If you have ever wanted to play fantasy sports on the go, you’ll be addicted to Pickmoto. Trust me, I already am. Since being founded in 2011, Pickmoto has already begun to make some great traction with football fans. With 8,000 downloads and counting (including 1,000 for their brand new NBA app), they’re just getting started.
“We wanted to create fantasy sports for mobile”, co-founder Ben Peters told Chat Sports in a phone interview. “We wanted to bring all the fantasy fun into a mobile game.”
So what is Pickmoto? It’s an extremely simple and easy Pick’em app that’s free for iPhone and iPad that lets you predict the winners of NFL and NBA games with a simple click and lets you gamble using their virtual currency. Pickmoto is the ideal game for sports enthusiasts who do not want to commit too much time to a game, but want to get their sports fix on a daily basis. This game really puts your football and basketball knowledge to the test, as it proves how skilled you are at picking who will win in every matchup. The game allows you to play against their computer or you can invite your friends to join you.
What’s so great about this app, you ask? Ben had that covered. “You can get in and out in a couple of minutes”, he said, “You can make your predictions, check your stats, wherever you are, in as little as seconds.”
When you download Pickmoto, you’ll notice the sweet design - your jaw may drop to the floor when you open it up. Trust me, mine did, so I can assure that yours will too. “We wanted to make the design a big focus because we noticed how porous the design is for essentially all the sports apps out there, and how their focus is so much on getting a bare minimum viable product out, and not treating users with any respect when it comes to the visual,” Peters said.
Peters, co-founder Ryan Gerard, and co-founder and designer James Wildman are, as Ben put it, “bootstrapping in the purest sense of the word.” They currently are based in a San Francisco apartment, but are hoping to get to raising funding in the future. “We’re focusing on building the best product we can, and when it comes to raising money we hope that the numbers will speak for themselves.”
“The app itself is all native”, Ryan Gerard said. “In my experience, most apps are not quite there yet in terms of responsiveness and manipulating what you can do with the UI. With James’ design skills, combined with my technical chops, to manipulate the UI we’ve been able to create this nice looking, responsive, beautiful looking app.”
The most impressive thing about the app in the eyes of co-founder Ryan Gerard is that almost half of their users are from invites. Approximately 4,000 users began using the app due to invitations by current users. In case you’re as bad at math as I am, 4,000 is half of 8,000, the number of users they have currently…not to mention they have had about 400,000 picks made to date. Many of their users have been acquired through people just searching the app store. That, combined with their use of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), helps them in gaining new users and downloads.
Despite their popularity, user acquisition is what Peters considers the main thing that they will look back on and wish they put more effort into. “I think in the long run, what we’ll look back on this period and think we would’ve liked to do better is marketing.” he said. “We just don’t have any know-how, and we’ve read plenty about what the product does and how half of your attention should be on getting users, and I guess we haven’t put as much energy into user acquisition.”
Moving forward, the biggest thing that Peters and Gerard want to add is a March Madness app and get into more sports, mainly the NHL and the Stanley Cup Playoffs. They also would like to get on the web and provide an outlet for those that don’t have Apple or Android devices (if people like that still exist). They are looking to raise money at some point in 2013 to be able to reach a mass market. But right now, Peters says that they are focused on providing and creating the best sports game that they can.
So, how we rate this app? After playing this game for quite a while, we will give Pickmoto a 4/5 stars. This game is so simple to use, is extremely addicting and has such a stellar design that it was pretty easy for us to give them high marks. Given that many of the executives in the Chat Sports world headquarters are college football and hockey fans, we are looking forward to the day that an NCAA and NHL app will be available as well.
Download Pickmoto today!
Pickmoto Football: iPhone App, iPad App
Pickmoto Basketball: iPhone App, Coming Soon for Android!
