Awesemo
Background
Founded by Alex Baker, a daily fantasy sports professional, Awesemo began as a content website for advanced daily fantasy sports data and conversation. Awesemo wanted to build analytics tools to help paying customers/users get the most out of their fantasy lineups. However, they did not have the engineering team or expertise to design and develop these tools.
Product
Awesemo approached Near The Box to help create a unique interface to allow users to view and create multiple lineups across multiple sports—all on the existing site. These lineup builders would have to account for vast functionality while allowing users to dynamically view information across hundreds of players.
Strategy
Awesemo had several core challenges when creating the new lineup builder. The first challenge was coming up with an intuitive UI for the product. We used Balsamiq to quickly create wireframes to isolate the core elements, illustrate how they’d appear on the site, and annotate how they’d change based on user interactions.
Another challenge was tying the new lineup builder into the existing Awesemo site. Awesemo’s site already had users and monthly payments. We needed to connect into their authentication system to allow users limited access to the new lineup builder based on their subscription plan. This required writing a custom back end to make API requests to gather data on the user in addition to caching that data within the new lineup builder to take load capacity into consideration.
In the end, we created a scalable front end that was easily able to be reused for multiple sports. Starting with the NBA and MLB, Awesemo has now expanded the lineup builder to 10 different sports leagues. That growth can be attributed to our initial, reusable architecture, which allowed them to launch new lineup builders for additional sports with ease, despite each sport’s own unique set of constraints and player data.
Outcome
We were able to launch Awesemo’s lineup builder in less than 100 days. After a marketing blitz to promote this new feature, the site saw a dramatic increase in traffic and membership. It is regarded as the “premier tool in daily fantasy sports for hand-building lineups” for ease of use and incorporation of industry-leading expert projections and rankings. As a result, Awesemo continues to leverage Near the Box for technical strategy and additional feature build-outs.
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