Fantasy Congress

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!

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/

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.

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.

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.