Teamwork. That’s where we started. Roey, Jason, and myself, talking baseball as usual. Talking about how no matter how much we knew when draft day rolled around, we just ended up in a blur, struggling to keep all the names and numbers in our heads and wondering which players would work best with our teams. Jason, our numbers guru, marveled at how undervalued Eric Byrnes was, since he strengthened teams in so many ways. We needed to pick the combination of players who worked best together for our particular league, that’s what we recognized.
So, we stopped complaining and decided to do something about it. Last year, in a few short weeks, we put together a tool that helped us observe how the portfolio of a team changed as it was drafted, how each player picked affected the team as a whole. Despite the short timeframe and web design reminiscent of 1998, 
over 100 of you used our Beta version. We had no expectations, but the response was overwhelming. The majority of you told us that the portfolio approach made sense AND your teams were succeeding.
We surprised ourselves – and immediately we began thinking “what’s next?”
We started planning this year’s product and got other talented folks to round out our team. You can see the results of that with this year’s version. The site’s faster, the product’s more intuitive, and we think it looks a whole lot better!
But that’s not all. In studying the stats, we came to the conclusion that portfolio management was just the first step in making smarter decisions. This year we’ve focused on furthering a new innovation in drafting:
I’m happy to introduce our improved DraftMVP Targets. While the portfolio view that our charts enable help you see your team as a whole, it also raises the question: exactly where should I be in each category? In response to this, we’ve improved our distinct category targets based on your league settings and, of course, a mountain of historical data. These targets are not meant to always be exactly dead-on, but we’re hoping that you can use them as a tool to make better sense of the immense amount of data available to you when drafting this year. As the year progresses we look forward to your input as we continuously work to refine our targets.
And with that, I’ll close our opening blog post. Stay tuned for more analyses and thoughts throughout the season. We’re excited for you to use our product. Tell us how we can improve it, share it with your friends, and most importantly, go draft a stellar team.
Thanks
Cyrus