-What have been the biggest mistakes and problems along the way?
-How do we overcome to succeed? Where do we go from here?

-What have been the biggest mistakes and problems along the way?

There have been a lot of mistakes and a lot of just flat-out bad (I shouldn’t say luck, so let’s say) ~circumstances~. Particularly since we started to put my long-dreamt idea of a website into production in January of 2020.

The first big mistake was starting our development as web-based, rather than an app – especially with a local friend’s development agency that had already transitioned their business from web development to app development. But we were bootstrapping what little profits we had just made from our first legitimate, though modestly successful season and didn’t want to take on any debt, so the web development quote was about 25% of the app quote and that’s what we could afford.

In hindsight, I was also very naïve to the evolving tech/audience usage landscape and maybe if we had been advised a bit differently, since we already planned to eventually have an app, and made a 3-year side by side projection, and more aggressively suggested that the app route would be better for us, we may have decided it was worth the extra cost. I was (and still am) used to doing a vast majority of my work on a laptop, so that is where my head was, as a worker, which is what I designed for, not a consumer, which is who we needed to design for. When we launched and started seeing the analytics showing that 90-95% of our traffic was mobile-based, I realized my mistake. Also, developing app to web is a lot easier than web to app. But hindsight is always 20/20 and now we have hard lessons learned. The app was planned for development during this 2023 offseason.

Back to February-March 2020, the in-house design for the website came together pretty nicely, but unfortunately since they had transitioned all of their in-house operations to app development, they outsourced our web development to someone in Brazil who was way over their head and couldn’t keep up with our desires, both in product quality and timeline. Also, we started to encounter the ~circumstances~, as just a couple months after we began development, COVID blew up into a global catastrophe. And as it turns out, a couple more months later, our Brazilian developer reportedly passed away. I say reportedly, not to minimize, the whole COVID situation was unfathomable, but it was just such a crazy time and we really got no other details, we had never spoken to them directly, it all just stopped suddenly and we had an unfinished website that we needed new developers for.

We were gutted and just basically had to put the unfinished website development on the shelf and hunker down to get through COVID with what we were already doing to generate our foundational revenue. Skipping ahead a bit to finish this side of the story, we did eventually find a new development agency, but they basically had to start from scratch. I say basically, because that was another mistake made, trying to pick up where the previous development left off to fix and finish, when there were so many problems popping up at every turn along the way that we should have just started from scratch. If you know anything about developers, they are usually very unique in how they work. It’s a massive pain to try to figure out what a previous developer was doing mid-project to fix and finish, especially if they were on a vastly different level of expertise, rather than just start over your own way.

We finally had a reasonably-workable-enough site ready to soft launch beginning May 2022, almost 2 years later than our originally projected launch date, but they warned us that things were probably going to break under heavy traffic loads. And they were right. We were crashing our Google servers basically from the start, kept upgrading and upgrading (through all the issues, we did 695k page views in May, 1.8M in June, 3.3M in July), eventually decided to migrate to a new host, WPEngine, in August, as we were concerned about stabilizing before the upcoming season… and holy hell, that was a disaster of a month. I can’t even remember all the details, but we were offline almost as much as we were online (and still somehow did 2.5M page views!), 50+ support chats, constant trial and error because nobody seemed to know why things were crashing or how to fix them. We finally migrated to LiquidWeb, made some tweaks here and there in the first week, and since then everything on the website side has been pretty smooth sailing.

And then there’s Facebook…

I spent over 13 years (since September 2009) building a significant audience on Facebook, over 600k followers, then it got wrongly flagged and restricted by their faulty automated systems to the point that after Thanksgiving, entering the busiest 2 1/2 months of our year, we lost over 95% of our reach and subsequent incoming traffic to the site. We went from making about $20k of foundational revenue per month, and expecting $30k+ for December and January that we were bootstrapping into our further development, particularly the app we planned for this offseason, to basically making nothing and having to put everything on pause until the issues were resolved or we could rebuild traffic in another way.

We have spoken to about a half dozen Facebook/Meta employees, from ad sales to tech support to management level of “products and integrity” (and many others in the industry), who all think it’s crazy, agree we haven’t been doing anything wrong, have called it the worst user experience they’ve ever seen, seemingly tried to help, but ultimately nobody has been able to fix it and they all just disappear on us over time.

We have charts and emails and texts and LinkedIn messages and formal complaints filed with the CA State Attorney General and on and on, but still no resolution after nearly 5 months. It’s been maddening. Literally, it has damaged me mentally more than anything, to levels I can’t even get into. I’m still struggling every day.

In fact, as I write this (roughly noon edt on 4/22), we are currently mysteriously blocked from posting to any of our pages through 6 of our 7 network admin accounts (they’re all verified accounts), simply saying “you can’t post right now” and giving us a button to “disagree with decision,” which we have clicked ad nauseam, we have a mysterious recurring “security check” not allowing us to post at all on our cornerstone NFL Draft page (460k+ followers), which does not, in fact, proceed to any kind of security check, and the one currently working admin account that was recently wrongly flagged for spam, which was appealed and overturned, yet the penalty of not being allowed to post to groups for a month remains… what?

(UPDATE: It’s now 4:30 pm et on 4/24 and I can’t post the massive news of the Aaron Rodgers trade to our pages because of these repeated, nonsensical blocks – finally able again at 6:12 pm)

So while we should, by all rational projections, based on our history, be producing well over 100k page views per day, we are barely eclipsing 1k – some days, not even.

This is not intended to be a sob story, but it is obviously an incredibly significant part of our story.

Our fault lies in being too focused and busy on what was working best for us, too reliant on someone else’s platform we don’t ultimately control, and not feeling the need to spend the time to diversify our audience by building on other platforms.

-How do we overcome to succeed? Where do we go from here?