YC Summer '07 Draftmix launches: Faster Fantasy Sports for Fun or Profit | Hacker News Reader

YC Summer '07 Draftmix launches: Faster Fantasy Sports for Fun or Profit

techcrunch.com

25 pointsdhouston18 comments

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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..

Yes and yes.

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?

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."

congrats matt, chad, john and russ!

Thanks. John is mad you stole his karma :)

Thanks Drew

cheers Drew! =)

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

Great concept, guys, and best of luck!

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

Cool idea, but I think the audience is limited.

Which VCs did these guys land after YC?

Congrats!

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