Edge Up Sports CEO and Head Coach Ilya Tabakh wants to make a better fantasy football experience. With more than 117 million NFL fans, why shouldn’t more people be playing fantasy football?
After more than 10 years of playing fantasy football and wasting 2-8 hours a week doing research for his team, Tabakh thought there had to be a better way to deliver the information the people needed. He joined forces with friends and talented coders to tackle a big problem.
Tabakh sought to organize and make digestible information to create better informed decisions for fantasy football players. Wanting to utilize social informatio, rather than the typical statisticians numbers alone, they teamed up with IBM Watson technology to build a competitive UX architecture that focused on the experience and rich visual presentations.
With months of planning and building behind them, they launched a successful Kickstarter campaign to give the power back to the people. More than 50% funded within the first 24 hours of the campaign start, and now fully funded with 14 days still remaining, SPN decided to uncover what made this such a successful campaign.
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Collaboration
Since Kickstarter launched in 2009, 9.3 million people have pledged more than 1.9 billion dollars, funding 91,000 creative projects, according to Kickstarter. Tabakh had never previously organized a Kickstarter campaign so he leaned on the Kansas City startup community for some insight.
“The Kansas City startup community is pretty rich and diverse,” Tabakh said. “So I reached out to a couple of colleagues of mine who had [run successful campaigns] and really talked to them about what their experiences were and what they would have done differently. A lot of folks had some really great insight we wouldn’t have otherwise had.”
Preparation
With the collaborative insight from the Kansas City startup community, Edge Up Sports could be better prepare. Sitting down about 6-weeks in advance, they put together a plan for their launch. They thought through a reasonable timeline, sought out any advances they could make in the app prior to launch and worked to put all the parts and pieces together to communicate their goals clearly.
Involving the community
“The biggest thing that was helpful, as far as advice,” Tabakh said, “was to make us remember not to lose focus on the most important thing. We had to involve the community in the company. Communicate what we are working on. Get feedback. Put people in the process. Ultimately, we are all about designing awesome experiences. Getting feedback and using that as a way to improve became second nature.”
The day they launched the campaign, instead of staying at home or in the office, they went out into the community. They set up their campaign launch in their favorite local coffee shop and let everyone know they could come down and chat with the team. They encouraged questions and direct feedback in person. It was this hangout for the afternoon that seemed to be the secret to jumpstarting their success.
Constant communication
Tabakh knows the fantasy football community would have a lot of questions. So they are prepared to take those on. They are constantly staying on top of communication with backers, as their founding user team is of the utmost importance to them. They continually answer questions, as well as listen to and and engage users via social media and email.
Their team even built in an option for backers that would allow them access to the Edge Up Sports team throughout the first season of play. Direct access to Edge Up Sports gives backers the opportunity of participate in the build and be integral to the platform’s growth process.
“We were excited about the possibility of getting that done, but it was really cool to actually see that come together and have people be excited about wanting to enhance it [the platform],” Tabakh said.
Exclusivity
Though the Edge Up Sports platform will eventually be available in both the Android and Apple App store , they are exclusively releasing access to Kickstarter backers for the beginning of this football season.
The right timing
Successfully launching their Kickstarter campaign during pre-season football was nothing but an accident.
“Upon the close of the campaign we will open up the platform for the season. We have had a lot of questions if people can use this for the draft, however, we have been focused on delivering the best product possible for the beginning of the season,” Tabakh said.
Setting Stretch Goals
Surpassing their original Kickstarter goal allowed the Edge Up Sports team to reassess their goals for this season.
“After jumping around and throwing some footballs, we talked about what are some of the other things on the roadmap we would like to push towards during the course of this season. The thing that floated to the top of that list was video smack talking. Enabling folks to share the best smack talk with their friends. In order to do that we have set a stretch goal of $65,000 dollars,” Tabakh said.
To see their campaign and learn more about how they set up a successful campaign, head over to Edge Up Sport’s Kickstarter page for more information.
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Abagail Pumphrey is the founder of ThinkCreativeKC.com, an online resource that shares ideas to excite, empower and motivate small business owners.
