FanDuel Upgrades Quick Player Replace Function
FanDuel has released an upgraded version of our Quick Player Replace function. Based on feedback from users of this function, you can now select which start time and salary cap combination you will be making a player substitution for. This filtering ability makes Quick Player Replace more flexible, and allows more effective lineup editing for people who are entered in contests with different start times or different salary caps on the same day. For those who are new to the Quick Player Replace function, it can be accessed from either the main ‘My Contests’ screen or the ‘Upcoming Entries’ screen.
Mike Kuchera joins FanDuel as our Customer Support Manager
We’d like to introduce you to Mike Kuchera (username: MikeKuchera) who joins FanDuel as our Customer Support Manager. Mike has been involved with the fantasy sports industry since 2006 when he started a fantasy baseball podcast called The Fantasy Man Show. The podcast turned into a website at TheFantasyMan.com and a blog at FantasyBaseballExpress.com and then “The Fantasy Man” brand was born. The Fantasy Man has spent almost 6 years helping beginner and expert fantasy players win their leagues. Mike has a Bachelor’s in Sport Management from Flagler College in Florida and a Master’s in Education from Mercy College in NY and has worked for such organizations as the WWE, Under Armour, LPGA, USTA and the New York Knicks with experience in customer service, sales, online marketing and live event marketing. Now, he takes his extreme passion for fantasy sports to improve the user experience here at FanDuel as the Customer Support Manager.
Excellent customer service here at FanDuel is crucial to our success. We want to keep our users happy and provide the best experience in the daily fantasy sports realm. FanDuel has added a tab at the top of the website labeled “Support”. Have a problem, a question or a funding issue? It’s as easy as clicking on the tab and submitting a support ticket. The fastest way to get help is to read and search our FAQ page, which is easily accessible. However, if you can’t find an answer, this is when you would submit a support ticket. The Customer Support Manager will be involved with monitoring the chat box on the home page and assuring that every ticket that comes through is handled quickly and appropriately. Remember, FanDuel is still young and as our user base grows, the FanDuel experience grows. Currently, we have two people dedicated to customer support, Mike and Mark Williams, and we’re working to make this department a success. It takes time and we’re human too, but we’re taking every question, every issue, and every situation to heart to make the experience on FanDuel better for you, the user.
Fanduel is looking for a Marketing Manager
Job Description
Marketing Manager – Media Campaigns
Job Overview:
Hubdub (Fanduel.com) is a well-funded premium games start-up looking for an exceptional individual to join our marketing team as Marketing Manager for Media Campaigns.
Your job will be to drive thousands of users to play our games. You will be instrumental in the success of the games and a key member of a small and elite marketing team.
You will be a proven media campaign specialist, adept at running paid media marketing campaigns direct and via ad networks, print and broadcast. You will be metrics-focused, using analysis to optimize campaigns to achieve the best ROI and cost of user acquisition.
This is an exciting opportunity to have real impact and project ownership in a fast growing and fun organisation.
Responsibilities:
- Media campaign management
- Buying media either direct or via ad networks
- Buying print and broadcast media
- Manage the production of collateral for all channels
- Detailed analysis of campaign results to optimize the ROI
- Detailed analysis of user cost of acquisition via paid media channels
- Inform the overall marketing strategy – messaging, positioning, promotions/offers, referral bonuses, etc.
- Develop relationships with and manage third party agencies including; ad networks, media agencies, PPC/social networks (Google, Facebook, etc.), print publications, etc.
Requirements:
The following are essential:
- 3-5 years experience running paid media marketing campaigns in B2C environment
- Experience buying online media both direct with media properties and across ad networks
- Experience running multiple integrated ad campaigns with a focus on acquisition and maximizing campaign ROI
- Experience optimizing campaign assets and conversion funnels
- Strong quantitative and Excel skills
The following are major pluses:
- Experience buying print and broadcast advertising
- Knowledge of mobile advertising
- Start-up experience
Other skills required:
- Creativity
- People and agency management skills
- Great attention to detail, highly organized, with a focus on quality of work
- Superior interpersonal skills
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills
- Passion for fantasy sports, games and consumer web business models
You must have excellent professional references
Please submit resume and cover letter to Lesley Eccles at careers@fanduel.com.
Do you have what it takes? FanDuel is looking for a customer support manager.
Job Overview:
Looking for a chance to get involved in the emerging daily fantasy sports market? Then FanDuel wants to hear from you. We’re looking for a Customer Support Manager who has what it takes to help us push FanDuel to the next level.
FanDuel is recognized as the world’s leading daily fantasy sports game, and we are growing at a phenomenal rate. We have given away over $5 million in prizes, launched tournaments that attract thousands of players and are scaling our team and operations to do more, faster!
Despite our growth we pride ourselves on providing excellent customer service and support and that is something we want to build on and improve…with your help.
Our passionate and dedicated Customer Support team is at the forefront of ensuring we maintain our reputation and critical to our continued success by helping users have a superior customer experience.
The Customer Support team is responsible for providing support to our users; interacting daily to help them enjoy and play our games, assist with account opening and funding issues, provide constant communication in the event of game problems, identify issues and problems as soon as possible so the engineering team can jump on them right away, and be a constant supporter and advocate of the users and FanDuel.
You will need to be passionate about fantasy sports (and US pro-sports in general), love interacting with users to help them get the best experience possible from our games and excel at dealing with the challenge of solving issues in real time.
What you will be doing:
The Customer Support Manager will be responsible for building and leading support team; hiring to our high standards other team members that are passionate about sports, helping users and maintaining our high quality experience. Once team members have been hired, you will help them get trained to ensure they are familiar with all the tools and the issues they are likely to encounter on daily basis. You’ll also help the product team ways we can improve our site and the ways we provide support so users can get instant answers to questions.
This is an incredible opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a rapidly growing start-up. FanDuel is the market leader in the fastest growing segment of the fantasy sports industry, and the decisions that you make will help shape the future of the industry. Compensation is competitive, and will include the possibility of stock options or equity.
Location: New York, NY
Job Type: Full time
What we are looking for:
- First and foremost you need to be passionate about fantasy sports
- Ability to work hours that include 5pm-9pm Eastern
- Willingness to work weekends and off hours shifts as needed to accommodate the US sports schedule
- Extremely strong communication skills – especially written, but also on the phone
- Ability to quickly understand complex topics related to the contests and other issues on the site and exhibit good judgment with regard to handling those issues
- Willingness to be on call 24-7 at times
- Experience at providing high touch customer support
- Experience of managing a small team working to flexible schedules
Job specifics:
- Oversee all areas of customer support, including building and managing the team (e.g. hiring, training, supervising, development)
- Resolve all user issues, questions, incidents, compaints, etc. in a timely and professional manner and to the complete satisfaction of the user
- Process withdrawal requests, while monitoring for fraudulent activity
- Understand the nature of user issues, interpret the complexities and escalate as appropriate to product and engineering team members
- Communicate user requests, needs and trends internally
- Provide an internal monthly report, with summaries of major issues, user needs and recommendations
- Identify ways in which we can improve how we provide support (tools, etc.)
- Develop resourcing plans for scaling the customer support team as the user base grows
Other skills we will be looking for:
- Proven and demonstrable experience of customer support in a consumer centric web product company.
- Creativity
- Passion for helping people
- People management skills
- Great attention to detail, highly organized, with a focus on quality of work
- Superior interpersonal skills
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills
- 3+ years of experience
- Excellent professional references
How do I Apply?
To apply for this position send your resume and cover letter to alex@fanduel.com. Due to the amount of great applications we have already received, applicants must include a cover letter addressing the questions below or they will not be considered for the position.
Your cover letter needs to:
1. Explain why you are the right person for this role – refer to the job description for details of the specific skills and experience we are seeking
2. Detail your experience with fantasy sports in general, and daily fantasy sports in particular
3. Demonstrate your strong written communication skills, your understanding of complex support issues and your good judgment by providing a response to both of the following hypothetical support scenarios…
#1 – Ten minutes after games start, you receive a support ticket from a user that says the following: “Help! I just entered a 10 person, $100 entry fee contest. After submitting my lineup, I noticed that I’m the 11th person in the contest. Please cancel my entry from this contest.” Please write a brief response to this user (note that we are not so much interested in the right answer as we are in how you respond) and detail why you gave that response by including an explanation of the thought process behind it. For purposes of this discussion, assume that you will not be able to get guidance from another member of the Fanduel team for the next two hours.
#2 – Five minutes before game time, you get the following support ticket: “Help! I accidentally entered a $100 contest. It’s contest number S123456. Please cancel it for me.” The ticket comes from a player who you know has never entered a contest above $25 before. Assume that you haven’t been given any guidelines for this scenario, that you do have the technical capability to cancel player entries, and that you’re expected to handle issues of this magnitude without any assistance. What do you think the correct resolution would be and why? What is your reasoning and what factors do you think are relevant to the decision?
Again, please get your resume and cover letter to alex@fanduel.com as soon as possible and we will get back to shortly.
The $100,000 FanDuel Daily Fantasy Baseball Championship Is Here!
While I know many of you have been growing accustomed to the $5000 MVP and the $4000 Home Run contests, I’m sure in the back of your mind you kept wondering “When exactly is there going to be some ridiculously huge tournament going on?”
Well, the answer is right now.
The $100,000 FanDuel Daily Fantasy Baseball Championship begins this Friday, May 13th. And one person is going to have a very lucky Friday the 13th. But let’s get to how the tournament works.
Every Friday from May 13th to September 2nd, FanDuel will have a DFBC qualifier. There’s $2000 up for grabs each week, but the key prize is for each week’s winner – a seat in the 20-person Sept. 9th final with nearly $70,000 on the line. All 20 finalists will win money, with the overall champion claiming a whopping $25,000.
Now, you may be saying May 13th to September 2nd? That’s only 17 Fridays (actually, you didn’t say that, but I’ll help you out anyway). The extra three spots in the final will come from two awesome challenges we’re doing. The Tournament Kings Challenge – where you have to kick butt in the featured MLB contests. And the Ironman Challenge – where you have to play FanDuel nearly everyday for the next three months (come on you wuss, you know you can do it).
So, not much else to say except that it’s time to get playing. Click here to enter your team and with any luck (or more likely skill), you could soon be the Daily Fantasy Baseball Champion.
An interview with the winner of FanDuel’s $25,000 MLB Grand Slam
Nothing like a little FanDuel
As many of you know by now, user thruthewickets won FanDuel’s $25,000 MLB Grand Slam. In fact, he did more than just win it, he came in first and second.
So who is thruthewickets? His name is Brian and he’s from Buffalo, NY and he joined FanDuel the day before the Grand Slam. The Grand Slam was the first contest he ever played on FanDuel. Let’s let Brian tell us what it was like to become the definition of an instant winner.
How does it feel to have won not just first place, but second place too in FanDuel’s $25,000 MLB Grand Slam?
What an unbelievable day. I didn’t even check the scores until about 8pm, when I noticed I had a few entries near the top of the leaderboard. I then watched the Seattle game closely, having selected Felix Hernandez. He came through with a big game and I was pretty stunned to finish 1st & 2nd. It still really hasn’t sunk in.
Who was your most important player?
Without a doubt it was J.P. Arencibia. He put up a great score with a low price tag. (Arencibia – who only cost $2,200 – put up 17.75 points)
Is this the first time you have played one-day fantasy?
Yes! Some major beginner’s luck…but I can’t ever see going back to season long leagues after this experience. It’s so exciting competing every day.
Have you ever won anything like this before?
Not unless you consider winning concert tickets from a radio station to be something like this.
How did you find out about FanDuel?
My friend John (who plays as Buffalo66 on FanDuel) suggested I give daily fantasy sports a try. He recommended FanDuel because of the large field contests you offer regularly.
What will you do with your winnings?
Well, I’m trying to decide between 20,000 chicken wings with extra bleu cheese, or a camel. If there’s anything left over, I might play some more FanDuel contests.
A brand new user wins the FanDuel MLB Grand Slam!
Imagine joining FanDuel on Thursday, playing in the $25,000 MLB Grand Slam on Friday and then waking up to $7500 in your account on Saturday. Sounds too good to be true, right? Not if you’re FanDuel user thruthewickets. Yes, thruthewickets joined FanDuel on Thursday, entered several amazing teams into the Grand Slam on Friday, and wound up not just winning the $5000 first place Grand Slam prize, he also came in second too ($2500). Not bad for one day’s work.
So who did the winning team consist of? P – Felix Hernandez, C – J.P. Arencibia, 1B – Adam Dunn, 2B – Gordon Beckham, 3B – Placido Polanco, SS – Hanley Ramirez, LF – Adam Lind, CF – Carlos Gonzalez, RF – Jose Bautista. That team produced the winning score of 86 points. His 2nd place team scored 82 points.
The remaining top 10 finishers – aside from hockey specialist and chat room regular, hendog – featured quite a few new users. They are as follows:
3. jmp5029 ($1700 – 75 points)
4. leftybob721 ($1150 – 73.5 points)
5. hendog ($850 – 73.25 points)
6. jmp5029 ($675 – 72.41 points)
7. joker_49024 ($525 – 72.33 points)
8. sleekgreek ($400 – 71.33 points)
9. boxcars ($400 – 70.75 points)
10. gruntz ($400 – 70.66 points)
Thanks again to all for playing, and be sure to check out these upcoming games.
$4,000 Saturday MLB Home Run - $10 entry, capped at 444 total entries
$1,000 Saturday MLB Bunt – $5 entry, no cap on total number of entries
$2,500 Sunday MLB Steal – $5 entry, capped at 555 total entries
Last chance to enter the $25,000 MLB Grand Slam
Today’s the day we’ve all been waiting for. April 1st. And not just so we can prank our coworkers (my personal favorite is the saran wrap on the toilet seat).
No, I’m talking about today, April 1st, is the day of the $25,000 MLB Grand Slam on FanDuel. $5000 for 1st place – not bad for one day’s work – and prizes down to 150th place.
By the way, did you know this is the largest single day fantasy payout ever? That it is. So join in before the 1:05pm EST cut off. And by Saturday morning, you may be a much richer individual and we will all fall to the ground in awe in your majesty.
So, as Arnold Schwarzenegger said in Predator: “Do it! Do it now!” As in, enter the contest.
FanDuel Insider is here to provide you with great fantasy sports articles
We’re exactly one week away from the $25K MLB Grand Slam, so it’s time to introduce you to FanDuel’s newest creation: FanDuel Insider.
FanDuel Insider is a site devised to assist you in all aspects of daily fantasy sports. Currently, the site is focused only on MLB. We’ll have everything from batter/pitcher matchups, pitching suggestion, stat breakdowns, feature stories, interviews with winners and more. And we’d also like to introduce you to our current staff. All five of our MLB writers have an extensive background writing about MLB. In fact, you probably know most of them. We’ve also listed their usernames since you’re bound to see them on site playing as well. They are:
Derek Carty (derekcarty): Manager and lead writer for The Hardball Times
RJ White (rjwhitepages): Lead writer and editor at Fantasy Baseball Café and Fantasy Football Café.
Chet Gresham (cgdoc): Lead writer for Razzball Baseball and Razzball Football
Will Brinson (rwbrinso): Published on Yahoo! Sports, ESPN, The Sporting News, Senior NFL blogger for CBSSports.com
Antonio D’Arcangelis (tonydizzle): Published on SI.com, Yahoo! Sports and RotoExperts
They already been writing articles for the past week. There are already some great articles on park factors, finding cheap pitching value and Opening Day matchups.
So check out the site now. We’ll have a minimum of two articles per day for you, and often as many as four or five. Good luck with MLB season.
$500 Fanduel Refer-a-friend Contest: Mar 21-Mar 31
Fanduel will be awarding a total of $500 to the top finishers in our refer-a-friend contest, which will run from 12:01am Eastern on Monday, March 21 though 11:59pm Eastern on Thursday, March 31.
Only referrals of new players who register and make their first deposit during the time period of the contest will be counted. The top three finishers in this contest will be awarded $300, $150, and $50.
Players referred using an affiliate code will not be counted. To receive credit for a referral make sure that they use your personal referral link or respond to a contest challenge or invitation link.
The contest will have no impact on other bonuses received for referring new players (or received by new players for being referred).
Also, please note that we will not be providing interim updates on contest standings.
Any attempts to cheat in this contest (including, but not limited to, the creation of bogus accounts) will result in disqualification from the contest at Fanduel’s discretion and may result in other penalties.
