It’s been a blur. The past week was heads-down, just building Fantasy Joes. Here’s a quick catch-up of what I’ve been up to.
Real money is live. I ran a full real-money entry all the way through, and it’s all connecting and working.
The tournaments are what people pay to enter, so they’re the core of the launch. There are a few different formats, and building out a lot of the system behind them was a big part of the week.
I also changed a lot about the engine of the game: which players get served and when, plus some other tweaks to make the matchups better. I changed how the algorithm treats brand-new players versus people who’ve made a ton of picks. And I built a new rankings system behind our Joes Rankings, the crowd’s overall player board. Small thing, but I like it.
The path a new player takes is a lot smoother now. I redid the first screen they land on so it’s cleaner. The old prompt to register was a full-screen interruption, and even though you could skip it, it backfired, and people bailed instead of playing. So I swapped it for a gentle nudge as they become more invested in their own rankings after they’ve played more.
A few other things: I made improvements to the Discord version of the game, redid parts of the homepage, and made the tournament rules and qualification line up. I set up thorough analytics so I can see how people move through the app, and tightened the behind-the-scenes controls a real-money launch needs.
I made the expert-takes feature more reliable and hardened the player research a lot of the content is built from. Some of the blurbs and videos were getting made off old or first-pass info, so cleaning that up has been useful.
I sped up the app, kept making short-form comparison videos, and started working on getting more partners on board.
That’s most of it. From here, it’s just improving the app and getting more users.