. It’s hard to tell for sure from their site. I think the fact that anyone is willing to suffer through that shows how much people want to play fantasy sports for money.

What all this has taught me is just how brilliant the online poker rooms are. I suppose it should come as no surprise. They were startups, and as such had to redefine a problem and then solve it. Fantasy sports online exist mainly as afterthoughts for mega-corporations like Yahoo, Disney, and ESPN looking to gain a few page views. They’re run by pointy-haired bosses, not entrepreneurs looking to make money.

In fact, the entire online sports industry is that way. There’s really no good place to go check out scores and trash talk suckers who like your team’s rivals. It’s probably the biggest, almost totally unaddressed market still in play, and I’m pretty happy to be staking my claim in it.

Online poker rooms were true innovators. They had to be. It is an ultracompetitive, highly lucrative business, and in its early days one that the big corporations shied away from. That’s changed quite a bit in recent years, but back then it meant that the winner was the group that executed best, not the one with the biggest marketing budget.

As such online poker rooms invented or co-opted many brilliant marketing ideas, some of which the rest of the internet has yet to apply, because they had to. Luckily, having been involved in it for so long on both sides of the equation, I feel uniquely positioned to take advantage of that in this new space.

Investors often ask me who I think our biggest competitors are. The obvious answer would be Yahoo, ESPN, and maybe CBS, as they have the most customers, but I’m pretty sure that once we’re up and rolling we’ll carve through their user base like a hot knife through butter. They haven’t innovated beyond the game people played in bars in 1982, they just threw it online. For evidence please see their drafts, which are still Java Applets, the programming equivalent of a phonograph.

I’m much more worried about other startups. There aren’t many in the space yet. There’s Rotohog, which is pretty cool in a way, but the exact opposite of what we’re doing. They make the game harder to play and more time intensive, and only let you draft once per year, meaning that if your first round pick gets injured on Week 2 you don’t just lose one team, but every team you have on the site. There’s also Flea Flicker, which I hear good things about but haven’t yet seen.

And right now, that’s about it, but that’s going to change. It’ll be interesting to see where it goes from here.

 

This entry was posted on November 6, 2007 at 11:18 pm and is filed under Startup . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed Both comments and pings are currently closed.