With the onset of another NFL season, daily fantasy giant DraftKings is poised to be even more dominant than it was a year ago. That, from a purely analytical perspective, is staggeringly impressive. In the 2014 NFL season, DraftKings surged to national relevance with its “Millionaire Maker” challenges, enabling people like Dave and Rob Gomes of the North End (you’ve seen them in the commercials) to win a million dollars thanks to a single fantasy lineup.
DraftKings harnessed its NFL success to propel the Boston-based startup into further fantasy competitions in other sports, as well as additional expansion in its existing initiatives (baseball especially). That said, the return of football means the company’s most popular sport is back.
And since the end of last season, DrafKings has been busily preparing, aiming to introduce newer (bigger) prizes and competitions.
With that in mind, BostInno recently caught up with DraftKings co-founder and chief revenue officer, Matt Kalish, to talk about the changes from 2014 to 2015 as well as several other football-related topics.
From a DraftKings perspective, how different is it in NFL preseason this year compared to even last year from an attention standpoint? DraftKings clearly has a wider reach heading into football in 2015 than it did in 2014.
Matt Kalish: This year has seen incredible growth for us and Daily Fantasy Sports as an Industry. DFS is now a part of mainstream sports culture, and the DraftKings brand has become ubiquitous with sports. It is an exciting time for us as a company, but we remain focused on ensuring our product and user experience is best in class. We continue to optimize the user experience on mobile and desktop, and scaled up our platform massively. We now host more and bigger contests than anyone else in the space by at least 25% especially leading into football. We’ve signed transformational deals with the two largest sports media companies in the country, ESPN and FOX, to line up a tremendous amount of new content that you will see rolling out and are excited about our league and team sponsorships many of which now include venue deals with a new way for fans to interact with our product and our brand.
What new features is DraftKings adding to its NFL component this season that you want users to know about?
MK: Our team has done a tremendous amount of work on our platform and user experience this year to improve the usability and enjoyment fans have on DraftKings, and to create new levels of participation. For example, we have completely overhauled our mobile platform and added features to provide the best mobile experience in all of fantasy sports.
We have teamed up with ESPN to award the ESPN Fantasy Football League Manager player who secures the highest number of fantasy points in the DraftKings Week 1 Millionaire Maker contest an additional $1 million to split between all members of his or her season-long 2015 ESPN Fantasy Football League Manager league(s).
We continue to grow our content on Playbook.DraftKings.com. We have added several new contributors who are some of the industry’s best DFS analysts and will bring great insight into the daily fantasy football strategy. Our goal is to entertain and educate players by providing research tools, interesting breakdowns, video tutorials, and other confidence-builders heading into drafts daily.
What type of feedback did you hear from users about last season that you’ve tried to implement for this year?
MK: The biggest areas of feedback last year were growing prize pools, increasing our mobile feature set, improving our content production, and offering lightning-fast performance in terms of contest scoring and real-time statistics.
All of these areas were priorities for DraftKings leading up to this season. We have the largest contest in fantasy sports history in the NFL’s Week One, with the $10 Million Guaranteed Millionaire Maker. Our mobile platform is now the best second screen experience in sports. We’ve scaled up talent and content, both in terms of bulk and quality. And, we optimized our infrastructure over the past year to be extremely fast and responsive, even with a large scale of users.
DraftKings partnered with the Patriots just in time for a Super Bowl run last season. What has it been like working with the Krafts and their organization?
MK: The Kraft Family has been a tremendous supporter of DraftKings, and the entire Patriots organization is truly one of the most well-run, well-managed companies in any business I have ever seen. The results of that organization across all dimensions speaks for itself. We couldn’t be more honored to be able to call the Kraft family and the New England Patriots Organization our partners.
What are you most excited about for this upcoming NFL season?
MK: Our main goal with DraftKings has been to deliver sports fans the best entertainment platform in the world as we forever change the way fans experience sports. We have an amazingly talented team at DraftKings that is pumped and ready to deliver on that promise to players everywhere. This football season will be a coming out party of sorts for DraftKings, where we will truly deliver on our goals in a big way. I’m most excited to be a part of such a dynamic company and see our mission come to life!
Image via DraftKings
