Early DFS Innovator Returns with Snake-Draft Mobile Game
You might not know Jeremy Levine’s name, but among those who have been around DFS for a while, it’s one of the most respected and trusted. Chances are, if you’re reading this, you’re familiar with Levine’s work.
Levine launched the much-loved daily fantasy site StarStreet in 2012. Before it was acquired by DraftKings in 2014, Levine and his team showed a knack for product and user-focused innovations that have since become industry standards.
“Jeremy and StarStreet were early innovators in a lot of features within the salary cap games that now have become standard within the industry,” said Dan Back, host of the RotoGrinders Daily Fantasy Fix and an early player on StarStreet. “It’s exciting to see him now develop a product with a totally different game platform that nobody else has brought to market.”
That product is DRAFT, a snake-draft DFS platform that appears poised for big growth. But we’ll get to that in a bit, because it’s Levine’s history as much as DRAFT’s variation on DFS that makes his next move one worth watching.
Levine actually started building StarStreet shortly after he graduated college in 2009.
“The initial idea was to create a sports stock market,” Levine said, “where you could buy and sell shares of players with real money and make money based on how they performed.”
If February of 2012 the focus shifted to daily fantasy when StarStreet launched its first DFS game. From there, StarStreet quickly grew into one of the leading sites in the field thanks in large part to a devoted user base.
StarStreet was known both for their product, and their customer care. Along with being the first to offer a full-fledged mobile experience, they pioneered many features and game types that have since become standards in the industry.
They were also the ones who helped the dreams of many daily fantasy players come true when they partnered with Playboy to host live finals at the Playboy Mansion.
“Honestly, the other girls and I all thought it was kind of going to be lame just because of the preconceptions we had about fantasy sports dorks,” Playmate Pilar Lastra told Business Insider in 2013 after the Playboy Fantasy Baseball Championship which paid out $200,000 in prizes at the Playboy Mansion. “It was honestly probably the best party we’ve ever had there. There’s never been a Playboy party like that. There was all this money on the line, but people were playing beer pong games for $1,000 and doing backflips off of the grotto into the pool. It was awesome.”
Now Levine and co-founder, Nicolo Giorgi, who Levine calls “the best engineer in fantasy sports,” plan to bring that excitement and innovation to DRAFT, and the buzz is building.
DRAFT actually launched in 2015 and was on pace to add more than 500,000 users last football season before the industry hit a legal roadbump. After New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced in November that he believed DFS was illegal in New York, Levine and team made the call to hit the pause button on user growth.
Luckily, he had a group of top tier investors and $3.5 million behind him. While legal battles played out in state legislatures across the country, DRAFT was heads down, focused on building the best product for the new market. With football season rapidly approaching, New York passed a bill once again legalizing DFS and it was go time.
As we saw during the leadup to the NFL season’s kickoff, DRAFT has since ramped marketing back up.
“Their marketing’s been everywhere” said Stephen Young, host of the RotoGrinders Morning Grind Podcast, an early StarStreet player, and an avid DRAFT player. “I’m so psyched to have them back. Just like they did at StarStreet, Jeremy and team have built an amazing product that is going to push the whole industry forward.”
Now DRAFT is primed to join the major players in the field, thanks to a platform that differs significantly from the salary cap games that currently dominate the space.
At its core, DRAFT is built on simplicity.
The seed was first planted with StarStreet’s Pick Five game, which Levine said he and his team built in a week, with the goal of creating “a game that someone could play at a sports bar, while taking a piss.”
“Seeing the reaction to that game, we knew we had something,” Levine said. “So we really wanted to take the next step and build out a truly mobile fantasy game”
Snake drafts seemed to fit the bill perfectly, because while salary cap games come with a steep learning curve for most users, the snake-draft format will be familiar to anyone who’s ever played fantasy sports. And the benefits of the format are multi-faceted; not only is it easier to play, it’s also easier to win. Levine says DRAFT has analysis that shows winning on DRAFT is almost three times more likely than winning in salary cap DFS.
Perhaps equally important, it’s just plain fun.
Imagine the ESPN or Yahoo mock draft lobby right before the NFL season where drafts are filling every minutes. That’s what DRAFT is, but the drafts are for a week and with the ability to play for money.
In Week 1, Levine says the average six-person draft filled in under 10 minutes, and even quicker in the hours leading up to kickoff on Thursday and Sunday. The drafts take on average under five minutes, so hop on, do a draft and you’ll be back to what you were doing in under 15 minutes. Or, more likely, you’ll do a draft and then another and another, and within an hour you’ll notice you just did ten drafts. It’s that much fun.
And while DRAFT is polished, if Levine’s history in the industry has taught us anything, it’s not anywhere near done. He hinted that there could be some new game types could be on the way.
“Jeremy Levine builds great products,” said RotoGrinders founder Cal Spears. “StarStreet was a great DFS experience, but he’s taken it to a new level with Draft. He’s perfected the mobile snake draft experience.”
One thing is certain: Players in the know are quite excited about DRAFT.