Website: www.fantasysportslive.com 
Interview With: Kevin Bonnet
How many founders does Fantasy Sports Live have and what are their names?
Kevin Bonnet, Paul McGuire, Jay, Mike, and Kent.
What are the founders’ backgrounds and qualifications?
I am a Product Manager at a technology company. I have a BSEE and an MBA from Pepperdine. My background experiences in online poker, sports betting, and fantasy sports gave me the opportunity to envision a post UIGEA fantasy sports industry, and develop the unique concept for the website. Paul McGuire is a well-known writer and blogger that covers professional poker. Readers of the Tao of Poker blog and the poker blogging community in general provided the initial seed of users for the website at launch. Jay is an ex-MLB pitcher and initial investor. His connections have been huge in securing our biggest additional investors. Mike is well known sales rep in the action sports industry. Kent aka Joe Speaker, is the spokesman for our website. Kent is a sports addict, accomplished writer, and poker blogger. Our website’s sports humor theme would have been difficult to pull off without Kent’s contributions.
What does your website do?
Our website allows people to profit from their sports knowledge by providing daily, fair fantasy sports contests of skill. Our contests are daily, so you don’t need to carry a rooster, make trades, waive players, make sit/start decisions, or make any type of season long commitment. You simply use your sports knowledge to craft the best possible fantasy team from today’s games and match-ups within the constraints of a salary cap. Our various salary cap draft methods allows for contests to form around the clock, and for the draft to be performed in just minutes at anytime prior to the start of the first game in the contest.
The best thing about our website is that it allows fantasy sports enthusiasts to profit long-term from competing in fantasy sports contests. This was something that is just not possible with traditional fantasy sports offerings. We run our contests every day, and payout over 91% of our entry fees in prizes on average. It is possible to gain a big enough edge, and run enough trials to be profitable long-term at fantasy sports on our website. With traditional season long fantasy contests too much of the entry fees are withheld, and you can only get one trial per year. Even if you win a massive prize one time, you will never know if it was because you got lucky or are truly great with the traditional offerings. FantasySportsLive.com allows you to find out where you stand long-term, and even where you stand today. The playing field is completely leveled everyday.
When did you launch?
June 2007
How do you plan on building your community?
We seeded the website with the poker blogger community, and are using an affiliate marketing model to expand on that.
What types of marketing do you utilize?
Affiliate Marketing, Sponsored Search, SEO, Gorilla Marketing, and Print
Do you have any revenue streams besides advertisement? Who is your ad provider?
We do not have any advertising on FSL. Our site is supported entirely through the fees we charge to enter fantasy contests.
Funding: Self funded, Angel Investment, or Venture Capital?
Self funded with family and friends
Are you looking for more funding?
Not currently, but would listen to the right offer.
What is your favorite feature on your site?>
Ability to enter contests and draft in minutes anytime 24/7 at your own convenience.
What type(s) of technology do you use?
XML for the live stat feed. Basic HTML for the website.
Any bold predictions for sports and technology in the future?
I think there is surge of innovation currently taken place in the fantasy sports industry that will lead to increased overall growth for many years to come. With the legality issues straightened out by the UIGEA, and licensing requirements evaporating away as we speak we are entering into unchartered, but very exciting times. I think those that can innovate and build a community the fastest in this evolving industry can overtake the well-established leaders. The technologies of live scoring updates and improved mobile Internet access combined with compressed fantasy seasons is leading to a sort of revolution. Imagine the sports junkie with no time for traditional fantasy sports. He could be stuck in a line at the post office or something, pull out his iPhone, and enter a contest on our website that starts in minutes and ends later that day. Now that is a reason to multitask.
STN’s Take:
That is one heck of a team Fantasy Sports Live has behind it. We really believe that one website is going to come out on top in the daily fantasy sports for money market and Fantasy Sports Live has a chance. Their site is designed well and they seem to have a solid amount of users. We set up an account and it was easy enough. We signed up for a no-cap contest and picked our team for tomorrow.
We have two suggestions. The first is that we would like to see a live draft option. For a site like this to come out on top, we really think a live draft option is very important. Last month we covered Draft Mix as one of our first featured websites. They had a live draft option but a much smaller community. Our second suggestion would be to involve some type of projection system and fantasy news content in the draft room so a person can quickly check information.
January 28th, 2008 at 7:51 pm
Thanks for trying out the website. Live drafts have always been in the plans for FSL. For them to work properly you need multiplayer contests to form very rapidly (less than 1 hour typically), so that users can register, and then live draft in a reasonable amount of time. We don’t currently have the required traffic to support live drafts, but are getting there rapidly. Sit & Go style multiplayer live drafts rarely run on our competitor’s sites, because people are unwilling to wait all day (or days) for them to fill up and start drafting. We are always working on new draft methods to add to our contest variety, and have several other unique draft methods in the development queue.
We don’t currently offer projections, and other fantasy news on our site because there are so many other great resources on the web for this. We may offer this type of content in the future, but our current main focus is our Fantasy Sports Contests.
January 28th, 2008 at 11:54 pm
I think it’s guerrilla marketing, not gorilla.
January 29th, 2008 at 1:32 am
2 Things:
1. It’s hilarious that they can’t even answer the technology question. They use PHP/Linux. See, I’m their competitor, and I answered it for them.
2. We have more traffic than them. See Alexa.
January 29th, 2008 at 5:09 pm
bobeubanks,
We actually market our products to Gorillas. I Stand by the spelling, lol.
Matt,
Your Alexa rankings are impressive. I think that traffic at sites like ours will be judged more like an online poker site. Traffic is how many contests (Tables) are open, and how many players are entered.
February 5th, 2008 at 4:59 am
@kevin, I wouldn’t say our Alexa rankings are impressive at all yet. Stay tuned though.
December 23rd, 2009 at 1:53 pm
Fast forward almost two years from when the article above was written. Draftmix has closed their doors. FSL keeps chugging along and has grown their user base, but their contests are the same thing every day. I’ve played at FSL and it is a good site, no doubt. My favorite, however, is http://365fantasysports.com. They have a decent sized user base and the site is easy to navigate, but the best thing about it is the variety of their contests. I won’t go into them all here, but let’s just say that you will never get bored of that site. There’s so many different types of contests, each with a wide variety of buy-in levels. Their vig is as fair as any in the small community of daily fantasy sites. (WARNING: UNless you like paying twice as much for your wagers as you should, avoid SNAPDRAFT. Their fees are DOUBLE those of FSL and 365.) Overall, I’d rank 365 as the best daily site, followed by FSL…Fantazzle and Fanduel are tied at a distant 3rd / 4th place.