Let’s cut to the chase.
The fantasy whales 2025 beta is canceled. I was unable to reach my goal of having 10 fully-onboarded leagues to playtest this season. Total flop.
Given how the game currently works (balanced for min. 8 players, requires engagement every week) there’s little feedback to gain from conducting a 12-week beta when you have practically no quality test subjects. To the few leagues that did successfully onboard: I sincerely apologize for wasting your time.
The decision to cancel was not made lightly, and what it comes down to this: My time is also valuable and I need to find a better strategy. I’m excited to make use of the allotted free time to pursue new opportunities on the path to make fantasy whales great (more on that in a minute)
Thank you so much for your interest in fantasy whales and for giving me a shot. It makes me really happy to see almost 100 complete strangers bought-in to the idea of betting on your fantasy team. I’m going to get it right eventually, you’re just going to have to bear with me…
Over the past 1+ year I’ve gotten the chance to build something I genuinely cared about and believed in. I was obsessed. It was a thrill the entire way, and I’m grateful for how much I’ve gotten to learn.
My notes from this month
Here’s what I was able to accomplish in the past year…
Designed a econ strategy game on top of traditional fantasy football that lets you make bets with your fantasy league during the regular season
Created a custom API to get fantasy provider data from ESPN + Sleeper
Learned how to code a robust, secure backend api server (highly recommend this video)
Learned html/css/javascript and React to design my first ever website/frontend
Successfully piloted a full-stack application that operated my game, playtesting with just my home league for V1
Collected user feedback and iterated to a much better version of the game with an enhanced UI for V2 (2025 season)
Created landing page, best-in-class league sync onboarding flow, newsletter, everything I needed to finally tell the world about fantasywhales.com
…all to learn the lesson that I can’t do everything myself.
I probably spent close to 200 hours working on the game in August alone. It’s basically been another full-time job for me. And I’ve been so busy building the damn thing that I’ve had no time to create adequate guides/resources/education to properly market it.
This was my main argument to my friends’ leagues/reddit this year:
So I made the classic newbie dev mistake of building a product before there’s clear demand/users (which I was okay with at the time, I was only aiming to get beta testers) But there was always another threat looming in the back of my mind.
From the start I knew there was going to be a big problem I’d have to face in order for this to work. And it has been fully realized this season— It’s hard as shit to convince everybody in a fantasy league to try out something new.
Fantasy football a game of tradition. Nobody wants change (believe me, it was almost impossible to get my league to switch from ESPN to Sleeper this year) and that’s just how it is. Coordinating a dozen people to pay their buy-ins/dues is hard enough.
For every 1 person who loved the idea and wanted to share fantasy whales with their league, they were either met with indifference or opposition from at least 1 other. Unfortunately, with the way the game is designed, it just doesn’t work without at least 8 people, and even still, it’s no where near as fun as having everybody on board.
So that simple truth along with the exhaustive 1-man-show I’ve been running for this endeavor has me hanging up the cleats for now. Though I’ve thoroughly enjoyed building it up until this point, I’m too burnt out to continue development without fruit to bear for my efforts.
fantasy whales has come a long way from it’s infancy as a dusty web app that I forced my home league to buy-into for $50 each:
v1: straight bets with just your matchup
v2: custom spread + O/U bets with anybody in your league
v1: player profile dashboard (desktop-only, ugly)
v2: player profile dashboard (mobile-optimized, sexy)
I want to be clear that I am not quitting/walking away. I still believe in the long-term vision of what fantasy whales aims to be: A fun, all-in-one way to make side bets your fantasy league. The current version is just not it.
My hope is that 1 year from now I’ll have a small team around me that can help me get this thing to work how it should. Rather than spend this whole season bogged down trying to do everything everywhere all at once, I could instead focus on what matters. That starts with no longer just building in the dark and instead telling you all what fantasy whales actually is.
So for the time being I’m going to treat this newsletter like my own personal journal. Every Wednesday I’m going to share more insight into the story of fantasy whales and where I think its going. There’ll also be a section of the newsletter dedicated to traditional fantasy analysis + memes, so I hope you stick around.
The main goal of this season is to finally organize all my thoughts and ideas in a way that gets people excited to work with me/play some version of fantasy whales in 2026.
If you want to unsubscribe, click the button below— no hard feelings.
For everybody else, thank you for reading and I’ll see you next Wednesday. You can reply directly this email, or shoot me a message on twitter @kylerudm with any questions/messages.
— Kyle (whale #001)
Cape Cod (2025), Alleghany Extended Draft Weekend