i've thought about it a decent amount and i've never been able to come up with a reasonable way to make market-style pricing work. it would be completely dominated by the regulars who are willing to sit at their computers 24/7 waiting for news to come out and/or bots and scripts.

Can you elaborate on Chicago's startup culture? I'm finishing up my entrepreneurship coursework at the end of the month after graduating with a finance degree last year and currently considering my next steps. I'm working on something right now that I'm probably best served to see through in Cincinnati (where I'm originally from) given the network I've started to cultivate there. In the event it doesn't succeed though, I definitely want to live somewhere else in my 20s and have always enjoyed Chicago, but wasn't aware there was a strong startup culture other than having Excelerate Labs, etc.

I had no idea that any of this existed till I saw the ad here yesterday. Though I'm mostly a lurker, I'm glad to see someone from this community is behind it. As a fantasy fiend who knows more about Brandon Belt than my Governor, I could potentially play these every day. I'm very excited about your product and hope it blows up. For a new site, it's impressively smooth. Love the chat too. Already told all my friends about it. Anyway, just a small bit of negative feedback.

I noticed no MLB freeroll today. I don't really care about the profitability of the freerolls, it's not about me wanting free money, but I would like to do them every day for a week or two because I want to get a feel for the daily format and if I would be any good at it. I don't want to put $20 on and play the smaller ones, because if I do that and then decide I want to play more seriously, I've squandered my deposit bonus. So every day without a freeroll pushes back my potential deposit a day. Also, very few of my friends are really gambling types comfortable with online wagering, just the kind of people who will do office/friend brackets and fantasy leagues for $100 or so. So the only way they will get hooked is with freerolls.

Congrats on a job well done and best of luck with it.

http://codeacademy.org/ is the Chicago version of that. (This is not the same Code Academy as the online one.) It was started by a guy I took an entrepreneurship course with and it also uses Ruby on Rails. I like the idea of these a lot -- paired programming and learning by doing a real application.

Congrats on the funding!

Here are some thoughts and questions after playing a bunch of games this weekend:

1. Un-registering after submitting a team before first pitch would help. I clicked on an 16 person game from the right screen after I submitted a team (check the box for fast entry section), and I had no clue it was double or nothing until it was too late. Would have been good to either know in the description what type of game (double or nothing or standard, etc) or be able to unregister for it. (Edit: Just saw the unregister on a team I submitted so maybe I missed it before!)

2. I would love the option to pick the whole pitching staff instead of just the starting pitcher for when times like Kershaw getting sick (which I beat the other guy in a challenge mainly because of this) or other times when the starting pitcher gets knocked out early. It would be cool if it could be added along with the other standard buy-in options as well.

3. Poker Stars and other rooms have their buy-ins for $10 + $1 instead of everyone paying $10 and then taking 10% from the pool. The $10 + $1 has a bigger prize pool and most people will assume they are winning more when they pay the fee to the house instead (effectively paying $11 per game instead of $10). There might be a law for that or something but just a thought will how it's currently set up at DD.

4. You can't see the ended games for the games you didn't play. I always liked to see the results for some of the poker tourney's I missed, and I think a lot would like to check and see what kind of prize pools, payouts, and teams won for the games they didn't play. (Like the options poker rooms have for registering, live, and ended)

5. iPhone App to check updates and register for on the go (prob in the works)

6. The "we pay you to beat your friends" tab on the left never gets smaller or goes away and blocked the screen when I had the window minimized. It does the trick to get you to see it but I accidentally clicked it a lot since it was always in the way.

I've had a lot of fun so far and these are just thoughts from one already satisfied user!

Great idea on the free $5 game for bringing friends into draftday to increase your customer base. It doesn't cost very much right now and could be worth a whole lot in the future.

well done and congrats. best of luck moving forward.

Taylor,

Congrats on the success of DD. It's great to see a poker guy make an amazing product outside of the poker industry. I think you were smart to go with a local VC. One of the biggest pluses of working with a VC is getting into their network of talent and soaking up their experience. Kind of hard to do if you are 3k miles away.

Thanks for doing this thread. I have a few questions:

What % of the $1m do you intend on using for marketing?

How hard/easy was it to find a talented tech team?

Did you learn from any mistakes with Cardrunners that helped you down the line with DD? If so, what were they?

What is the estimated market cap of daily fantasy sports?

We're just getting started with advertising (outside of poker circles). We've focused more on a good refer a friend program.

Right now if you send a friend a refer link, we match the two of you heads up for a $5 game. You'll get a $10 deposit bonus if your friend eventually deposits, but it's a really great way for people to casually tell their friends "hey, DraftDay is fun, just sign up with my link and we can play a 1 on 1 game, $5 to the winner."

As far as what we are doing specifically for advertising, we are testing a variety of things right now. We've run a lot of different test runs of $100-$250 and are measuring what's working best. We're trying some offline marketing as well, which I would prefer not to go into the specifics here (sorry, I usually don't do that but this thread is definitely being read by a few of our competitors and if something works I'd like to scale it up before other people find out about it).

1. Unregister is available until ~15 minutes before gametime. The reason it's not available up until gametime is if someone backed out right before the game then the game would cancel as they must be full to start. We could do a better job explaining some of the game types, this is being addressed.

2. Interesting idea. I'll talk to the team about it.

3. We did it that way because we thought casual people would want to play with normal looking buy-ins. I actually believe Stars moved their buyins back to this but can someone confirm? I know you can "stretch" people a little more if you bump them up, it's always something we could do.

4. Good idea. Probably not something we can do soon, but something we should do.

5. In the works

6. heh, that's the point. We go back and forth on that. For now, I think we are going to keep it kind of annoying because we really want people to check it out and it's a relatively new feature (less than 1 month).

Thanks for the comments and for playing at DD!

Quick question -- did you see our $25k, $10 buy-in baseball game? It's pinned in the lobby and there is a blog post about it (did you even know there was a blog?) but it's not really "promoted" that well and I'm worried people who are new to the site miss stuff like that.

% on marketing - We closed the deal at the end of last year, we just didn't announce it until now. Between then and now, we've mostly focused on product, so a large amount is being spent on our product. In the end, I'd guess about 25-30% on marketing.

tech team - Everyone says it's hard, but I feel like we've always been able to do okay (by we I mean CR and HEM). I'm not the one doing much of the recruiting for tech positions. I will step in if the person is a poker player but mostly our CTO does that. I think the biggest key is that we have always had interest work and offer a really good work environment. You're working for 2 founders that are in their mid/late 20's, are laid back, and aren't going to hassle you if you're doing a good job. We offer competitive salary, perks like free lunch and the ability to work from home if you need it, and a fun office environment. I feel like if you do that, you will find good employees.

mistakes - I have learned so much from CardRunners. I think I did a good job overall but I made more mistakes than I wish I would have.

-I regret not handling some of the "scandals" CardRunners faced better. Most of them looked a lot shadier than they actually were because we were so worried about saying anything that looked bad. The truth was never that bad (for our company or for me personally at least), and I regret not just being super open about everything from day one. I learned that you just need to conduct yourself in a respectable way and then be honest from there. I'm pretty open and direct about everything I do with customers and employees.

-Be careful who you trust.

-Know what things are most important to your bottom line / company and make sure you do them really well. You can't do everything perfectly or even good, but make sure you get the important stuff right.

-Treat people well. People give their business to people they like and respect. I really try to treat other people well. There were times during my time running CR where I just got burned out and I should have taken a break or focused on finding someone to take over my job sooner. I regret not being as approachable as I could have been for some period of time, I am sure we lost some customers over it.

DFS Market Cap - I really don't know. I do know there has been about $10m in venture funding invested into the industry, $7m of which is in the last 12 months.

For #3, It might be a good idea to tinker with that. Right now for example you buy in for $1 and in the double or nothing games you win $1.80. For me, I would rather pay $1.00 + 0.10 to win $2 even. All of the prizes look like that, and I think most causal players look at what the winner gets not at the buyin amount #'s. It becomes an even bigger difference in the $2 and $5+ games, where the winners would get a lot more by adding that 10% to the pool, rather than taking the 10% out of it. I bet you could keep all the numbers even on the main page, i.e. $1, $10, etc, but in the single game lobby you will show $10 + $1 and just have people check off when submitting that they are paying the $10 + $1 for a total of $11. I doubt that would ever be an issue, as it is just a different way to pay the house.

Honestly, as a player it really, really hurts me to say this, but I would move up the $25,000 tourney to around May 5th. This would give you more time to get the causal players you are looking for, while more heavily promoting the big guarantee for $10. I don't think there will be much of a scramble in the next few days to get tons of players to sign up and make it worth while business wise. There may still be a lot of entries because of the guarantee, but it would be from people like me who buy in 10+ times cause of the overlay, and not from a bunch of new players. I may be totally off by the time the big game starts, but as of this writing there are only 47 entries, with only around 20 or so people being different.

I really like the different games options available, and I look forward to seeing some of the different formats you come up with!

Hey sorry for the late reply.

Chicago has a burgeoning startup culture. For more information I'd check out www.builtinchicago.com. The big news is 1871 (12th floor of the Merchandise Mart) - which is just a massive startup workspace/collective - is opening next month. I've actually been working here for a couple of weeks because we got in early, and there's still lots of construction, but they're expecting 100+ startups all working out of the same space together.

Other things of interesting going on:
- Technori does monthly pitches of six of the hottest startups in Chicago
- Healthbox is an incubator for healthtech related companies
- As you noted Excelerate Labs is grooming their next class I believe
- Sandbox is also another hybrid VC/incubator
- There are now a number of tech focused VC funds: Lightbank, I2A, FireStarter, New World Ventures

I'm sure there's more....all of the business schools have thriving communities. Booth is huge - running entrepreneurial pitches, incubation or contests nearly every week. I know that DePaul and Loyola are also doing a lot...surprisingly, I see very little coming out of Kellogg but it may be because they're in Evanston.

Hope this helps!

Ezra

The big UK fantasy premier league soccer season long contest (buy players up to a budget) uses prices that move up and down with player performance and or purchase - sales. People seem to understand it fine.

fantasy.premierleague.com I think

The site is well made and easy to use. You guys did a good job. I tried it and it's nothing I would get that into --it felt pretty sharky and I don't have the time to do the research and studying needed to get an edge.

I was curious if you guys are in general worried about future legislation that could change the way the system works? Would the powerful NFL lobby want to eliminate sites like yours? Did these types of discussions come up in the VC talks?