Company: Footballguys.com
Founders: Joe Bryant and David Dodds
Launched: 2000
Full time: 2002

Come on, this fantasy football stuff ain’t rocket science. Or is it?

Well, if it is, then David Dodds certainly has an advantage over most of the rest of us. Before he and Joe Bryant became the “Footballguys,” Dodds was the supervisor of standard and Tomahawk missile operations at Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station. Maybe that’s what’s making this whole fantasy thing work for him.

Dodds originally created MrFootball.com on America Online back at the end of the 1980s, before most of us had ever even heard of the Internet. He eventually sold that site to Fanball, which helped him to pursue the next venture.

“I used some of the proceeds to get smarter on databases and began to envision an even better site than I’d just sold,” Dodds says. “I knew I had to work a lot smarter, not harder.”

Dodds says he met Bryant at a fantasy football convention and “convinced” his new potential partner that they could put together a successful fantasy football site.

In 2000, the two each put forth $5,000 of their own money and launched Cheatsheets.net, which provided free content for fantasy football users. In 2001, the site took on the name by which it is currently known, Footballguys.com, and continued to offer free content.

Pretty soon, though, Bryant and Dodds realized that the free-site avenue was limiting what they could accomplish.
“The Internet bubble made advertising deals very hard to come by in the first years of Footballguys.com,” Dodds says.

So, in 2002, the site began to offer much more of its content and features to paid subscribers only. Not coincidentally, this also marked the time at which Dodds was able to put down his missiles and take to the fantasy gridiron full time. (Bryant, on the other hand, says he continues to run a boat-building business as well as a barbecue joint called Black Eyed Joe’s.)

“Our goal was not necessarily to become a subscriber site, but we opted to go down that path because we had things we wanted to do and felt like we were losing ground to sites that had more revenue,” Dodds says.

For those who choose to subscribe — which currently costs $26.95 for a season or $60.95 for three years — the tools that Bryant and Dodds have been able to develop after treading the pay path include Draft Dominator, Projections Dominator, Lineup Dominator, Trade Dominator, Data Dominator, Game Log Dominator and VBD (value-based draft) Application. Subscribers also gain access to some 90 features weekly throughout football season, according to Dodds, as well as extensive training-camp updates and other off-season information.

Of course, there remains some free available content as well. Users who wish not to subscribe can still access the podcast “The Audible,” which Dodds says ranked as the 17th most popular among more than 400,000 on iTunes last year, and the online show “Five-Minute Drill” is being distributed for its second season by On Networks. Anyone can also browse the forums or sign up to get the site’s daily fantasy news e-mail.

Make no mistake, though, the core of Footballguys.com is the list of offerings for paying subscribers. Although it might seem that life could get tough for a fantasy site dominated by pay content, what with the proliferation of free sources around the Web, Dodds says there’s no need to worry about his site.

“We have grown subscribers and revenue every single year we have been in existence,” he says. “Sites like ESPN that promote fantasy football actually help us a great deal. Until these major media sites have people that will work around the clock to make sure their subscribers have the best information, articles, stats, tools, etc., we do not see them replacing us with their offerings. The information on these sites has improved, but they are still very far behind us in terms of content provided for fantasy football.”

Tags: cheatsheets, david dodds, fantasy football, fantasy sports, fantasy sports business, fantasy sports industry, football guys, footballguys.com, joe bryant, mrfootball.com

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 24th, 2008 at 11:44 pm and is filed under Business Profile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.