Two USC alumni create fantasy basketball app
Two USC alumni have created a mobile app that allows users to play fantasy basketball with a few swipes of their fingers.
Brandon Asherian and Matthew Khorsandi, who graduated in 2015 with degrees in business administration, created Starting Five to cater to people who have become exhausted trying to pick their independent, original teams among professional fantasy sports players.
Image courtesy of Starting Five
Slam dunk · Created by USC alumni Brandon Asherian (above) and Matthew Khorsandi, fantasy basketball app Starting Five facilitates a unique and easy user experience for casual fantasy sports fans.
“For most people, daily fantasy contests feel like rigged lotteries,” Asherian wrote in an email to the Daily Trojan. “You enter a prize pool versus 10,000 random individuals, most of whom are daily fantasy sports professionals who make a living entering these contests.”
Asherian wrote that in contrast, Starting Five users play one-on-one, either with friends or against a random opponent. He wrote that the app makes it easier for people of different skill levels to play by utilizing pre-set lineups.
“We do part of the heavy lifting by hand-selecting four unique fantasy teams per night,” Asherian wrote. “Players then select the team they feel has the greatest likelihood of success. Think of it as Tinder meets daily fantasy sports in the sense that we have pre-set lineups that players can select by swiping left and right.”
According to Asherian, Starting Five focuses on bridging the gap between season-long fantasy sports and daily fantasy sports by bringing the social elements of season-long fantasy into a simplified daily model.
“I started asking many of my friends why they don’t play daily fantasy sports, and the most common answers were ‘It’s impossible to win,’ ‘I don’t have the time’ or ‘I’d rather play with my friends,’” Asherian wrote. “We cater to casual fantasy players that are tired of being taken advantage of by random professional players on Fanduel and DraftKings.”
The beta version of Starting Five was launched in January, and the official app is now available for this NBA season, as the company completed its first fundraiser.
Asherian wrote that the concept of the business first came to mind while he was in enrolled in a business class at USC that focused on understanding market opportunities — which meant that he had to find out what the market was missing and develop a business plan for a product or service around that. While conducting research, Asherian wrote that he interviewed a number of people that pointed him in the direction of a fantasy sports app.
“During those interviews I was asked questions like, ‘How would you help cater our product to casual sports fans,’ or ‘How can we convert season-long fantasy sports players into daily players?’” Asherian wrote. “Those questions inspired me to streamline the most difficult part of daily fantasy—the process of picking a lineup. That, coupled with the ability to challenge friends and chat with them over the app, is the foundation of Starting Five.”
After he graduated from USC, Asherian developed his class project into an actual business. He also wrote that the long-term friendship between the co-founders, who met in elementary school and were roommates at USC, further helped them to create a strong team.
“While we are best friends and business partners, we are also totally different people,” Asherian wrote. “I am obsessed with sports, detail-oriented and somewhat technical. Matt is passionate about music, makes quick decisions and has an uncanny understanding of people. Our strengths complement each other’s weaknesses, which makes for an extremely healthy partnership.”
With Starting Five, Asherian and Khorsandi aim to remove the barriers to playing fantasy sports.
“We are using fantasy basketball as our launch point,” Asherian wrote. “Our plan at the moment is to learn from our users and continuously improve the product.”