Interview: Fanium’s Grant Gurtin on why his company came out with a CFL fantasy game

Fantasy football's long been a huge deal for fans of the NFL, but opportunities for Canadian football fans to draft their favourite players have been scarce until recently. That's starting to change, though. Fantas-Eh has been around for a couple of years as a pay service and recently announced they're revamping to a free product, and U.S.-based Fanium just launched their own free iOS-based CFL fantasy app this week. The Fanium app is already gaining plenty of popularity, as the company's picked up 1,156 followers on Twitter through Friday morning and has seen plenty of fans and somecurrent players join in. It's perhaps most notable because of what it represents, though: a U.S. organization seeing the CFL as a business opportunity, and specifically developing something for the Canadian football market. I spoke to Fanium founder and CEO Grant Gurtin last week about what led him to develop this app, and he had some interesting things to say.

Gurtin said this is his company's first fantasy app on their own, but they have a substantial background in the arena thanks to developing companion apps for larger companies.

"We started last year with a fantasy football app for Yahoo! and CBS," he said. "We realized there was an opportunity to create a new app."

Gurtin said his personal background gave him some familiarity with the CFL, so it seemed like a natural league to explore. He said the CFL seemed like a natural target for them, as when they started developing the app seven months ago, there was no free fantasy CFL application on the market.

"I worked in the Arena Football League and a lot of players would elevate to the CFL," he said. "It's a massive market that didn't have a free fantasy game. That didn't make sense to us."

Gurtin said they received plenty of interest as soon as they started talking about it.

"The reception we've got from the fans has been phenomenal," he said.

Making a CFL fantasy game isn't particularly easy, as there are challenges in trying to spread across the talent from an eight-team league. Fanium decided to deal with that by making each individual fantasy league have only six teams, small enough that there are plenty of player options for each team during the draft.

"Eight teams would have been too many, four would have been too little," Gurtin said. "Six is just the perfect fit."

There are other challenges, too, including each team playing 18 games instead of the NFL's 16. Gurtin said the CFL is far easier to develop a game for on some fronts, though, particularly with bye weeks. As the league's bye weeks take place in back-to-back weeks and every team plays in one week or the other, those weeks are simply rolled into one for scoring purposes, making for a much simpler solution than the NFL's complicated bye weeks.

For now, Fanium only has public leagues, so when a user signs up, they're automatically placed in a league with others from around the web. The Fanium drafts take place over multiple days when people have time, though, so there's less pressure and time commitment than there may be in a live-draft league. Gurtin said that longer drafting process led to Fanium only doing public leagues this year, as they wanted to release the app well before the season.

"We wanted to get people in the league and drafting," he said. "The second your league fills, you just start drafting."

Fanium has big goals for the future. For now, the app's only available on Apple iOS platforms such as the iPhone and the iPad, but they're targeting an Android release in 2014 and may release a Blackberry 10 version that year as well. An NFL version is also planned for down the road. Gurtin said the company has devoted all their efforts to making a great CFL product so far, though.

"All the focus has been on the CFL so far," he said. "The goal for us is to make the best fantasy product on the market."

It's been a long developmental road for Fanium, as the idea of a CFL fantasy app was conceived almost 10 months ago and they've been working on it for the last seven months. Gurtin said he's thrilled to get it to a point where users can check it out.

"It's been a lot of months of work," he said. "The fun part is now."

Gurtin said he's thrilled he chose to do a CFL app, he's proud of what his company's done, and he thinks CFL fans will enjoy the finished app.

"It's definitely a really strong product," he said. "It's definitely an exciting release."