One Text Away From Glory: Fantasy Football Nerd Delivers Injury Updates Via Twilio SMS

One Text Away From Glory: Fantasy Football Nerd Delivers Injury Updates Via Twilio SMS

Fantasy Football can be a cruel and fickle beast. At times it heightens the average fan’s experience watching games. The next game day, it brings them to crushing lows. For better or worse, it’s clear hundreds of thousands of fans are locked into the Fantasy Football roller coaster ride.

Joe Dyken, founder of Fantasy Football Nerd aims to give fantasy football diehards a competitive edge in their leagues by compiling all the leading fantasy data, sorting it via a slick API, and distributing it to fantasy football players.

Sweet Victory, Only One Text Away

Joe remembers the day that he was one text message short from winning gold in his fantasy football league. Joe was driving to Lambeau Field to see his beloved Packers play. In the time it took to get from his house to the stadium, the news broke that Rams’ running back Steven Jackson was injured. Joe missed the critical window to sub Jackson out from his starting lineup which cost him two points, and lost him the league’s championship.

Keeping Fantasy Football Fans In The Game

Joe hopes to save Fantasy Football Nerd users from the same tragic fate. He’s now using Twilio SMS to give FF Nerds alerts about player injuries 30 minutes before every game. All the pertinent information is included in one text message to save users from a bombardment of incoming SMS with each torn ACL, twisted ankle or elbow injury.

Joe recognizes that football is a game of inches, while Fantasy Football is a game of seconds. The hardcore fans troll Fantasy Football news sites every five minutes, but the average fan doesn’t do that. Joe hopes to save those fans the trouble of combing Twitter, by offering them proactive SMS alerts. The alerts are simple. You’ll get a text saying “FFN iAlert [Player] of the [Team] has been ruled inactive.”

Being on top of injury news is huge to the average player, and SMS notifications allow Joe to communicate with FF Nerd users instantly. Dyken remembers trying to build an SMS update feature a few years ago using a spreadsheet and a cobbled together API. “It was very cumbersome,” said Dyken. “It was more headaches that it was worth. Twilio took all the headaches I had in the past and eliminated them.” Using Twilio, Joe had the SMS alert feature up and running within 5-10 minutes.

While Dyken is happy that the alerts are working out for his users, he can’t help but imagine how that one fateful day driving to Lambeu field might have turned out differently if he had gotten a text alert. “Had Twilio and FF Nerd existed in that time, I would have gotten a text, put in a back up and won the championship.”