<aside> ⚠️ What follows are snippets of a few of the efforts in founding Yotie. It's difficult to summarize the collective effort that Kennet Postigo, Ashley Narcisse, Jonathan Beltran, Yuan Wang and I put into this company. I did everything I could to make this work from design, code, and marketing. Let this serve as a summary of the product thinking, and if you’re curious for more details, I’m happy to share over a meeting.
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Yotie was a social fantasy sports app that aimed to be the fan’s guide into fantasy. In contrast to existing sports bookies and fantasy apps, Yotie sought to frame the propositions on sports in the context of the daily drama in the leagues, therefore increasing the emotional incentive to play fantasy sports. It was an extremely ambitious product; we wished to have fans responding to fantasy challenges while the game was on TV, providing a second screen experience that only increased buy-in from users.
All of this tied to a thesis that if you positioned a sports product that didn’t follow the usual motifs already captured by FanDuel, MGM, and ESPN. In theory, you could carve out a new user base similar to how the Nintendo Wii could introduce millions to video games where Sony’s PS3 and Microsoft’s XBOX 360 primarily focused on their existing market segments.
To deliver on this experience, the founding team and I set out to build nearly everything in-house with a suite of cutting-edge technologies. What follows is a collection of thoughts on how we thought about the product development process and the countless lessons we learned along the way.
I have been thinking about sport for the better part of my life. I owe a lot of my early formation to the diet of Counter-Strike scrimmages and Football teams I supported growing up. Later, I would join my high school’s cross country team, where I tried to build a small little platform that would do a few fantasy sports leagues for the small but tight-knit running community in South Florida. My friends and I who met in college also had their formative participation in Sports; fellow co-founders Ash and Kennet played more than their fair share of basketball, Jonathan followed Chess very closely.
Around this time, several factors led us to think it was an opportune time to work in this space.
Over tacos on a late Summer day in Brickell in 2018, we expressed frustrations around how insufficient most fantasy sports apps were. They were hard to learn and most betting sites had hostile UX to most new users.
Drawn on “a back of a napkin” (the notes app), the rough spec was an app that allowed you to pick a proposition and a dollar amount to bet on.
We initially named the app WOLVES because of the social component to the betting; however, around mid-2019, we changed the name to Yotie. There are references to both terms, but I will use Yotie throughout this article to reference the product.
In the discussions immediately after, we realized that there were multiple compelling approaches to reaching the market while building a product that was a staffing experience for ourselves and our potential users. While we were performing research, we noticed a few trends that seemed to be working in our favor.
Taken from our old pitch deck