6 Months Into Building XP Fantasy
Our beginning
At 20 years old, I co-founded my first business. XP Fantasy combined two of my favourite hobbies — fantasy sports and video games — and brought them together in a daily fantasy esports website.
Fantasy sports are a way for sports fans to enhance their watching experience by entering contests with the goal of creating the best roster of professional players to win prizes. As a life-long basketball fan, I’ve spent countless hours analyzing NBA players and trying to draft the best fantasy lineup possible to compete against my friends. As my recent fantasy basketball performances left much to be desired, I decided it was time for me to move on and try a different fantasy sport.
When researching different fantasy sports to play, I quickly came to realize that the competitive fantasy experience I loved so much was relatively nonexistent in the professional esports world. There seemed to be an unmet need in the market for an esports fantasy platform. To validate whether this was actually something people would be interested in, I reached out to my then roommate (now co-founder), who also happened to be the biggest League of Legends fan I knew — Arjun. Ranked in the top 2 percentile of players worldwide, Arjun knew the competitive esports space well and immediately validated my suspicion — that esports fans would actually be interested in a fantasy platform.
After conducting 60+ user interviews, we further validated our hypothesis and learned a few other things in the process — but we’ll save those learnings for another blog post. Using these learnings, we created XP Fantasy — an affordable daily fantasy esports website where users can build fantasy rosters and win real prizes.
The opportunity
In 2019, there were 450M+ esports fans worldwide, with 200M+ that considered themselves as being “esports enthusiasts” (people who watch esports competitions more than once a month), over casual viewers. By 2022, the number of esports enthusiasts is expected to increase to 300M, with a total global esports audience of nearly 650 million.
Surprisingly, although North America only holds 12% of the global esports audience, esports is already the second most viewed sport in the United States (second only to American football — go Chiefs go!) In fact, the League of Legends World Championship now rivals the NFL Super Bowl in views with around 100M views each year.
The traditional fantasy sports market (for sports like basketball, football, etc.), has already proven to be extremely successful — with an estimated total market value of nearly $20B. While the fantasy esports market is becoming more prominent, we still find that no other platform uniquely caters to the average esports fan. Instead, these platforms are trying to implement the same strategies used by traditional daily fantasy sports sites and in doing so, are trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.
Where we are today
We are hoping to officially launch XP Fantasy very soon! Our first official fantasy tournament is being held at the start of the 2021 League of Legends Championship Series (LCS) season where we will be connecting esports fans of various collegiate schools across Ontario, Canada to compete against one another.
Our journey has just started and we are super excited to continue to grow and document every step of the way. Check us out at https://xpfantasy.com/ and join our discord https://discord.gg/GdRejmbcEE to learn the latest about what we’re up to!
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The most valuable thing I’ve learned so far is that any good idea is worthless without impeccable execution and the commitment to reiterate.
