Fantasy Congress
Fantasy sports for politics
Today Fantasy Congress reached $10k for the year which means $10k Annual Recurring Revenue. I'm on track to double what I made last year. At the beginning of the summer, I would have thought this was impossible. I actually stepped away from the project in June because I was getting burnt out. I'm amazed at how much it grew with out me this year. This explosive growth has re-energized me and hopefully I can double or even triple revenue in the next year.
Experimenting with pricing has been on my todo list for Fantasy Congress for some time. As I'm planning for a big promotional push in the beginning of the year, I decided now is a good time to set up some different options to compare against. I also want to introduce the ability for players to purchase one game, or league, at a time instead of a subscription. This is something that is regularly requested from folks. Instead of trying to take on too many changes at once, I decided to introduce the smallest change first, which is annual billing. I also spruced up the pricing page quite a bit: https://fantasycongress.com/get-started/
Still a few days to go in September, but I'm excited to hit this milestone: Fantasy Congress has made over $1k this month! I still have a lot to figure out before this becomes $1k MRR, but I feel like I'm getting there. Will share more details in my September retrospective.
Since I launched Fantasy Congress in February, revenue has hovered around ~$300 MRR. Which is nice, but barely covers the site's expenses. I've spent this summer working on a new offering that I hoped would bump that number up a notch: annual subscriptions for educators. This offering launched in July and already I've seen a 127% increase in revenue!
July Highlights
- $760 total revenue
- 6 new free trials
- 4 educator sign ups
- Estimated profit: ~$460
As the fall semester approaches, I'm hoping revenue from educators will continue to increase. You can read more details on my plan for this in my July retrospective. But for now, I'm celebrating this small but meaningful win!
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This is so cool! Congrats on the progress.
Well-written, retrospective on the blog, btw.
Sounds like it's implied that the site's costs are about $300/mo? I'm curious, if you're open to sharing, what the breakdown of those expenses is?
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Thank you! Costs are around $250/mo I believe. Though it's been awhile since I went through and counted everything up. It's mostly small stuff that ads up like AWS, Heroku, Sendgrid, gsuite. And then there are some yearly things like the corporate annual report ($325) and my accountant who does my taxes. I factor the yearly stuff into the monthly costs.
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Ah, that make sense. I haven't read all your blog posts, so I don't know all the context and was wondering if the AWS free tier might help reduce costs. Seems like the assortment of services needed kind of makes where things stand pretty close to the minimal cost. Small stuff definitely adds up!
On the upside, I'm also imagining the costs won't increase much for a while, so hopefully your August goals go well and you see some more profit! 🤞
I'm looking forward to following your journey! Creative and impressive work thus far!
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Congratulations, this is a huge achievement!
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Aw thank you 😊
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This is awesome
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Congrats! As the spouse of a teacher, I feel like it's gotta be hard targeting teachers since they have so little discretionary income. How are you overcoming that problem? Or am I wrong on that assumption?
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You know, through this experience I've learned that there actually is quite a lot of money in education, but it is not evenly distributed. Of course I'm specifically talking about the US, where schools are funded by property taxes. The balance I've tried to strike is offering some piece of the product for free (I have instructions on the website on how to play for free using data I make publicly available). So if someone lands on the site and belongs to the 80-90% of schools that don't have a budget for this, they can still get something out of it and don't get their hopes up for nothing. So far it's working and in general people are understanding.
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Ah, super interesting. Makes so much sense as soon as you say it.
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Very neat idea to tailor to educators! I would hope that that users could be counted on for new feature ideas and for sales ideas (e.g. how to help educators sell this product 'up' to principals/administrators).
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Oh yes, the teachers are really great about giving feedback. They're a pretty supportive audience.
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This is an awesome idea! The educator angle is great and I bet is going to be a big source of revenue for you. You also have a cool roadmap if you started knocking off fantasy sports features (like daily fantasy betting -- granted betting takes this in an entirely different direction)
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Yeah there's so many ideas I have for where I could take it. But so little time!
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Congrats! This is excited.
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Congratulations!!
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Thanks 😊
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congratulations.
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Ty :)
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So glad to hear this, great work!
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Thanks!
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well done, good job.
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Thank you!
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congrats! The game looks very topical! kind of like hidden agenda x hollywood stock exchange... ? so educators are using it to educate students about government?
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Yep!
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This comment was deleted 6 years ago
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Looking to maintain it for now. Trying to reach ramen profitability before I think any farther into the future.
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Fantasy Congress saw an 18% increase in MRR and only one churn in April. This was very strange considering my site traffic is way down. It's clear I need to interview my latest customers to get a better understanding of who they are and how people are finding Fantasy Congress.
By the numbers:
- 23 paying members
- 1 churn
- 137 players
- 25 leagues
- +18% MRR
- $315 total revenue
Full retrospective here:
https://allisonseboldt.com/april-2020/
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Congrats! Digging the monthly updates on your blog. And thanks for the link to https://ahrefs.com/academy/blogging-for-business/ I'm doing content marketing for an app I'm working on, and that looks super helpful.
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thanks! Yeah that course has been the best SEO/content strategy piece I’ve found so far
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Now that Fantasy Congress has revenue, I'm excited to share it and be part of the open start up community. Almost all of the revenue so far has come from my mailing list. But I've noticed an exceptionally low open rate in the past couple of weeks. Wondering how many more sign ups I could have got if I was able to reach closer to half my list! Alas, this will be one of the things I focus on in the coming month.
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Hi 👋🏻 Allison, are you using https://gmail.com/postmaster to track your domain/ip reputation?
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I am not. Never heard of it, thank you!
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You should check if everything is ok in postmaster, I saw the same problem in other startup. When is a new domain you should build a good reputation first. Also if you retarget people that is not interacting with your email more than one time you domain could be automatically marked as spam. Good luck!
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Last week I launched Fantasy Congress and so far I've acquired 13 paying members for a total of $166 in sales. It was a simple, quiet launch and overall I'm content. I didn’t have the time or energy to coordinate something big, so the launch consisted of two emails. The first was sent on Monday to my full list of 1,900 subscribers. Normally I send emails out on Wednesday and see a 40% - 50% open rate. So I was surprised to see my open rate for this past Monday hovered around 20%. To capture any low hanging fruit, I decided to send a second email on Thursday targeting subscribers that had not seen the launch email. This one had an even lower open rate (~10%).
I’m not sure what’s happening to my emails. I’m planning to send another tomorrow to the full list. Perhaps I'm picking the wrong day/times or there’s something bigger at play.
There’s quite a bit of clean up I need to do with the site before tackling the next big challenge: setting up a marketing strategy. I’m dedicating the rest of February to tying up loose ends and hope to focus mostly on marketing in March.
Finally! After a frustratingly slow year, Fantasy Congress 2.0 is live! It's 2am, I'm exhausted, and all my plants have died from neglect, but I couldn't be more proud of what I pulled together in the last few months. Excited to participate in the community more now that I have something launched!
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Wow, the website/frontend looks amazing! Such a beautiful UI and a wonderful UX! What did you use to build this? Did you build it all yourself?
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I built the website with Hugo using a template, which I really love. The app is bootstrap with some vue.js.
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Very cool!
I noticed the app sits in app.fantasycongress.com which is considered another domain.. Won't it be better for SEO if the app sits under the same domain as the landing page?-
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Yes, I hope to move the public facing parts (list of congress) over to the main domain eventually. But the main app requires login, so no need for seo there.
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Sorry to hear about the plants but congratulations on the launch!
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Nice. I shared it.
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Aw thank you!
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Well done Allison. 🙌🏻
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Lol the only one remaining is a succulent so accurate
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Shared it with some friends on Facebook as they are very political people.
So far this is the feedback I got.
It doesn't say how points are earned. If they lean even a little bit to one side it'll fuck anyone who drafts for the other side. Interesting though.
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Hey Josh, thanks for the feedback. I list how all the points are earned on this page: https://fantasycongress.com/rules/ It's under the "points distribution" section, unless they saw that and that wasn't what they were looking for?
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Not sure. I'll share this with them. Thank you!
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Congrats!
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Great job, will def try this!
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Congrats Allison! All the best to you! 🎉 🎉
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What a fun idea! Congratulations on your launch. I've shared this with my political friends :D
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Awesome 😊 thanks!
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This is an interesting idea, I hope it works out for you. I'm really happy for you, not many people are able to move their idea from conception to launch, so congrats!
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Thanks! So true. I’ve learned so much about execution doing this.
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Fantastic. You should feel really proud of your efforts and find a suitable way to celebrate :-)
Fantasy Congress looks like a really innovative idea, and I hope it gets a lot of interest.
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Thanks! I think I’m going to celebrate by sleeping in all week lol
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This sounds brilliant! Congratulations on your launch 🎉
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Congrats man! Nothing like shipping product!
Code Hard, Ship Harder 🔥
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This comment was deleted 4 years ago
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It’s a static site generator built on Go: https://gohugo.io/
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This comment was deleted 6 years ago
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This comment was deleted 6 years ago
I wanted to avoid mistakes and get lots of feedback before launching. Throughout 2019 I shared what I was developing with my audience and collected plenty of feedback. Was planning on doing a beta before the official launch but I have a year's worth of feedback so, why wait? Fantasy Congress 2.0 comin at ya in February.
During my second customer interview for Fantasy Congress, we discussed a big upcoming conference that the customer was attending (national social studies educator conference). She will be hosting a discussion at the conference and brought up the idea of passing out Fantasy Congress freebies or materials to the attendees. Unclear if Fantasy Congress will be part of her discussion, but she is very supportive of the project and using it in her classes this semester.
I'm going to send her a bunch of stickers. Stickers are great right? They don't have the full website url (they just say "Fantasy Congress"), so I'd like to attach them to some little cards that have the url and social handles. Time to get a crafty.
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