Business Profile: TheFantasyFootballTimes.com
Company: TheFantasyFootballTimes.com
Site: www.thefantasyfootballtimes.com
Founder and CEO: Greg Bebezas
Lauched: 2003
Full time: 2003
What do you do if you’ve been playing fantasy football for about a decade and you feel like punishing yourself with a startup business? If you’re Greg Bebezas, you jump on the Web and launch a fantasy-content site.
“I had been involved in fantasy football as a consumer since 1992, so seeing the continued growth of the fantasy sports industry over the years, I decided that the time was right for me to get involved on the business end,” Bebezas says. “I had always wanted to go into business for myself and this was the perfect opportunity for me to finally do so.”
Bebezas made the most of his involvement in an entrepreneurial business program at the time and developed a plan for what soon became TheFantasyFootballTimes.com. He says that his desire was to provide strong fantasy football content and present it as cleanly as preseason magazines, which he says other sites at the time were failing to do.
Bebezas threw mostly his own funds — along with some private-investment capital — behind the venture and launched in 2003. He concedes that his background as an architect didn’t do much to prepare him for entry into the fantasy sports industry or the business of running a website, and there were some early struggles. He calls his chief technology officer, Chris Jewer, “instrumental” in delivering the company to its current state.
“Web-based businesses can’t be successful without a concerted effort from both the business and technical sides, and we’re constantly working together to grow and adapt the company,” Bebezas says.
The latest outgrowth is “My FF Times,” a social network that’s debuting for this season and is free to join. The point of the network is to create a community of fantasy football players who can view each other’s rosters and offer suggestions on things such as trades and player pickups. Just like with major social networks, participants in My FF Times can add other users as friends, or in this case “teammates.”
Although such roster recommendations and peer advice have long been occurring via message boards and forums, Bebezas believes My FF Times makes it easier for people to connect and share information. The community, for instance, allows users to enter multiple lineups, so that all of their players can be visible at all times (rather than the often-problematic and tedious method of copying and pasting your roster into a message-board post).
“The driving force behind providing an environment like this is that we know there are a lot of knowledgeable fantasy players out there that can help each other win,” Bebezas says.
In addition, TheFantasyFootballTimes.com continues to provide its annual online draft guide (cost: $9.95), which has twice earned a spot as a finalist for a Fantasy Sports Trade Association award. The site also offers “No Huddle News,” a feature added in 2007 that funnels football content from various other sites through the Fantasy Football Times homepage. Bebezas says this quickly became the most popular destination on the site.
“This has all been part of an ongoing effort to give our users a combination of free and premium tools and resources that help them find the necessary info and expert content they’re looking for without spending hours on end,” Bebezas says. “From the beginning, I’ve felt that building a brand, a good reputation, and gaining credibility within the market was of great importance for a content provider like us.”
Business partners of TheFantasyFootballTimes.com include Mock Draft Central, Jostens and SportsBuff.com, which is owned by the same company that owns this site (and for which I also write).
Tags: draft guide, fantasy football, fantasy football times, fantasy sports, fantasy sports business, fantasy sports industry, fantasy sports trade association, ff times, fsta, greg bebezas, jostens, mock draft central, my ff times, social network, sportsbuff.com, thefantasyfootballtimes.com
