Pitch Deck: Sports Analyst Matthew Berry’s Fantasy Life Raises $7M

Fantasy football season is the best season.

You get together with your friends, create a league, draft your favorite players, and face off every week throughout the NFL calendar to hopefully end up the winner and earn bragging rights until the season starts again.

Those are the basics of a fantasy league. But what if you don’t know much about the NFL, and are looking for some assistance in picking out the best players for your roster for the games on Sunday? Or perhaps you know a lot about fantasy football and want to find content to interact with or similar people to talk with. Maybe you want to get into fantasy sports betting.

Fantasy Life, a brand started by NBC football analyst Matthew Berry, wants to offer something for every level of fantasy football fan — and it just secured a $7 million raise led by LRMR Ventures.

Fantasy sports is “the great equalizer,” Berry told Business Insider. “It brings people together. From the kid in the mail room to the CEO, to rockstars, to kids, to grandmothers. Almost every one of our investors plays fantasy football.”

How Fantasy Life grew from a book to a media company

Berry wrote Fantasy Life, a book that became a New York Times bestseller. It’s about all the ins and outs of fantasy football, along with the social aspect of it, from punishments for coming in last to trash-talking with your friends. He quickly turned it into a newsletter. Austin Rief, the cofounder of Morning Brew, is a friend and advisor to Fantasy Life, and he told Berry that he had something big in the fantasy sports space.

“You’re doing about 6 billion things wrong, and yet, even with one hand tied behind your back, you’re still doing better numbers than we did in year three of Morning Brew,” Berry recalled Rief telling him. (Morning Brew shares a parent company with BI.)

“That’s when we pivoted,” Berry said.

After that, the newsletter became a website, and Berry hired Eliot Crist as CEO. The Fantasy Life team has since grown from a newsletter to a full media company, with a website full of written content and radio and video shows about fantasy football.

In addition to fantasy football analysis, Fantasy Life offers betting analysis for all major sports leagues, videos on fantasy football, and ways to play through Guillotine Leagues, a unique fantasy football experience.

“We think we’re in a really strong position to do something that’s that’s never been done before in the space,” Crist said.

Berry hopes that Guillotine Leagues will revolutionize fantasy football

Part of Fantasy Life’s growth included acquiring Guillotine Leagues, a new way to play fantasy sports with friends.

Traditional leagues have games that are played every week, and if you lose one week, you just drop in the standings. You rotate through players, adding, dropping, and trading depending on what your team needs.

Guillotine Leagues offers a different take. With its gameplay, if you lose, you are out, and all the players on your roster are released back into the pool to be picked up by everyone else who remains.

Berry said there were some key elements that made him want to buy Guillotine Leagues. One was the playtime, with users spending an average of 22 minutes on the platform per session, per the company.

“We think that Guillotine Leagues is the next big thing in fantasy football, and our goal is to have as many people try it as possible, because we think that once you do, you’re going to be like, ‘this is the only way I want to play fantasy,'” Berry said.

Read the 14-slide investor deck below.