It's been a month since my last essay - "Execute Phase 2". Since then, we've been working on executing that - product developments, market health, building our media arm. But also making internal changes, many of which are AI focused as we seek to leverage that power to let 15 dedicated people punch way above our weight.
I've got some observations I want to share about being a founder during the locked in and building phase, which people know less about than the loud marketing pushes around market and token launches.
I was actually going to write this yesterday, and the community were expecting it. But I didn't. One because I'm in Dubai atm and it's been disruptive. I also have way more shit to do to actually keep the company moving forward than just write. But actually those are just excuses - the main reason I didn't was I hadn't yet settled on what I wanted to say. Until today.
We've got the big picture to focus on and lots to talk about. But the mood this week in the community was dominated by NFL, and a lot of unhappiness about changes we made to the off-season reward system.
NFL Changes
A significant section of NFL players told us we'd broken a promise by changing the mechanics about how off-season rewards work.
I can understand it can be frustrating when things don't happen the way you expect. But the reality is, we change the game mechanics pretty much most weeks. Most of the time, it's welcomed. Next week for example we launch Picks, a new game mode which gives people even more rewards. We demo'd this at the Superbowl and people liked it.
The reality is, we are running an innovative startup that is only 6 months live, solving extremely challenging economic problems that other startups have failed to crack. And we've probably got further than all of them in just six months.
It has to be ok that things will change.
So it would be dumb of me to come out and say we will seek to minimise changes - we won't. We will pursue them actively when it makes the game better.
Because the game isn't good enough. It's a good foundation, but it's got to get better in every aspect. And it will keep evolving and changing as we get more information and feedback.
Over the past few weeks, I've seen people building detailed calculators and long-term strategies based on specific game mechanics - e.g calculating a yield over 9 months if X and Y factors remain constant.
My advice is - do not do this. We are effectively in our beta season - we are not a settled product that can offer our players predictability on specifics.
Some changes will feel like losses - something that benefited you is gone. But there are also massive upside surprises coming for off-season holders that you don't even know about yet.
There are however some things I can stake in the ground that can be relied on.
When you play Sport.Fun, you're not investing in a company. You are playing a game. You're backing a team that's solving genuinely hard problems in real time, and believing that we can do it when other very well funded teams have failed.
Thinking specifically of NFL - if you're holding through offseason, here's the promise I made:
I want the people who had the patience to hold through the doom and panic and yes boredom of off-season to look back when the new season starts and be really happy they stuck around.
That's the objective. That's what we're committed to delivering.
We're absolutely focused on making offseason work. On rewarding people who stayed with us. On proving that this model can work across seasons. That's super important to the success of the product. What I want to happen next season in NFL is that those who held through off-season come out telling everyone how glad they were that they stuck with it even when others were telling them to sell.
You can trust that we are incentivised to make that feel good.
But the HOW will change. Features will evolve. Balance will shift. Mechanics will adjust.
Not because we're fuck ups who do not do our homework. It's because we're navigating genuinely new territory amidst unpredictable economics that swing wildly sometimes. The "right" thing to do often depends on what others might do later.
PTSD is real
Another thing I noticed creeping in the second some people are unhappy with something is that they start throwing around accusations that "this is like X past project" that went wrong.
One of those projects was Fantasy Top. I don't actually know a ton about what happened with Fantasy Top. But I swear to god I will draw the line at being compared to French devs. That is just fucking uncivilised.
More seriously, I get it. Crypto has left people with legitimate PTSD. Projects that launched hard, sold tokens, made bold promises, and then either rugged or slowly faded away. I myself lost six figures on a previous iteration of "fantasy + trading". That was a shit day.
When you've been burned before, every blow up in Discord brings back bad memories.
I understand that feeling. But we're not those projects. And we are not those teams.
We've had a live game for nearly 6 months. We've processed $120M+ in volume. We've already re-invested millions into the game economy. We shipped an ICO that actually worked and launched a token that was well received. We're hiring, not firing. We still have well over $7m in the treasury and every cent of that money is there to build the company, the game, and ultimately grow our sports markets and $FUN.
We're not here for a quick flip. We're building a real business with real revenue and real staying power. We pay ourselves modest salaries, at market rate or lower in many cases. Personally I seed funded the business with my own cash, and went for many months without salary at all.
But I also understand that trust isn't built through words. It's built through time and consistent action. We will just keep going and doing the right things until at some point people realise we're here to stay.
We're going to keep building in good faith. We're going to keep shipping. We're going to keep improving the game.
And over time, I'm confident the actions will speak louder than the words.
Feedback vs attempted pressure
Feedback is good. When people point out problems, suggest improvements, or highlight pain points - that's valuable. That helps us build better.
There have been many examples of that even this week when it looks noisy. And the people who put their views across calmly and thoughtfully are 100x more influential than anyone else. We don't care how big your wallet is. We care what you say and how.
But there's a difference between feedback and people organising campaigns to try to pressure us into doing stuff.
Feedback is: "Here's a problem I'm seeing. Here's why it matters."
Attempted pressure is: "If you don't change this, I'm going to cause public problems and sell".
We welcome the first. We won't be swayed by the second.
Not because we don't care. But because building under pressure to never change anything and/or change other things doesn’t help us do our best work.
A word about Discord
While we're here, let's talk about community spaces.
This week I've seen Discord treated like a town hall for airing grievances by a loud minority. People repeating their same points over and over again, believing that if they cause enough drama they'll get their way.
Let me be clear about what Discord is for:
Our Discord is a sports bar where people come to be entertained. It's not a customer support channel.
We have specific feedback mechanisms:
• Support tickets for issues
• Feedback forms for suggestions
• Direct messages for serious concerns
Use those. They work. They get read. They get acted on.
But Discord is not the place to rally people behind your grievance. It's not the place to try and create pressure through public drama. It's not the place to turn every channel into a referendum on the latest game change.
Think of it this way: if you walked into a sports bar and someone started standing on tables yelling about how the bar's beer selection strategy was wrong and everyone should be angry about it... the bouncer would throw them out.
Same energy here.
We'll enforce this like nightclub bouncers stop people pissing on the floor.
You can disagree with decisions. You can give feedback. You can debate strategy and picks and sport.
But if you're consistently making the space worse - creating drama, stirring FUD, turning every conversation into a complaint session - you'll be removed. It doesn't help anyone. It distracts the team, makes other players not want to hang out in the space, and any new users looking in will just think “fuck that”.
This isn't because we can't handle criticism. It's because we're going to protect the vibe for everyone else who's there to actually enjoy the game. If you have something public you wanna say to fud the team feel free to tag me on X - that's designed for public grievances.
End of Retrospective - what's next?
This connects to what I wrote about Phase 2 execution last time.
We have the team. We have the resources. We have the vision. And we have a community of people who understand what we're building.
We're going to keep shipping.
We're in the middle of a ground up redesign of the app and user experience, we've made an expert UX hire who is examining every aspect. How do you make what we're doing feel simple, amazing, satisfying? How do you build an onboarding experience that lets fans know immediately "shit, this is the game for me?"
The Market Health work is well underway, with some practical improvements to address what I think is the platform's biggest problem right now - "I feel like I'm winning, but my squad value goes down anyway." Sometimes it feels like what we've built is exciting, it moves fast, it's dynamic, it's fun. But it’s like a Ferrari with no steering wheel, it can go off the rails if not controlled. We know this.
There is not one solution to this - its fiendishly complex - the unsolved problem in open market games. But we're on the right track and we will get there, I know it. The problems that people say can't be done are the most exciting to work on.
The media arm is spinning up. We've hired a new head of content, a new socials lead, and spun up powerful AI tools to help us create high quality consistent content. It starts soon.
Picks and division rankings is rolling out as soon as we’re done testing it. That's a skill based element to the game that shows the receipts - how good are you at specific selections? This gives a big flex if you get to the top of the divisions structure - it's the esports of Fantasy. And it's super rewarding - boosting your weekly gains if you do well each tournament.
Reputation is coming. Rep brings long term rewards and incentives, sort of like our Season Pass mixed with long term incentives to play.
We're also working on Scouting, Draft experiences, DARK MODE, multi-contract renewal, EXTENSIVE social features and more.
Phase 2 is about scaling from 10,000 crypto fans to 100,000 sports fan traders - and eventually millions of mainstream fans.
If that's exciting to you, I'm glad to have you with us. The details of what we're doing will change. But the objective of seeing our fans win with us never will.
We can't even guarantee success. But I can promise we are working hard, in good faith, to deliver something big and difficult. Wouldn't have it any other way.
───
Adam
Founder, Sport.Fun
