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Interview with the founders of Daily Joust

Posted on April 25th, 2012 09:31 AM

How did the idea for Daily Joust come about? Walk me through the thought process of creating a DFS juggernaut.

In late 2010 we looked at the DFS space and thought it was a terrific opportunity to provide a higher quality daily or weekly fantasy game with truly accurate salaries that are updated daily – along with a more informative player selection process for building a fantasy team. We spent several months putting together the site, designing the games and building our team before launching with MLB baseball a year ago. We are based in Palo Alto which is in the heart of the Silicon Valley culture of innovation – so we could build a nice team of engineers. One of the key criteria for all our employees is that they play a lot of fantasy sports and love the idea of helping us build a loyal community by following suggestions that come from our users who we call “jousters”. This has allowed us to introduce by far the widest variety of contests of any DFS site including Solo Contests and two different types of Survivor Tournaments.

We came up with the name Daily Joust to capture both the mano-a-mano competitive challenge and the daily nature of the contests. Some of the other early name ideas were betsportsnow, dailysportsdraft, dailysportschallenge, etc - but we wanted a name like Daily Joust that was a bit more “gold and glory” and memorable with fun images and names. One of our early engineers also happens to practice real jousting and sword skills with an actual full suit of armor at the occasional Renaissance Faire.

What were some of the challenges you faced creating the site? Would you do anything different?

It’s a 24x7 work requirement - no days off! The challenge is to build something that is very reliable and automated to minimize the need for constant manual intervention. DJ has had better than 99.99% uptime availability while we have at the same time introduced 6 new sports in less than a year while getting rave reviews for our responsive customer service from users. Not that we never have glitches, but our tech team is excellent. We have had to regularly upgrade the capacity of the site, and recently completed a huge increase in capacity to deal with the massive surge in new users and traffic on the site in the last couple months.

The other challenge is that users have always had many choices - when we started there were 8 or more DFS sites - and today there are still 8 or more DFS sites but just within a year some have dropped off and some new ones have launched. It’s a tough business.

What we would have done different is to start perhaps a year earlier!

Can you explain how your previous experiences (Mr. Brook creating game concepts and bringing them to the marketplace, Mr. Matthys helping start-up companies flourish) meshed in making Daily Joust?

Michael Brook has a long history making sports games, and was the original designer and producer for some of EA Sports biggest games such as Madden Football and NHL Hockey. Michael then decided to start his own game development company called Spectacular Games which built and licensed games for Sega, EA, ESPN and others.

Michael Matthys has been involved in multiple new start-up companies in different marketspaces and different technologies where he built the businesses and teams from a standing start to 10s of millions in annual revenues. We have not gotten there yet with Daily Joust, but the DFS market is growing fast.

What have been some of the highlights at Daily Joust? How will you build on and eventually top those moments?

The first time we launched MLB Baseball was a lot of fun - and it helped us learn a lot very quickly about what users care about.

For us the coolest thing is when a user suggests a new idea and we make some software changes and give it a go. Users know we actually respond to them and they really get into giving us a lot of ideas and suggestions - and one of the most rewarding things is watching the community develop, interacting with customers and evolving the site with our users. We have had users invent a new contest format which we introduced and named after the user, users who pushed us to run a charity tournament for Toys For Tots which was a really nice experience to see so many jousters get into helping to promote this event with proceeds going to the charity. Other users have pushed us to make changes to prize structures and we find that the more we listen and respond to users the better the overall site experience for everybody.

Tell me more about Daily Joust "Crusaders." Is this sort of "word of mouth" advertising especially effective in the age of social media?

Yes word of mouth is great - a very high percentage of our new users come from existing users. We do use Twitter and FB to help get the message out. We also pay the highest friend referral bonus in the industry - $20 each for both the existing and new user! Crusaders are those users who are often commissioners or have been deeply involved with one or multiple fantasy leagues and they can get compensated for introducing their friends to daily fantasy contests and private leagues.

We also rely heavily on our users to give us great ideas and feedback for new contests, new promotions and ways to make the site experience better.

What differentiates Daily Joust from other DFS sites?

1. DJ has the most accurate salaries in the industry – we update them daily using our proprietary algorithms and latest information each day. This ensures the contests are fun and challenging – and also minimizes the issue of having duplicate players with your opponents. It’s not a good challenge if everybody can pick a nearly all-star line-up without too much trouble.

2. Easy access to information about players as you build teams including injury updates, news highlights, player stats, opponent stats, weather, games played out of last 10, etc etc. For example, in our baseball contests when you are looking at players you can just hover the cursor over their opponent pitcher to see the historical batting average against that day’s pitcher. We even let you check which players were most popular with other jousters the day before.

3. Wide variety of unique contest types and $-levels. DJ is the only site with Solo contests where the user can win by simply hitting a target score. This is excellent for newbies who can play cash contests without worrying that their opponent is a shark - and it is also excellent for experienced users who see it as an extra source of action in addition to all the heads-up and leagues and tournaments. DJ is also the only site with Survivor Tournaments in multiple sports running every week. We have Solo Survivor Tournaments - where you survive each day by winning at least one Solo Contest and we also have King Richard 50/50 Survivor Tournaments where the top-half of users survive each day until there is one winner.

4. Real-time scoring for all sports including NHL hockey, college basketball, et al. No other site has equaled our real-time scoring - especially in hockey with real-time plus/minus, and no other site was able to include nearly as many college basketball games in the fantasy contests. DJ was also the first DFS site to launch college football last fall - a testament to our innovation culture of not waiting for other DFS sites to go first.

5. Loyalty program. DJ also runs a popular badge system which provides recognition of user victories and also a valuable loyalty reward system. We offer a variety of free-entry Badge Tournaments that our users qualify to enter with their badges. Some of the badges are pretty fun - every time you beat a top 10 user you get a badge. We also have a Bad Beat badge for the highest score that did not win!

6. DJ also offers the SuperJoust contest at the end of each major sport season. We just completed our $10,000 NBA superjoust which was won by a user named chainsaul. Next up is our $15,000 MLB SuperJoust which also includes two tickets to the World Series for the winner! We make sure that all jousters have a chance to be included in these big free-entry tournaments by allowing the high-score of the week to earn a seat, as well as many jousters who have earned enough badges, plus the winners of our weekly tournaments.

7. Users consistently comment that they really like the chat which they self-enforce to be focused on fantasy sports and related stories and comments.

8. You can easily find lots of user comments on various sites where they consistently mark DJ as having the most responsive customer service in DFS - as you can tell by our emphasis on responding to user community when we think of new innovations and changes to introduce.

What are some of the challenges facing DFS' growth? How big do you think DFS can get?

DFS has only just started and is not yet hardly even on the radar screen of the broader $4B fantasy market with its 30 million active users in North America. We estimate there may be fewer than 100K users who have tried daily fantasy. We believe that DFS is inherently more exciting and has ability to attract a very large share of that overall fantasy market. The perception that DFS lives in a legal grey zone have largely been resolved and as more states move to legalize other forms of online cash contests this PR perception will become more positive for DFS.

Where do you see DFS headed in the near future? What's the next frontier or innovation for DFS?

We expect DFS sites will support more sports and better mobile-phone access. We have a number of new innovations that will be announced as we launch them.

Can you share some of your favorite DFS experiences?

It was quite a thrill to see one user db730 win more than $10,000 in our first NFL SuperJoust last year – and recently another well-known user chainsaul won more than $3750 in our recent NBA SuperJoust. This is very nice because both these users do a variety of things to help grow the DFS industry. Many of our best moments have been at the end of a long day when we get really nice comments from users on various other third-party sites complementing our team for excellent customer service.