January 22, 2009
Game On
Anyone who knows me knows I love some good-natured trash talk. I may even like the bad-natured variety better. So I was pretty excited today when a nugget entitled RIP Draftmix about my fantasy sports site, popped up in my Google Alerts today. Game on.
I normally would never give lip service to the competition, but it was clear from the beginning that they would never really be a competitor. I did follow them for a while, because they were one of the better capitalized competitors out there. They were funded initially through Y-Combinator, and later through some secondary funding rounds (according to Matt). Well it gives me great pleasure to see that they have stopped running fantasy leagues on their site. I am not sure if they are doing this to cut their daily losses, or they are just buying time before they shut the site down like Instant Fantasy Sports did last year. Matt deserves what he gets, and his site never had a chance.
That's funny, because you've mentioned us multiple times. Maybe you should look up the definition of the word normally. As we're about to see, there are a lot of things you should look up.
We have stopped running fantasy leagues on our site because the football season ended. Our biggest strength (and at some times, our greatest weakness) is that we run live drafts. That means that we need a number of users on the site concurrently for it to work. When we have a lot of action, for instance during football season, it's great. Our users find it significantly more engaging than simple "pick from a list" type games, and our traffic shows that.
That's why we get hundreds of drafts per day running during the football season. Sit and goes were popping off every few minutes, almost around the clock, from 2-man all the way up to 8. Unlike FSL, we don't leave a week's worth of them sitting in our lobby to try to pretend we have traffic. We actually do, so we clean them out immediately to make it navigable.
If we never had a chance, you're screwed. Check out our respective traffic from Compete.com:
They are doing some FaceBook stuff I guess, but that will be an utter failure as well.
That Facebook stuff is called Football Tycoon. You can see that it has 54,000 users from that page (Facebook publishes that) and it's growing rapidly. I can't say much more for competitive reasons, but suffice it to say it's far from a failure. If you knew anything about Facebook games, you'd know they are incredibly profitable. Add Mob Wars to the list of things you need to look up.
If this is really it for them, they will probably go down as the worst start-up in Y-Combinators history. If you use Vegas style accounting (You don't count a Blackjack bet as revenue, you count what is won from the Blackjack players as revenue) which is appropriate for this type of business, their revenue is actually negative for the life of their company. Negative revenue for the life of a business is a pretty tough thing to pull off. It means that you are paying people to use your product, not the other way around. Hard to make a living that way, so I can understand why they are trying to cut their losses.
Your accounting knowledge is even more limited than your poker or business knowledge. Apparently you need to look up revenue too, because it can't be negative (except in some rare circumstances). I assume you're trying to make the argument (which you could verify is untrue if you weren't lazy, or had any programmers capable of automating the process) that our rake from tournaments isn't higher than what we give out due to freerolls and guarantees. That would be negative profit if it were true, not negative revenue.
And negative profit over the lifetime of a business is easy to do. In fact, that's the most frequent result, especially of internet businesses. Luckily we're headed in the opposite direction. I can pretty easily prove that your net profit is negative too. A quick scrape of your site would show that you couldn't possibly make enough to cover stats (even though you use the budget XML Team ones, which explains the constant error messages I get from your blog) one server, and one person's reasonable salary.
It really did not surprise me at all. I read the Matt Maroon blog for a while, because he would discuss his start-up from time to time. Pretty much everything he wrote their was dead wrong. He said the iPhone would not sell 10M units in 2008. Wrong! He said the Google Android phones would crush the iPhone. Wrong! He went out of his way to defend the Crap Vista Operating System. Wrong! He wrote a long post about Global Warming being a fact. Wrong! He never bothered to admit that this stuff was wrong, so I tried to point it out in a comment which he censored. Unfortunately, you can't censor me over here.
I did lose the iPhone bet fair and square. They rolled out a 3g model with GPS and for half the price. I'd certainly not claim I've never been wrong before or won't be again. You should try having an opinion and see how you do.
I did say Android will outsell the iPhone, and I still stand by that. I didn't say it would do it in 2 months. It will take a few years. How can defending an operating system be wrong? It's an opinion, which is yet another word you need to type into Dictionary.com. And I didn't say Global Warming is a fact. It's a conclusion drawn from facts that, unless you're a geologist (or related scientist), you have to be either ignorant or stupid (or in your case, both) to doubt.
I actually remember your comment (I didn't know it was you, but then I really don't even know who you are) and I deleted it because it was stupid. I have a firm no idiots policy in my comments on both blogs. You clearly aren't qualified to talk about science (or accounting, or business, or as we'll see in a minute, economics) and you also claimed I said that the Xbox would outsell the Wii, which a quick Google search of my blog shows is untrue. You're one of the numbskulls that the "scientists" paid for by oil companies tricked into disbelieving in global warming by saying things like "the Earth is really getting cooler" even though the ten warmest years on record have occurred since 1997 and areas of the ocean that have never before been navigable due to ice are now easily passable.
So Draftmix leaves the competitive landscape, and we are left with NBC, and a bunch of under capitalised new start-ups. We make things look pretty easy at FSL, but it really is not that easy. Our site was set up correctly from the beginning, and we are laser focused on our target customer.
Yeah, it was set up so correctly that it errors out if you don't put in www in the url bar. Try it. That's an error that no competent developer has made since 1994. We told you about that a year ago, and shocker, it's still there. That's what happens when you contract mediocre programmers to build it for you, rather than hire awesome ones and do it in house.
That's why when you were asked what technologies you use, you didn't even know the answer. I had to answer it for you in the comments. In case you're ever asked again, it's PHP, on Linux with Apache web server. Presumably MySQL for the database, in which case you can say "LAMP stack" and anyone with a clue (i.e. nobody in your organization) will know what you mean. I don't know about the DB for certain, though I guarantee that if your code monkeys can't even properly configure a web server, I could find out with a SQL injection attack in a matter of minutes. I could probably also take over your whole site, but I'm not big into committing felonies, especially to get the $52 total that people have on deposit. Nonetheless I'd never keep any money I cared about there.
Best of luck Matt and Chris with whatever you decide to do next.
You too. I have a feeling you'll be moving on soon. Your business results will be much like your poker ones, and you'll spend your time grinding it away at the kiddie tables while watching the big boys play. Maybe you'll grace us with some clueless business strategy blog posts too. You are clearly, as Jed Bartlet said on The West Wing, a .22 caliber mind in a .357 magnum world.
Just a quick look at your blog found more evidence of that, with you talking as cluelessly about economics as you do about everything else. My favorite quote:
The credit markets being frozen is a huge lie. Does your credit card still work? Mine did last time I checked.
Hilarious. You don't even understand what that means. When economists say the credit markets are frozen (which every single one does, because they are) they don't mean consumer credit. They mean commercial credit. Credit markets aren't frozen when you can't borrow money, they're frozen when GE can't.
But hey, why would you let total ignorance, lack of experience, and at-best marginal intelligence stop you from voicing opinions about things you don't understand? Just as global warming isn't real, because you found a website that says so, credit markets aren't frozen because you can still buy groceries with your Visa. Economics and global warming, clearly both are topics on which you are qualified to have an intelligent opinion.
I'd bet my left nut you're a Republican. Nobody else could be so vocal, while at the same time so blissfully unaware of their own ignorance.
Posted by themaroon at January 22, 2009 5:57 PM