I have been reading everyone’s posts here, but I didn’t want to respond too often and derail a good, important conversation. I appreciate the support and I understand the skepticism.
I’ll focus this post on the concerns raised about tying a roadmap or milestones to the price change. I take major issue with the notion that the platform hasn’t already undergone major improvements, especially in terms of mobile and the auction draft.
- Head-to-head and playoffs were added this offseason. This constitutes “a real feature enhancement”, certainly.
- The auction backend was completely rewritten in 2016 and has been improved iteratively since then. There are still issues, but auction drafts are getting better and smoother every season. It is hard to write site updates about those changes because they are pretty technical, but I believe a lot of you have noticed that auction drafts have been less and less buggy.
- There have been improvements to the mobile experience. Going through the Wishlist sub-forum you can see a variety of mobile-focused changes that have been made, lineup page improvements and live page improvements being the two most obvious ones. I’ve also mentioned search page improvements, and the recent player page changes. These interface improvements have not made the mobile experience perfect but have made the experience significantly better than where it was in 2015.
If there are other concerns that haven’t been addressed, please please please create a topic in the Wishlist forum, or upvote an existing Wishlist topic. It is the absolute best way for me to see the ways you want Ottoneu to improve.
I work to make the site better - I want it to be better on mobile, I want to add a ton of features that have been asked for on the wishlist, I want to make the auction draft infinitely scalable and smooth. I guess in my mind it was implicit that I’d continue to make the same kinds of improvements I have been making, with hopefully additional revenue so I can afford to continue working on Ottoneu full time and maybe add a second developer to make some of the improvements faster. The price change is being made in order to make the business sustainable for the long-term, because currently it is not sustainable for the long-term
We have do not know how much the price change will affect our bottom line in 2019. Being specific about changes that are only possible with additional revenue without knowing how much revenue we will have in 2019 simply does not make sense to me. I do not want to promise anything that we then can not deliver on due to financial constraints. Once we have a picture of what our 2019 revenue looks like, you can expect some specific updates about our planned improvements going forward, similar to how we announced Head-to-Head in the 2017-18 offseason.
I consider myself lucky that enough users are passionate enough about Ottoneu for a conversation like this thread to occur, and I do not take for granted that people are willing to spend their hard-earned money and increasingly limited time playing Ottoneu Fantasy Baseball. Thank you for your continued support and passion.