Boston-Based HuddleHub Looks to Drastically Improve Fantasy Sports Management
Of the 23 million fantasy players across the country, 50 percent play in multiple leagues on multiple sites. It can be a lot to manage.
Adan Gutierrez and Patrick Hereford hope to make that process easier with HuddleHub, a Boston-based company whose website launches Monday, Aug. 30. The site gives fantasy players the opportunity to track their fantasy leagues from ESPN.com and Yahoo in one place and to manage their teams from their iPhone or Android devices.
"We want to be trendsetters," Gutierrez said.
Gutierrez and Hereford came up with the idea for HuddleHub last Septemper while sitting on a coach with their laptops and watching Sunday football games. They were checking in on their fantasy teams, but they had to hop all over the internet to keep up.
"This is really annoying," they thought, and just like that, they started working on creating HuddeHub.
Huddlehub has big plans. The site expects to soon expand to fantasy providers CBS Sports and Athlon Sports, and HuddelHub also is looking to host its own fantasy leagues. The site doesn't plan on staying limited to football and baseball, and is looking to create NASCAR and soccer leagues as well.
An application for the Palm platform and a March Madness aggregation tool also may be in the works, but Gutierrez mainly plans on expanding services as fans desire. The company, he says, is small enough to be far more responsive to the desire of users than ESPN or Yahoo currently is, and Gutierrez "wants the users to have as much ownership of the site as we do."
The mobile apps will soon offer options to purchase additional content such as waiver alerts and a red-zone feature.
"If you are out at a bar and somebody has a huge game, your phone will alert you, and you can be the first in your league to claim them," Gutierrez explained.
At the moment, ESPN's app doesn't allow a manager to add or drop players. HuddleHub's functionality will exceed those limited uses.
HuddleHub's most ambitious feature, though, may be its vision of being "the Facebook of fantasy sports." Other sites may offer message boards and smack talk, but Gutierrez wants HuddleHub to provide something bigger — a network for all fantasy players to interact and show off their lifetime of fantasy achievements.
Over the past decade, Gutierrez has witnessed a drastic increase in fantasy interest.
"Five to 10 years ago, when you brought up fantasy sports, people looked at you like you were talking about role-playing games," he said.
Now, not only do most people know exactly what fantasy sports are, but people of all ages and backgrounds are getting involved. While women only make up 15 to 20 percent of the current fantasy market, Gutierrez believes that number will go up a lot in the near future, and HuddleHub will make a concerted effort to appeal to female users.
"It's not just a man's game," he explained.
As for advice in your fantasy league this year, Gutierrez recommends points-per-reception leagues, since they offer an extra dimension of strategy, and he sees Vikings receiver Bernard Berrian and Redskins running back Clinton Portis as strong sleeper options.
With Percy Harvin and Sidney Rice having health issues, Berrian should become Brett Favre's
No. 1 option, Gutierrez explained.
HuddleHub's iPhone and Droid apps will be available for the 2010 football season.
