Update: My New Venture

As a lot of you in the community already know, I have been working hard behind the scenes for quite some time now, to bring an exciting vision and idea I had, a couple years back, to the FPL world.

It has been a real hard slog – as any start-up business owner will tell you – but we’re finally at a point now where we can release to the public, for the new season, what we’ve been working hard on.

No Bullshit, Just Me…

Before I go into explaining and revealing our exciting concept in a bit more detail, I want to you guys to understand some things.

Mainly, I want you guys to understand me.

I’m a simple guy who loves football and FPL. I’ve been living at my parents house for some time, working on building the foundations for this project.

They have been kind enough to allow me to stay at home, having rejected a move into the recruitment industry back in 2016, to pursue a dream and have supported me to that end ever since, for which I will be forever grateful.

I realised back then, that although the potential monetary gain from working in that industry would get me to where I wanted to be in my life, I realised that if I wasn’t happy along the way, then what is the point?

Since then I made it a goal to follow passions and do more of what makes me happy and what makes me happy, is football and everything to do with it.

So that, put simply, is what I am doing. I dropped everything I had planned (recruitment job, move to London) and put all my time, effort and money into chasing this dream – I am all in.

I’m not doing this for money. If I wanted just money, then I would be in London right now probably earning a very decent wage as a recruitment consultant, but no, I have been here, fighting hard to produce something I’m passionate about that I believe you guys will love.

My Aims…

My aim is to enhance the overall experience of playing FPL mini-leagues through custom durations and new innovative league types with your friends, work colleagues etc.

I want to make playing FPL, even more exciting and engaging through current and future developments.

I also want to achieve all this, whilst maintaining my individuality. You’ll not see us turn into corporate stooges with boring tweets and replies!

Furthermore, I want YOU all to be a part of this. I want to hear from you. I want to know what you think will help make our offering even better so we can, together, build a truly remarkable product/service that everyone is going to love to use.

What We’re Offering…

So, for those who don’t already know, what we’re offering is a site that allows you to create customised FPL mini leagues using your own FPL team.

You create your FPL team as normal on the official FPL site and you manage it there, but you can come over to us, and create more leagues (additional league slots to the ones you have on FPL – they will not count towards your allocated 20 from FPL), leagues that are customised by duration or a new league type.

CUSTOM DURATION

Have you ever been in a mini-league with mates, family or some work colleagues and come Christmas time, been completely out of the running for a cash place and wished you could start over? Well now you can.

So when I say custom duration, I mean, you can create, on our site, a league that spans from any GW to any GW.

You’re not solely restricted to creating a league that starts from GW X and finishes at the end of the season.

You can create a GW that lasts for 1 GW, or 4 GWs, or have one for half the season (GW1-19). What about a Christmas mini league? Or perhaps a mini league that’s just for the blank and double-gameweek period of the season?

With our site, you can do all of that.

EXTRA LEAGUE TYPES

How many creative folks in our community have come up with exciting and innovative ways to keep mini-leagues interesting but have had to resort to doing it themselves in a round-a-bout way on a spreadsheet of some kind?

It can be difficult for some, to manage and maintain these complicated spreadsheets with some forgetting to update and keep on top of everything and it can become, pretty messy, unless you have the time and are very organised, which not everyone is.

So to that end, we’ve developed two league types with the view of developing more in the future…

Elimination mode

This one is straightforward and I’d imagine a fair few of you have already played in some way.

Basically, it’s a classic league scoring system where at the end of every GW, the lowest scoring participant will be eliminated from the league each GW until there is only one player remaining.

Champions league mode

The other, as the name suggests, is a take on the elite competition in the world… the coveted Champions League.

There will be a randomised draw to put players into groups of 4. From there, like the UCL, there will be H2H matches with the players in your group until you’ve played each other twice. The top two progress with the bottom two eliminated.

From there on in, it’s a straight knockout tournament using H2H scoring system until there’s only one team and manager left standing – the elite!

COVID…

Like a lot of businesses out there, we too were hugely affected.

We’ve already had a lot of bumps and battles throughout this journey to this point, but this one was by far the greatest test and one that nearly meant we were dead in the water.

We were right in the middle of testing our product, with just enough time to complete testing on every aspect of the site, and then Covid hit.

With no real time span on a return to PL and with little money left in the budget, and with our initial developer having to fire his staff and more or less close up shop, it looked like things were pretty much over.

But we kept faith and waited for news.

Luckily, in the meantime, I managed to find a new developer, someone who was very keen on helping us out and was a big FPL geek who had tons of experience, but was looking for a project to work on that he was passionate about. The stars aligned.

Then we got the news about the PL coming back and with that, FPL!

However, because we had a takeover from developer to developer, and FPL came back with some changes to their API which needed to be fixed and updated on our site, it meant we didn’t have time to test our UCL game mode.

Launching Our BETA..

So, because of COVID, we’re not in the position we wanted to be in (full site launch), but we are in a position to launch an open BETA to the public.

So please bare in mind that this is not the finished article, and I have a lot more to add to this, but I’d like to welcome everyone to try out our new site as and when FPL is launched.

We will be offering a 60 day free trial to everyone whilst we complete our testing, during which time, we will be working closely with the community, taking feedback and applying that feedback to the site.

After we have tested everything fully and we have fixed all bugs and applied market feedback, we will launch the site fully.

Our Content/FPLConnect.blog

A quick word on the content side of things.

I want to re-iterate that we will NOT be charging for our content. This will always be free to the FPL community.

The current site I use to do my content on will continue as such until we’re ready to move over. It will likely be soon, but in time, we will migrate completely to the new site, where we have a blog section and if you try to search for the blog, you will be re-directed to our new site.

Final Words

Lastly, I’d like to say that without all of my followers and anyone that supports my blog, this new venture wouldn’t be possible.

I have developed some great relationships in the community and I know so many of you on a personal level.

Being a key part of this community is one of my greatest joys and it’s been a pleasure providing you content over the years and it will be an even greater pleasure to not only continue providing that content, but to provide you with excitement and fun in the form of my new service.

I hope we can, together, continue to support each other and grow this amazing community so that even more join and want to be a part of it.

Thank you, Simon.