XP Fantasy’s Beta Launch
Overview
This past February, XP Fantasy hosted an inter-collegiate fantasy esports tournament for 13 collegiate schools across Canada. We wanted to do something special before our official launch in March and thought an inter-collegiate tournament would provide a unique way for students and alumni to test our platform.
Tournament Details
The tournament rules were as follows:
Each student/alumni competed in a free-for-all tournament on the XP Fantasy platform to accumulate the most “fantasy points” in order to win the ultimate prizes of:
👑1st place: PS5
🥈2nd -11th place: $20 Amazon gift card each
🎮12th-16th place: $10 Riot Points each
Participants accumulated fantasy points by drafting a custom lineup of professional LCS (League of Legends Championship Series) players based on their expected in-game performance. The participants with the most fantasy points at the end of the tournament were crowned the winners! The entire tournament was also free for students and alumni to enter.
The Good (Where We Succeeded)
From partnering with 13 different collegiate schools + their affiliated esports clubs, we were able to have nearly 100 students compete in our fantasy esports tournament. We also grew our Discord community to 200+ active users — with many users discussing the results of the games and providing feedback on how we could improve the platform. Many users shared how much they enjoyed playing on the platform which was not only encouraging to hear, but also helped validate that XP Fantasy is fulfilling a need in the esports space. Additionally, since the entire tournament was held on the XP Fantasy platform and our community Discord, it was very easy to moderate questions and concerns so users could have a seamless experience.
We rolled out our premium subscription plan earlier this month and were happy to see that many of our most engaged users immediately subscribed — we look forward to further growing our subscription numbers from here!
The Bad (Where We Could Improve)
Hosting this tournament was a great learning experience, even if there were a few challenges that we faced along the way.
Originally, instead of a free-for-all format, we thought users would enjoy a team-based tournament format. The original plan was for students from the same university to compete together, where the scores of each school’s top players would then be added to determine the winning teams. However, when pitching this format to school clubs, we learned that some schools were not interested in participating because of the proposed tournament format. So, we did what every startup that caters to its users would do in this situation, we listened to their feedback and pivoted. Based on club suggestions, we devised the free-for-all tournament rules and every school was more excited about the tournament.
Final Thoughts
Overall, the tournament was successful in helping us:
- obtain extremely insightful user feedback;
- market our platform to our target market; and,
- easily segue into our official product launch.
We will likely host similar events in the future when we make significant updates to the platform —to both excite our user base and bring new users on to the platform. With the experience of our first intercollegiate tournament under our belt, our next tournament will be bigger and better than ever!
If you’re interested in learning more about XP Fantasy, check us out at https://xpfantasy.com/ and join our Discord community to see what we’re up to!
