Long before The Fantasy Footballers became the No. 1 fantasy sports podcast on iTunes and surpassed 100 million downloads and counting, it was a side project started by three friends in Arizona who were simply creating shoulder programming around their office league. “We did it for fun on a weekly basis on lunch breaks,” says Andy Holloway, who launched the project with Jason Moore and Mike Wright. “We were kind of obsessed talking fantasy all the time.”
Investing their own time and money, the trio took the podcast public five years ago and grew it into a multimedia company that releases a yearly draft kit with player rankings, more than 100 player profile videos, a lineup generator and feature articles. Episodes are still typically produced inside Holloway’s home, but the group is now touring the U.S. and recording in front of crowds in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Phoenix. Videos of the live recordings are uploaded to YouTube and the FNTSY Sports Network; their YouTube channel counts more than 130,000 subscribers and 15 million all-time streams.
SportTechie recently caught up with Holloway to talk about the company’s unexpected journey, the business and media lessons the three have learned along the way, and the insights you can glean about fan engagement from self-described regular guys who have amassed a loyal following.
The biggest lesson perhaps: Counterintuitive timing can separate the casual fans from the ones who can’t get enough of what you’re selling.
SPORTTECHIE: What’s your origin story? How did it all begin?
ANDY HOLLOWAY: We launched in February 2015, which was perceptually pretty much the worst possible time to start a football podcast, when the Super Bowl ends and everybody is walking away from their TV sets. But it gave us the opportunity to build a hyper-committed, die-hard fan base for those first months in 2015.
To buy ourselves stability, one of the revenue streams we developed was our Patreon page. We looked at Patreon as a great strategy to get people to pledge monthly and we were super surprised at how many people didn’t discontinue their pledge at the end of the football season. They were committed to the fact that we were an independent show, churning out high-quality content. We weren’t ESPN, we weren’t CBS. We were three guys inviting you into the studio. It was more than transactional. It was a supporter relationship.
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If you quit your Netflix account today, you don’t write them a letter saying, I’m so sorry I’m quitting I’ll be back as soon as possible. But that’s the kind of relationship we have with our listeners. If they cancel, I get notes because of the exit survey, and they’re like, “Oh man, I’m moving right now, I’ll be back in a couple months. Love what you guys do.”
SPORTTECHIE: At what point did you realize your audience was building these tight-knit connections?
HOLLOWAY: I would say anecdotally we noticed it pretty quick. Just in people’s engagement and their excitement, the reviews that we were getting and the conversations on social. But I think I realized that in a very measurable way when the season ended in year one and all of these people that had pledged support for us—I thought maybe they were doing it temporarily—they didn’t leave. I expected people to be in more of a, “I’m exchanging this pledge for goods and services mindset.” And then I realized that the majority of these people stayed to support us in the off-season. They weren’t just exchanging it for services, they were pledging it as support, as wanting to support an independent show that wasn’t the same as the big media entities.
When people hung around after season one, I think it really resonated with me. We had something very unique and special that I don’t know how we got necessarily, but these are really, really loyal people—and we get to meet them now on our live tour all the time. I started to realize that people are building that connection every single day during their workouts or when they listen to us during their commutes, and they know who we are as people. So, it was a little bit surprising to me that people just wanted to hang out and support us regardless of what they were getting out of the equation.
SPORTTECHIE: What’s your philosophy about fan engagement? How do you connect with listeners on a deeper level?
HOLLOWAY: From Day 1 we’ve been very intentional and active on social networks, which, obviously, everybody now has that as part of their philosophy for engagement. But in particular we’ve been very intentional on social to try to spend time and interact and engage with people there.
From Day 1, I’ve also had this huge Google doc that I build out. It’s called our rotational tweet log. I build out all the touchpoints we want people to regularly hear about with our show. Everything from, “Hey, I want to tell people about the Ultimate Draft Kit every 17 days to let’s make sure we post an interesting stat every three days.” So this doc is filled with like a tweet rotation schedule that our team executes on; they keep track of the last time we posted about our shop, the last time we posted about our community. We have schedule things out based on that.
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We have a pretty good-size newsletter. We try to stay connected with people on there. We’ve been working to make that really useful and fun, not just another newsletter you get that’s filled with self-serving links but something that’s filled with analysis and something you can digest really quickly.
Everything philosophically at the top is framed in the mindset of: Can we get people into our ecosystem, into our community? If you’re a listener of the show, are you a member of the #FootClan? If you’re a member of the FootClan, you’re engaged with premium content we provide and you want to be involved in the forums that we have.
We try to be really smart with our email marketing and things like that. So if you click certain links in the email to show that you’re interested in something, but you don’t become a member or you don’t buy a product, maybe we’ll follow up in eight days with a different email telling you more about our show and who we are. We’ve done our best to use automation as a way to scale the engagement as our show grows. It’s very easy when you’re small to talk to everybody on Twitter, but it’s a lot harder as you grow.
SPORTTECHIE: What are your interactions like with fans at live shows? Is there anything they tell you about your work that you’ve come to realize you can never change?
HOLLOWAY: People view it as a badge of honor to have listened to us for a long period of time. So a lot of times it’s huge hugs and high fives. And they say, “I’ve been listening to you for two years, I won my league last year. I’ve been listening to you for three years. I have so much fun, don’t ever stop doing the show. Every time I drive into work…”
I think people have this fear that we’re going to change, that we’re going to sell the company, that we’re going to step into the ivory tower of superiority in fantasy advice over this discussion-based format that we have. It’s always super humbling to realize that we have this connection.
They know who we are as dads and husbands and people. We try to share glimpses into those parts of our lives on the show and in the FootClan community, as opposed to trying to manifest some sort of ESPN-like mindset or just kind of like a super professional mentality that I think a lot of people getting into the industry try to mimic.
SPORTTECHIE: Is that why you guys have turned down investment offers?
HOLLOWAY: It’s certainly a part of it. We’ve had the moniker, “Remember why you do this” written above our window in our office for four years. We built this company with a sense of contentment in building it as what it is. Not with this driving force to have a high-rise or make a billion dollars. It’s grown organically but our ambitions are still the same: to produce high-quality content and to stay loyal to the listeners and to the format. It’s a challenge when you grow to constantly have to pull back to that center focus and keep the main things, the main things. You can write that in a million mission statements for your company—that’s in ours—but you still have to do that on a daily basis to not get pulled into a thousand different avenues. We’ve tried to be very selective with our opportunities and do them well.
SPORTTECHIE: What sort of feedback do you hear from your audience regarding the NFL? Is there anything they dislike about the league? What do you know about NFL fans that the NFL might not realize?
HOLLOWAY: I think any of us as football fans get fatigued at off-the-field things that happen. It’s one of the unfortunate, most annoying, and most difficult things for us as football analysts to talk about on a regular basis. When off-the-field issues happen, it kind of muddies everybody’s fandom, because in fantasy you really invest in individual players, not just teams. So, all of a sudden you’re kind of facing that situation: Are you going to support this player by drafting him? Can you no longer root for this player? Over the years we have set pieces on our show, or maybe video drops, that we can’t use anymore because certain players have gotten into trouble and we don’t want to highlight them.
SPORTTECHIE: In a similar vein, have your listeners been turned off by concerns over head injuries and CTE?
HOLLOWAY: I would say no, I don’t think so. I don’t think that they’re taking that high of a view of that. One issue that did spark some noticeable negative [reactions]—people left our FootClan, people left fantasy, people left the NFL over the issues that came up around Colin Kaepernick and kneeling for the anthem. We would receive feedback at times as we review everybody that leaves. They normally say something on the way out and then it would be like, “I love you guys but I don’t want anything to do with the NFL anymore … You know I love you guys, but this politicized stuff, I can’t take it anymore, I’m out.” People have definitely quit fandom and fantasy over the social issues that the NFL has faced over the last four years.
SPORTTECHIE: Did you ever talk about Kaepernick and anthem protests on your podcast?
HOLLOWAY: Not really. We’ve never taken any politicized perspective on that stuff. With the anthem situation in particular, it doesn’t affect a player’s availability, so it’s not really a fantasy issue to us. In terms of off-the-field [disciplinary] issues, we might spend a little bit more time talking philosophically about those issues. But we always try to keep that elsewhere. We’re not here to give commentary necessarily on those issues. We try to focus, bring it back to how it affects fantasy owners and then we let them— you know, the fantasy owner can make those decisions based on their own moral and ethical binds.
SPORTTECHIE: Do you or your listeners ever struggle between rooting for your fantasy players when they’re playing against your favorite team?
Yeah. Everybody has a different perspective on that. Sometimes they find it as the silver lining of like, “OK, I’m going to go to a game and either my home team’s going to win or I’m going to be like moderately happy on the other side with my fantasy player having success.”
I personally sometimes struggle with having my own hometown guy on my team because I’ll go to a game and my team will be doing well, but it won’t be doing well through the player that I have. And then I’m sitting there going, I’m not as happy as I should be as a normal fan right now because David Johnson scored three touchdowns and it wasn’t Larry Fitzgerald and I have him on my team. So yeah, everybody’s got a different take on it for sure.
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Some people that I know completely blacklist players out of their own home team’s division. I’ve run into guys in leagues where I try to trade a Dolphins fan a Patriot and they’re like, “No, I’m never going to have a Patriot on my team.” Everybody takes a different approach, but it does complicate the emotions of watching the game.
SPORTTECHIE: Why do you think fans have become so attached to fantasy football?
HOLLOWAY: There’s a lot of sub-factors that exist, like the technology’s improved. You can follow it on your phone and people like checking things on social media. But the real true answer is the community/friendship aspect of the game. When we play it, we’re playing it with 11 friends. We’re getting to know people and engaging in conversations about it. It’s something that we have in common now. It’s something that when I go to a random city and I run into somebody that’s a fantasy player, that’s our common ground now. In an elevator, we can have a conversation about Antonio Brown’s potential for the week because we’re coming from the same place.
It’s really the community aspect. Our big leagues, this is the only way we stay in contact with people from college or high school or old jobs. It’s just fun to engage regularly in all of the shenanigans that come with fantasy, lording stupid victories over people. That’s what our show was birthed out of. So, to me, that’s what connects most people with fantasy. It’s not the stat-nerd side of it, although all that stuff is fun. It’s the community and getting to engage with people on a weekly basis. And pretend that you’re the GM of the team, I think that’s the core.
SPORTTECHIE: What metrics of your business matter most to you?
HOLLOWAY: I would say the metric that matters most to us is growth. From a listenership perspective we keep a granular eye on year-over-year numbers, making sure that our podcast is growing, extending that reach, that people are still engaging with it. There’s certain aspects of granular analytics that we just don’t get access to from a podcast side. It’s not like we can go in on any given day and know that 84% of the listenership is people that have been there a year. We don’t have that kind of data. But from the product perspective, we try to be extremely overt in letting people provide feedback and then listening and responding to that feedback where it makes sense.
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Everybody who buys an Ultimate Draft Kit, they have a real tangible way to get ahold of us immediately about anything that’s going on. We survey them at the end of the product cycle to say, What’s the best thing, what’s the worst thing? Where can we get better? And we try to just go build those things out for the next year as opposed rather than rest on the thought that they’re just going to keep coming back and buy the same product over and over again. I think that’s helped our products side grow a lot. We’ve been able to add a lot of value; this year adding an app. we didn’t charge more for it, we just added it. Trying to stay ahead of the curve because there’s competition and a lot of people want to be The One Draft.
SPORTTECHIE: What would it take you guys to sell your show?
HOLLOWAY: We get asked that a lot. It would have to be a unicorn type of offer. We’re not uprooting our families. We don’t have the [mindset] that the money side is like the pinnacle of our company. We’re content with our growth and the money we make. It would have to be one of those situations where someone comes in and says, “We want you to continue to function in Arizona and do your show there. We’re going to give you creative control or at least a high degree of it to keep doing what you’re doing.” We’re not like a tech company that can just sell and someone can walk in and take over and we can walk away with a bag of cash—we’re the show. So, for the three of us to be beholden to somebody else’s creative control, that’s intimidating to us. I never rule out the possibility that we would accept an offer from somebody, but the money and the way the offer is structured—and the way that we function as individuals and fathers, what we want from our day-to-day life—that would have to be that unicorn offer. It would have to be something that meets all of those needs, not just the financial needs.
SPORTTECHIE: What do you think larger companies get wrong about connecting with fans?
HOLLOWAY: This is not really their fault, but I will say that it’s like the “Yankees mentality”—it’s fun to hate the big guys. They start from that disadvantage from a community-building perspective. It’s a lot easier for somebody to feel connected to being a member of the FootClan than saying, “Yeah, I’m a big ESPNer.” It’s hard to be tribal about ESPN because they’re at the top. Something like that is just an inherent disadvantage for major media companies to try to build that kind of community.
The other thing that I would say is that it’s just philosophical in the way they acquire and use talents. I mean, most of those entities will hire three people and those people don’t know each other and they’ll put them in a room with three microphones and they’ll say, “Figure it out.” We have the advantage of being friends and being friends for a long period of time—and being in the same room together. A lot of shows, even from major media companies, have people distributed around the country. So you’re not in the same room together and you’re not friends and now you’ve got to figure out how to create a compelling show that people connect with. That is difficult to do and it’s not as simple as just hiring three smart people. You can hire three smart people that don’t get along or don’t know how to interact
SPORTTECHIE: What will fantasy football look like in 10 years?
HOLLOWAY: I think most of the change is going to come in the sports betting universe. That’s what we see as members of the Fantasy Sports and Gaming Association, which is a group of all of the industry professionals. We attend those things on a year-to-year basis and we can kind of a temp-check how people are treating things. They just changed their name from the Fantasy Sports and Trade Association to the Fantasy Sports and Gaming Association this past year as a reflection of the incoming sports betting universe and as a way to embrace regulated sports betting.
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When we first got into that organization, there was a lot of DFS because it was unregulated and FanDuel and DraftKings had a lot of money, and there were tons of startups in that area. Now I’m starting to see the same things chasing the money on the sports betting side. So I think that’s going to be the transformation. And I think that that will peripherally extend the growth of the NFL. For us, in particular, we’ll benefit because if the NFL grows, fantasy grows and if fantasy grows, the NFL grows. And if people are watching with money on the games, it’s just going to make the NFL [bigger]. I mean, they’re already doing it. There’s already a large percentage of people that are doing that offshore and in Vegas. But if it becomes regulated, it’s just going to turn to another level I think.
SPORTTECHIE: Do you see the NFL continuing to grow despite concerns over CTE and player health?
HOLLOWAY: I think it’ll be interesting to see how much it can grow. I do think sports betting will be a boon for it. I think they do face a couple of challenges—oversaturation is a question, just games that are on all the time: Thursday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday. There’s international expansion. Actually, having a franchise in England, it seems like the league is bending itself in that direction.
I think the league is trying to grow internationally quite a bit. I can’t see the future, but I think it’ll still grow because of those things and because the NFL just has a stranglehold on that time of the year. People bet baseball and basketball and stuff like that, but the NFL has got this pinnacle every week on Sunday that other sports can’t replicate.
SPORTTECHIE: What’s the best way to describe the on-air dynamic between you, Mike and Jason?
HOLLOWAY: The respect between the three of us is great enough in reality that we can challenge each other on almost everything. We never have this pressure to comply; we never have this pressure to agree or not argue. No matter what happens on the show or how heated an argument gets or how sarcastic we get—Jason is very self-deprecating in his humor and we lean into it and so it becomes comedic. But sometimes people are like, “These guys hate Jason or that’s really mean,” and that’s the furthest thing from the truth. We have a true admiration and respect for one another. It gives us so much freedom on the show to take shots at one another for the sake of comedy and entertainment that, you know, I think is unique. We’re probably over a thousand shows now together. And that dynamic was there from Day 1.
SPORTTECHIE: That would be the perfect note to end on, except: Best sleeper pick for the upcoming season?
HOLLOWAY: I love Dante Pettis, wide receiver for the San Francisco 49ers coming into his second year … he would probably be somebody that I like as a mid-round breakout guy. If you wanted to go really deep on a sleeper list, I’ll throw the name Anthony Miller out there. He’s a wide receiver for the Chicago Bears. Second-round pick last year, played most of the year with a separated shoulder but still scored seven touchdowns. That offense should be pretty good.
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