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Sleeperbot — Fantasy football leagues that don’t suck
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Eric Friedman
Hunter
Hello Product Hunt!
I’m really excited to hunt Sleeperbot with you today. Sleeperbot is a messenger app for sports fans, and participating in Expa Labs. The focus is to make the experience of playing traditional season-long leagues with friends more social and fun, by making chat and smack-talk central to the experience.
If you are playing fantasy football this year, I’d highly encourage you to check out Sleeperbot for your league. They have built a cross platform mobile optimized social experience to better enjoy the season with friends.
Feedback and questions welcomed as the founders + team are here today to answer questions!
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I'm mostly convinced! Happy to jump ship from Yahoo. Any chance your team has plans for co-commissionerships? I've got a league where I handle the technology side of things, but another person handles the scoring/trades/sport-specifics — is this something planned or already supported?
@kleinmaetschke Hi Klein, that's a great feature request that I'll bring up to the team. How would the delineation of the tech / sports roles work for you guys so I can better understand how we can implement something like that? The way we currently have the leagues set up is basically a 1 minute setup process with a turbo-tax like on-boarding with a couple default options for team size, scoring settings, etc., to make it easy for more casual commissioners to create a league without having to worry about predetermining hundreds of settings in advance. The leagues will then generate a unique invite link that you can share outwards with friends and it deep links them into your league. All of your leaguemates are brought into the league chat environment, and you can decide how best to further customize scoring/trades/and other specific settings together. In practice you can still be commissioner, and leverage the rest of your league's opinions to edit settings at any time prior to the start of the season. We even have built in polling to make it easier for you to gather opinions on things like draft time, type of scoring, number of roster positions, how trades work etc. All of that can be discussed with your league and decided on (or changed) prior to drafting.
@nan_wang Thanks for the quick reply. I'm not sure you'd need to assign responsibilities. Currently, Yahoo allows for giving an additional user commissioner level permissions. That's really all we'd need. We can deal with splitting responsibilities amongst ourselves.
I totally understand you wanted to streamline the onboarding—and boy, did you! It was great!—this would definitely be an "advanced user" feature. Just need the ability to say "This coach is also a commissioner with me."
@kleinmaetschke Oh I see, yeah we should be able to do that! Thanks for the feedback and recommendation.
Nan congrats! Tell me more about the background and inspiration behind what you've built here.
Congrats on the launch! App looks awesome and love that you support leagues with a small # of teams. Any plans on supporting auction draft in the future? Keep up the great work.
@msingleton Thank you very much Mike! We currently support leagues with anywhere from 6-20 teams. We started by focusing on traditional snake drafts this year, but do plan on offering auction drafts by next season. We wanted to make sure to get the experience right before trying to do too many things at once, since we are still a pretty small team. I hope you give the app a shot this year for your leagues, we're adding features to it every day leading up to the start of the season.
This looks great, congrats on the launch. What differentiates Sleeperbot from other fantasy platforms like EPSN? Never done a fantasy league before but have been thinking about it as a way to get interested in the sport / keep up.
@lankybutmacho Thank you very much Matt! The biggest differentiator is that we are built with a focus on the friend to friend interactions, and making the gameplay more social. What this means specifically is that the chat component (we're a messenger app after all) is front and center of every part of the gaming experience, as opposed to a widget buried into a website. Many of our friends who play in leagues on existing platforms face the same problem as we do - they'll get together to draft one day a year, and then spend the next 3-4 months of the season trying to patch the social experience together through email threads, group text messages threads, and sometimes even social media groups. We saw this as a huge wasted opportunity, since really the primary driver for why people play in these leagues was to hang out with friends and chat about sports in the first place. In addition, there are quite a few other more modern bells and whistles (like a mobile app that isn't just used for checking scores) we have thrown in as well, since there really hasn't been a season long league offering to launch in over 10 years.
Finally we are getting some innovating in the fantasy sports world.
More collaboration = more competition. Love it!
Thanks Eric! Football season is right around the corner, and we are really proud to share what we have been working on with the rest of the Product Hunt community. Sleeperbot was made to be enjoyed with friends. Our live draft experience can be cast to a TV for draft parties, and almost every aspect of our leagues has chat embedded into it, so that it is easier to smack talk and joke around with your friends while playing fantasy sports. After all, most leagues are formed are between friends, family, and coworkers, and serve as a backdrop to talk sports with people you care about. We just wanted to make that experience more social and fun.
Thanks Eric! Appreciate the kind intro.
Hi Product Hunters, I’m Nan, one of the founders of Sleeperbot.
As long-time fantasy sports players, we were frustrated that there hasn’t really been any innovative products addressing traditional leagues in over 10 years. We wanted to build one that didn’t suck, where you could enjoy a comparable experience on both web and mobile, and that emphasized the conversations you have with your friends without forcing you to jump off onto email or text messages.
Hope you guys check it out for your leagues this year, and let us know of any feedback you might have!
I agree that for the past 10 years, there were no innovations in the sphere of esports, and it's cool you decided to come up with something like that. But I think the latest FIFA wasn't bad at all, but that's maybe because I'm a huge fan of football in general, and on Takebet I always check the latest news and upcoming events.
