Sport Draftr

Will had spent 8 years in product marketing roles in London, specializing in customer journey optimization. His co-founder, a friend he met in Thailand, had been exposed to the US Daily Fantasy Sports model (FanDuel, DraftKings) while living in the US. They spotted an opportunity: the UK had a huge gambling industry and massive football passion, but no native DFS platform. The existing Fantasy Premier League had a major flaw—if you missed a week or fell behind, the game became pointless. They believed they could fix this with a weekly-reset model that gave every player a chance to win.

The founding team moved fast. Will created wireframes, they hired 99designs for the initial site design, and his co-founder—who had a finance background—handled the coding. Rather than pay lawyers £10-15k per license application, they wrote their own KYC and compliance policies, drawing on the co-founder's financial experience. The whole process from agreement in February to launch at the end of August took 6-7 months. The co-founder worked asynchronously from the US, sending code for Will to review and provide feedback on, creating an efficient remote workflow. When it went live, it worked beautifully—players could watch their scores update in real-time as games unfolded.

They had built an email list before launch and pushed the product to that list, plus their personal networks. Traction came surprisingly fast: main games filled within 15 minutes of posting, meaning engaged users were setting lineups and watching scores throughout the week. They grew to approximately 1,000 users, with about 50% playing weekly across different games.

Facebook Ads proved highly effective. They created blog posts analyzing player performance and a "Power Ranking" system showing which players would score best that weekend based on individual form, team performance, and opposition. Player comparison posts (e.g., "Liverpool vs Man City: Will Salah or De Bruyne score more?") performed well on social. Forums provided good organic growth, and the football community was passionate and engaged. However, marketing revealed their biggest challenge: they didn't understand the gambling industry, and the gambling industry didn't understand DFS. Affiliate and partner networks tried to charge them £60-200 per acquisition—but their projected lifetime value was only £50. Without investment to subsidize customer acquisition, growth stalled. Revenue peaked at just under £30 average monthly spend per user, totaling less than £1,000 in revenue (£6-7,000 in entry fees after their 15% rake).

In March 2020, they failed to close an investment round. The timing was brutal: US legislation was cracking down on DFS, and FanDuel and DraftKings faced bans in multiple states. Investors saw the UK market evaporating and worried DraftKings would enter the UK to compete. Will and his co-founder shut down the site, surrendered their gambling licenses, and moved on. Will lost approximately £45,000 and a year of time. He now specializes in customer journey marketing and conversion optimization, while his co-founder became a CTO at other startups.