The FL Team and TMR are doing an exclusive Twitter Takeover. So, let me explain by answering a few questions.

When is it?

Tuesday, August 23, from 7 to 8 p.m. EST.

How does it work?

Easy as 1–2–3:

1. Open the FL App (download if you don’t have it).
2. Ask your fantasy related question in the post above (should be on top of Main Feed).
3. Head over to Twitter on Tuesday evening to see the video answer.

Why are we doing it?

To spread the word about the app and community by answering questions that were submitted by our users.

What do we need from you?

We need two things:

1. To ask questions you would like to be answered during the takeover.
2. RT, share, and tell your friends about the app, the takeover and the community!

Please help us make this event successful! Reach out to us with any questions.

FL Team

The Fantasy Life app is the best sports community app to talk fantasy football, basketball, baseball, hockey, soccer, WWE, MMA, Nascar, golf, eSports, or anything else you would hear about at a sports bar. Find or post funny memes, polls, GIFs, or join chats about your teams. Matthew Berry (ESPN, The Talented Mr. Roto), the face of fantasy football co-founded the app as a place for fans to chat about sports, get fantasy advice, or find sleepers for your team. Find Matthew on the app @matthewberry

Download the iPhone or Android app at fantasylifeapp.com. Also available in theApp Store and Google Play.

Fantasy Life Twitter Takeover — We Need Your Help was originally published in Fantasy Life App on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

To FL 2.0 and Beyond

Our biggest update and what it means for the FL Community.

DALLAS — It’s the end of January at the FSTA Annual Winter Conference. I am with Mark Welsh and Matthew Berry and we are in a noisy restaurant. A meeting that is going to determine the fate of the app, the company, and the community that we’ve all built. So, the question was, “What are we doing next and what do we think this can be in the future?”

As a co-founder of the company and as a product manager of the app, I knew we were onto something. With $0 marketing, one developer, and no press (by design) we had a power user base that was averaging ~20 user sessions a day. We had MORE activity during the offseason than we did in season. More messages sent. More connections made. Instead of talking keepers, the community was talking Game of Thrones, Beer, and Pokemon. The community was starting to form. And we knew it.

So, no brainer right? Just build out 2.0 and let’s get going for next season. Well, it’s usually never that simple. What about salaries, hiring, development costs, etc? But somehow, we all agreed that this was becoming something that could change the way people communicate. We thought we could create the first great sports community. We all realized that if you like fantasy football, you like at least 20–25 things that the entire community loves. By starting small and niche, we ended up building an app with huge potential. Next step was to find the talent to take the app to the next level and the goal for our 2.0 product was August 1st.

Flash forward to today, August 4th. Version 2.0 is out! So, let’s go through the release notes and show you what we’ve added:

“The Fast and The Furious 2.0

“We live our lives one update at a time”

• Fresh Coat of Paint: our genius designer revamped the UX/UI for 2.0 (new logo included).

• Bigger! Stronger! Faster!: we heard you! GIFs, Lists, and Links are now available!

• Added Seat Belts and Autopilot: commissioner moderation tools, verified emails for chat creation, real-time chat updates, etc.

• New Set of Tires: the main page feed is now tailored to the users you are following!

• Air Freshener: first impressions mean everything, we know that. So, we added a brand new Onboarding System; you can follow users and sign-up through Facebook and Twitter.

• Nos Installation: get to what you love, faster with Discovery — brand new search feature that allows you to find the best content, and create a board of your favorite posts to come back to later by boarding them. typeaheads for tagging, and many more.
• Under the Hood: we squashed a lot of bugs and fixed a lot of issues from 1.4.1. — thanks for the feedback as always :)

Lastly, this update is a very big one for us and our wonderful users. The feedback and support from our community has helped us immensely and we want to say THANK YOU. We aren’t perfect so please reach out anytime with bugs and other feedback.”

So, what does this mean for the Fantasy Life? That we are just getting started. Our team has grown to 7 full-time employees and we have some very exciting news that we will be sharing soon :) (FOLLOW the blog for more details).

Hope you like the update and let us know if you have questions. You can email me directly charlie@fantasylifeapp.com — or follow me on the app “@charlie”.

Oh, and if you haven’t downloaded yet, what are you doing? DOWNLOAD HERE.

To FL 2.0 and Beyond was originally published in Fantasy Life App on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Little Flashback Friday for you guys. I’m going to go through my favorite Fantasy Life App ‘shouts’ of all time. Let me be clear, I love the humor aspect of the FL app and the way that the community “get’s me”. So, here we go:

10. The Mark Cuban and our Fantasy Wives

Most of these posts deal with thoughts that some/most fantasy owners have and this is no exception. I’m not married but I have a feeling this is a very common issue.

9. The Bart Simpson

I’m also a sucker for pop culture references and this one was a doozy. Well done.

8. Ricky Bobby / Fantasy Life AD

I remember seeing this and bursting out laughing. Hysterical.

7. The “Sex” Poll

The slew of Draft Day posts were fantastic but none compared to this one. Still makes me laugh.

6. The “Charlie vs. Mark” Poll

Yes, I am 1 for 1 on personal polls. BOOM. Loved this one because it’s the original Troll Post. So, I repost it once in awhile to make light when the community is going nuts over something.

5. The “Kate Upton vs. Matthew Berry” Poll

Yes, I know this is three polls in a row. I couldn’t find the original post but here is the one that Matthew posted on Instagram. This one really hit home for us because it was on ESPN. They did a feature on the post and how on earth Matthew could possibly get 22% of the votes. I voted for Kate.

4. The End of Marriage

That emoji. The ! mark. The fact that he posted it. Brilliant.

3. The Phil Dunphy Injury

This has happened to me so many times. So. Many. This has so much truth to it that I had to put it on the list.

2. The Seinfeld

There a few ways to get an auto-prop from your boy and having anything that deals with Seinfeld is one of them. Favorite show ever. I died laughing when I saw this one as well.

Winner: The Wolfpack

It isn’t the FL Team. It isn’t me. It isn’t Mark. It’s the whole community. We are a Wolfpack. We ride together, we die together. Respect the community and the community will respect you.

The Fantasy Life app is the best sports community app to talk fantasy football, basketball, baseball, hockey, soccer, WWE, MMA, Nascar, golf, eSports, or anything else you would hear about at a sports bar. Find or post funny memes, polls, GIFs, or join chats about your teams. Matthew Berry (ESPN, The Talented Mr. Roto), the face of fantasy football co-founded the app as a place for fans to chat about sports, get fantasy advice, or find sleepers for your team. Find Matthew on the app @matthewberry

Download the iPhone or Android app at fantasylifeapp.com. Also available in the App Store and Google Play.

My Top 10 Fantasy Life Shouts Ever was originally published in Fantasy Life App on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This is a crazy time for our startup. We’re hiring, re-designing the app, solidifying features for FL 2.0, developing and now we have launched The FL Blog (thanks Medium!). I’ll take you through our vision by answering questions.

Why? Content creation has always been intriguing. We built the app in the first place to create a conversation around an incredibly passionate thing (fantasy sports). We were inspired by Tim Ferriss, Product Hunt, Barstool Sports, and theSkimm. They have this cult following that we admired.

So our first task was to make something that people loved. We couldn’t put the cart before the horse. We couldn’t hire writers, spend time editing, and then publish to a non-existent audience. But how do you know you’ve created something special? One thing (we believe) that could be a sign is when your users start using your brand to create their own outlets.

These are two podcasts from users that have MET other fantasy sports players on the Fantasy Life app. Not only have they met the players. They created a league and play with these players. They talk shit to these players. They started PODCASTS with these players.

Who will write? Easy. Recruit these crazies users (in the most loving way) to help us out. One email. It took one email to get 20 Fantasy Life users to write for us. Gosh, I love our users. They are the best. We are giving them free rain to write about anything they think the community will care about.

What will our writers write about? One is writing about Daily Fantasy Basketball. One is writing about Zero RB Theory and Free Agency. Another is writing about Miami Sports. Packers. Broncos. Movies. Weekly Trade Column. The list goes on.

How is this going to work? We are going to give it our best shot but we want to put out 3–4 articles a week. So, if you like the Fantasy Life app we think you’re going to love the blog. And if you do like the blog, please share it.

Will Mark Welsh and I contribute? Absolutely. We will write about FL2.0, our company as it grows, and everything else we think is interesting.

Enjoy!

If you have any other questions, shoot me an email (charlie@fantasylifeapp.com).

The Fantasy Life app is the best sports community app to talk fantasy football, basketball, baseball, hockey, soccer, WWE, MMA, Nascar, golf, eSports, or anything else you would hear about at a sports bar. Find or post funny memes, polls, GIFs, or join chats about your teams. Matthew Berry (ESPN, The Talented Mr. Roto), the face of fantasy football co-founded the app as a place for fans to chat about sports, get fantasy advice, or find sleepers for your team. Find Matthew on the app @matthewberry

Download the iPhone or Android app at fantasylifeapp.com. Also available in the App Store and Google Play.

Introduction: The FL Blog was originally published in Fantasy Life App on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I had no idea when I would write this post. As a creator you always believe that you will build something great enough for people to use. But at my first crack at a startup and with an app no less, I had no idea. But I knew I would at some point. You have to think that way about yourself. But let’s back up.

In June of 2014 I left my job to start creating mobile communities with one of my best friends from high school. We had the idea of apps with communities that talked back. About creating apps for the most die hard communities in the world. We had started about six months before we quit our jobs and had built a few prototypes. In May, my co-creator Mark approached ESPN’s Matthew Berry at a book signing. He saw the incredible following Matthew had and how Matthew’s book about fantasy football and life united so many people. We knew Fantasy Life (Matthew’s book) could be the perfect mobile community; a combination of die hard fantasy players seeking advice, private messaging their leagues, and sharing the ups and downs of the game that 40–50 million North Americans play every year.

So we started creating. We had a vision of what we wanted the app to look like, but we knew that the community building was the number one priority. We had to ease users into the idea, we had to build an easy to use tab-based product, and we had to set the tone from day 1 (shoutout to Sam Altman’s Startup Class, multiple product podcasts, and the countless accounts of community builders that we read). We launched at the start of 2015, after the 2014 season had ended. Why then? Because we wanted it to be on our terms.

The initial growth and user base was small. Matthew tweeted about beta testing the app and we literally started personally emailing die hard fantasy football players one by one. We would personally onboard them onto the app and they would be our original users (now they call themselves the OG’s, check out their website fantasylifeog.com!). By April we had about two-thousand users.

In May, we launched the Android version. Then, the growth slowed. We were averaging about 100 iOS users in the app daily and while the reception was great, we had a lot of trouble getting new users without a big marketing budget and with the season being about four months away. So how do we recruit and build the app organically?

This is where the hard work came in. We went on ESPN Mock Drafts and spread the word to die hard players one by one, we created fake accounts to drive more content that we wanted within the app (as the creators of Reddit did), and we became the go to users on the app whenever anyone needed anything (follow me on FL @charlie). Paul Graham has a great essay called Do Things that Don’t Scale that we called upon on a daily basis. We knew we could control the customer service and that was extremely important to us. We created a culture. No bullying, no trolling, no putting others down. Respect the community and the community will respect you. Below is the best email we’ve ever received and it will be blown up and hung on our office wall some day, if we are ever lucky enough to have an office.

July 2015 arrived. Fantasy Football season was back! And now we were armed with a die hard user base that was ready to protect the community they helped create. User growth started to explode.

We have doubled our user growth every three weeks since the start of July and now we have about 30,000 total users (about 6k of them active daily). While I know the user total isn’t crazy, the activity has been. We’ve been in the Top 100 sports apps in the Apple Store nearly every day in the past month. We’ve had over 100,000 comments on posts, 20,000 total public posts, 1000 leagues created (public and private) and over 350,000 user sessions (averaging over one minute per session) in the past month. And the season is still three weeks away!

The app isn’t even remotely perfect. In fact, there are new bugs every day and there are new features that we still need to add before the season even starts. With that being said, we have the best users in the world. They are understanding and patient. Because of this, I can’t even begin to think about where would we be if we had launched the app in July instead of last winter. I wouldn’t give up that initial culture building for 250,000 users on initial launch.

So why did I write this? Why did I feel the need to put this all out there? Because hopefully I can provide a creator with some guidance before he or she starts building. Because everyone needs help. Because although working on the app and moderating the users 18–20 hours a day with a very, very small team is tough and extremely unnerving, I am reminded daily of just how awesome the community has become. Leagues with total strangers have been created, there’s a public forum titled “Getting Started” that is strictly run by original users trying to help new users get acclimated to the app, and people that have never had the opportunity to write or produce content for “professional” fantasy websites have become Fantasy Life Experts.

I have no idea what Fantasy Life will be. It’s impossible to say. But right now, it’s truly a magical thing. Community building is hard and I think we got it right. Sometimes fantasy can become a reality and I could not be prouder of the community that we’ve built.

Please reach out to me if you have any questions or concerns at Charlie@fantasylifeapp.com. If you are a talented developer or love fantasy sports, I would also love to chat about joining the FL Team.

The Fantasy Life app is the best sports community app to talk fantasy football, basketball, baseball, hockey, soccer, WWE, MMA, Nascar, golf, eSports, or anything else you would hear about at a sports bar. Find or post funny memes, polls, GIFs, or join chats about your teams. Matthew Berry (ESPN, The Talented Mr. Roto), the face of fantasy football co-founded the app as a place for fans to chat about sports, get fantasy advice, or find sleepers for your team. Find Matthew on the app @matthewberry

Download the iPhone or Android app at fantasylifeapp.com. Also available in the App Store and Google Play.

0 to 30,000 users: building Fantasy Life’s mobile community was originally published in Fantasy Life App on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.