Cash prize fantasy surfing. My first startup and my first digital product.
This was the first mock I ever built. Skipped right past wireframes.
It took a lot of hard work to get from the first mockup to this.
I pitched over 500 industry peers who voted me 2nd place out of 25 new products.
Four years of manual data entry later, and I had the first digitized database for professional surfing.
Fantasurf
Fantasurf was the start of my career as an entrepreneur, and my first ever digital product. I had no knowledge of web development or building a business when I started in 2010. During the six-year journey to acquisition, I learned business development, digital product management, UI/UX design, legal operations, social media marketing and analytics.
I hit many walls, but with stubborn persistence I was able to acquire the skills needed to bring an idea to life. This has become my passion, and I'm fortunate to have a career doing what I love.
First mockup to first launch
Fantasurf started as a season long, free-to-play game. Getting the first version built took a lot of time. I worked with inexpensive overseas developers because I was broke, but I had to learn basic code in order to fix their frequent mistakes. After a few years and a lot learned, Fantasurf actually went to market.
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But checks weren't exactly piling up in the mail. People were playing, but not nearly enough to support the ad revenue model. This was a hard-learned lesson in financial forecasting and sound economics.
My first pivot
With the emergence of Daily Fantasy Sports (legal cash entry games for prize money), I saw what a profitable revenue model looked like. Fantasurf made the pivot to cash entry and finally started generating inflow.
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I was able to hire freelance designers, engineers, marketers and legal counsel. While I had learned to do these tasks on my own, I now had more time to focus on product decisions. Business was growing slowly, but growing nonetheless. I learned A/B and variable testing, for both product and marketing, and saw improvements come to life.
Surfing data
A big moment in my journey was filling a user demand for researchable statistics and historic competition results for surfers. This wasn't available in any useful capacity at the time, since each surfing contest was archived as an individual PDF file.
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Over the course of four years, I manually entered every Men's and Women's contest scores into a database. I now had a unique value proposition for casual surf fans. While it improved the product for Fantasurf players, another opportunity emerged.
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It was at this point that I founded Surf Stats, a blog for professional surfing statistics, performance history and predictive analysis. To see more about that career fork, click here.
My intent with the blog was to talk about surfing like other major sports, invent new metrics and create a community. But ultimately, I wanted to cross-promote Fantasurf to an extremely primed audience.
The end
While working on a partnership with the World Surf League they ultimately decided to acquire Fantasurf and hire me full time.
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This was the end of Fantasurf, but the start of a new exciting chapter for me. I have fond memories of the entire era; it was the most personal growth I had ever experienced and it changed the trajectory of my life. I reflect on it with pride because there were massive hurdles along the way, and it beat the odds.
Next Chapter: Surf Stats