Fantasy sports giant (which is not a startup anymore) FanDuel has over six million registered users today. It’s a name that’s much revered in the US fantasy sports space. But did you know that FanDuel is originally a Scottish company? FanDuel is now ready to bring its platform to the home soil UK. What did FanDuel do to win these many fantasy players? What new strategy can they adopt in order to be successful in the UK market? Let’s find out.

FanDuel introduced “a new way to play fantasy games”

FanDuel is a startup from Edinburgh that began its voyage from North America. Back in 2009, the founders decided to launch the daily fantasy football. The logic of the idea was that with shorter gamplays, the players would get more opportunities to play and win games on a daily basis. This meant that players wouldn’t have to wait a full year to win but could taste victory on any given day. This brought a major novelty in the fantasy sports space and the strategy resulted in multiplying players year after year.

The company claims to have made sports “more exciting” and increased sports content consumption by 40%. Statistics say that FanDuel players watch more live games since they play fantasy games regularly. Here’s what FanDuel really did:

 / Brought a novelty in the usual drills of fantasy sports games through shorter gameplays
 / Made their platform accessible and compelling
 / Constantly evolved with users in terms of handheld devices, preferences, times of playing  etc

FanDuel won the award for the best sports app on a handheld device as the Judges Selection in The Webby Award 2016. The company is now valued over a billion dollars.

Eyeing casual fantasy sports users

The newest product that’s set to charm users from the FanDuel kitty is called FanDuelMixup, which is slated as a lighter version of DFS designed keeping in mind causal players and beginners. FanDuel has done it by introducing two major differential factors. One, MixUp contests have limited the types of players users can draft for their team (say only the players playing away games that day or only players over 30). Two, the lineup in this platform would comprise only five players as against the nine spot rosters that the company’s usual baseball games have.

As a result, the casual players or beginners wouldn’t need to spend so much time in researching about team and drafting lineups. This discourages serious players from joining so the target audience is automatically segregated. This is a well thought-out strategy in order to keep the fun elements of DFS for the freshly recruiting sports fans who don’t want to spend a long time studying the statistics but want to have instant fun playing fantasy sports. Here’s what FanDuel did:

 / Had a clear audience segregation, introduced features in order to recruit new sports fans
 / Had two clear-cut USPs to distinguish it from other platforms

Multiplying user base is still the focus in the UK market

From both past and present strategies that FanDuel has followed, it’s pretty clear that they still have their eyes focused on multiplying user base. The company definitely has the advantage of homegrounds especially after winning the users of a foreign land. Unlike its American counterparts, the user base in the UK is not a huge fan of baseball. So it’s likely FanDuel would center its attention towards soccer.

Did you have any take-aways in daily fantasy sports from this blog? If you are considering to launch a daily fantasy football platform in the European market, we can give you the best launch possible. Let us know.