Dudspuds Blog

Big news this week from Dudspuds land… we’ve signed up our first publisher!

Rotowire.com has begun selling articles on our site covering player analysis, expert opinions, weekly sleepers, player rankings and game handicaps. Look for both current and past articles. There should be plenty of stuff to help you out.

Rotowire has been around since 1997. They’re experts in the business of fantasy sports news and analysis. We’re excited to be working with them.

You can read more about Rotowire at their about us page.

Welcome to the first ever Dudspuds Weekly Update.

My goal with this update is to keep a journal of our business progress, including accomplishments, milestones or setbacks. In football, it’s called the play-by-play. Also, this forces me into a rhythm for posting on the blog — which I believe is important.

This week I have a few things to report from Dudspuds HQ.

Business / LLC Formation

Dudspuds is now a Registered LLC in the state of New Jersey. While I consider this house keeping, it’s an accomplishment, nonetheless. We’ve also obtained a Federal Tax ID number — so we’re ready to roll. Thank goodness for accountants and lawyers.

Our formal company name is: Dudspuds, LLC

Search Engine Enhancements

Since quietly rolling the application into production (http://www.dudspuds.com) a couple weeks ago - we’ve been fixing some bugs along the way. Our production environment runs Linux while our development environment runs Windows. Needless to say, there has been some interesting differences in how things work (or don’t work) between the two environments. In particular we had some issues with our search engine — which is used to find articles by title, player, team or publisher. The issues involved Unicode characters or UTF8 character sets that handle international characters in names like:

• Magglio Ordóñez
• Carlos Peña
• Álex Rodríguez
• Édgar Rentería

We resolved the issues so the application is smart enough to know that an “n” and “ñ” are the same when you’re searching for “carlos pena”.

We also improved the way our search engine returns results… so when you search for “carlos” or “pena” or “carlos pena” — it will know what to return. It will handle misspellings also. For example “farve” or “hassalback” would return matches to Favre and Hasselbeck respectively. This is called “fuzzy search” for anyone who’s interested.

Rotobowl in Atlantic City

As I immerse myself in the world of fantasy sports, I feel obligated to participate in several fantasy leagues along the way. On September 8th, I participated in Rotobowl’s live draft in Atlantic City at the convention center. While I’m far from an expert in fantasy sports (and I certainly don’t expect to win), the experience was worthwhile. I was especially excited to see 300 people show up for the draft. This is the perfect customer demographic for using Dudspuds to find and buy their favorite fantasy sports content. Especially considering everyone paid a team entry fee of $250 to participate in Rotobowl. The WCOFF was also being held at the convention center. Maybe next year I’ll participate in that one.

My Account Enhancements

We spent a good amount of time improving the My Account area. We separated the publisher profile from the user profile, making it easier to use. This is important since most users won’t be publishers - so there’s no need to make the user profile screen more complicated. In addition, we moved some functions to the My Account Overview page, making it easier to change your password and close your account.

In closing

So that wraps it up. We are continuing to harden the software and we’ll do several more testing iterations before I consider doing a formal marketing campaign to solicit publishers to sign up. More on this next week.

Dudspuds was fortunate enough to exhibit at the 2007 Fantasy Sports Trade Association (FSTA) Summer Conference in Las Vegas (August 1st and 2nd).  This was our first ever exhibit and it surely didn’t dissappoint.  At best, it looked like a poorly done high school project.  See for yourself.

Fortunately, the software was up and running (in final stages of development) and it looked a lot better than the exhibit.  We demonstrated the marketplace to many folks at the show, including some future publishers we hope to work with.  It was time well spent - we’ll certainly attend next year.

Our first ever half-page ad was featured in the conference handout.  It’s worth a gander too…