Website: www.draftexpress.com

Interview with: Jonathan Givony

How many founders does DraftExpress have and what are their names?

Two, Jonathan Givony and Prerak Shah (who got out fairly quickly)

What are the founders background and qualifications?

We were college students at the time. Just hoop fanatics. Basketball dorks.

What does your website do?

We’re a scouting service that tracks the top players in the world outside of the NBA, and provides comprehensive info and scouting reports on them. Most media outlets talk about teams, we talk about individual players. We mostly deal with NCAA, International, High School, D-League, and also some scattered NBA and Summer League coverage. We do a lot of traveling to all the major scouting events in the US and overseas, and have established a pretty big network of contacts from all over the industry.

When did you launch?

December of 2003.

Has it been easy or difficult to build your community?

That’s all relative I guess. Easy considering that there was obviously a need for a niche site like ours (so things got going pretty fast), but certainly difficult in the fact that we all put an incredible amount of time, money and effort into making our service #1 and by a huge margin.

What types of marketing have you done?

Internet message boards were big for us. Also I partnered up with different sites on the internet to provide NBA draft content for them (like Hoopshype.com for example), and in return they gave us a tremendous amount of exposure. Media outlets picking up our stuff helped a lot, but word of mouth and Google were probably the biggest factors.

Do you have any revenue streams besides advertisement? Who is your ad provider?

Advertising is the main one. Some of us do private consulting work for teams on the side, but that’s not part of DraftExpress. Our ad provider at the moment is Tribal Fusion.

Funding: Self funded, Angel Investment, or Venture Capital?

Self funded.

Are you currently looking for funding?

Not really.

What is your favorite feature on your site?

The fact that every word we’ve written about a player is all tracked in his individual player profile. So for some players, you can track their evolution from the scouting reports we did for them in high school, through their time in college, and then even through the professional ranks.

What type(s) of technology do you use?

We work with an online video service called Synergy Sports Technology, which is a website-accessed, on-demand video scouting service and end-to-end professional solution used by 23 of 30 NBA teams. They have tens of thousands of games (NBA, NCAA, International, much more)–from the past three years– logged according to professional criteria, and presented in a variety of ways, to allow video intake in a matter of seconds. It allows users to watch full games very efficiently: without time-outs, half-time, dead ball situations, free throw attempts or point guard slowly bringing ball up-court, and allows users to watch powerful automated edits to focus on any aspect of a player’s game, such as pick & rolls, post-ups, isolations, spot-ups, offensive rebounds, transitions, and more.

Any bold predictions for sports and technology in the future?

Teams are going to get a lot smarter in the way they work over the next few years. They are currently spending a lot of money working in a not-very efficient manner when it comes to their draft scouting, and I think that they are going to get better and better with the way they work, thanks to the web, very soon.

STN’s Take:

For those of you who are interested in NBA prospects, DraftExpress is a must visit. The fact that these guys travel around the world to scout players shows their dedication. After perusing the site very briefly we can see the top college freshmen and the projected draft positions for next years NBA draft based on the current standings. These rankings are great information. We also like the feature that allows us to track a certain player and get updates when any new news is written about them. Right now OJ Mayo is the most tracked player. A site like this can definitely help project who the fan favorites in the NBA are going to be as long as they succeed and it looks like OJ Mayo can be one of those guys.