HN user
Founder of Benchcoach.com
Also consider going the the Fantasy Sports Trade Association conferences. They have them twice a year and the opportunity to meet a lot of folks in the Fantasy sports world gives you an opportunity for cross promotion and just meeting good guys (and it's almost all guys)
This is interesting stuff. I started a fantasy baseball analytics site as well a couple of years ago and have a bunch of feedback.
1) I would love for the site to integrate with my Yahoo/CBS/ESPN leagues and adjust the stat displays to account for my league settings
2) These stats are great for during research, but are also available at baseball-reference.com, fangraphs.com and several other sites. What would be great is for this to use the CBS/Yahoo API (scrape ESPN until they open their fantasy leagues API), and pull in my league info, teams, settings, positions and give me customized advice.
3) One this I found 2 years ago was that these stats were great for hard core stat nerds, but for more casual games, I've found that these numbers didn't make sense to them. We had to provide a simpler dashboard, with easily digestible recommendations/graphs and allow them to drill into more detail for each point.
4) Historical data is nice to have, but the real value would be to use the historical data to try and project the future. I don't really care that in 35 career ABs that Aaron Hill hit 4 HR (too small a sample size). What I'd like to know, is given his age, his ball park, and the profiles of the opposing starting pitchers, what range of stats can I expect from him?
5) In addition to historical stats, it would be nice to use your particular league context to define what a "good" trade is. For instance, trading Miguel Cabrera for Michael Bourn late in the season may seem crazy, but if you need SB and trading Cabrera to an opponent might prevent your nearest opponents from gaining on you in HR/RBI, this trade might make all the sense and actually improve your odds of winning.
These are just some of my quick thoughts and I hope they help.
We just went through something similar this past summer, where a large company approached us about purchasing our technology and team. At first, we were extremely excited and we worked our butts off to get a couple of new features that were in the works out the door and had a second meeting with them to demo the new features and then spoke to their head guy about terms and numbers.
They kept delaying and hemming and hawing and the intent to acquire cooled off a bit leaving us a little disheartened and wondering what happened.
Like you guys, we had to go and continue working on our product but at the same time, allocate time to replenish our coffers as you said but we're still trying to figure out what happened.
We do mostly baseball and in our first year, we used a bunch of retrosheet data for historical data and we went with BIS for current season data. They're pretty laid back and their data was pretty detailed for us. Recently, we went with MLB.com's xml data over at http://gd2.mlb.com/components/game/mlb/ where we had to do a bunch more calculations to get all the data we wanted, but it's free (for now).
We also looked at XML Team and I found their prices to be completely reasonable and they have a per document pricing structure which allows you to control your costs to a much greater extend.
We also spoke with Stats Inc and found them to be pretty unreasonable in terms of dealing with startups and for home projects.
Hit me up if you want any more data or if Benchcoach can help with the data on the baseball side. We're looking at expanding it to football and basketball this year so we've been speaking with XML team about that.
Has Yahoo actually complained? I heard that they were opening an API for their fantasy sports products.
i see that you take our credentials for yahoo and you take us to the url to add a player. Can you actually, post the transaction for us as well? Or are you giving the users the chance to review the change before submitting?