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I can remember just constantly thinking about Fantasy Football. It was an obsession from 2005-2015. Part of the excitement was playing, but most of the excitement was building a successful side hustle business around it.

My love and passion for the strategy and competition, led me to just constantly have thoughts, hypothesis and analysis on just about everything related to winning my leagues.

I manifested this into something productive, NoOffseason.com, where I wrote every day, sometimes 2-3 long form articles and 10-20 shorter news blurbs.

I built up my site from zero web traffic to a site that CBS Sports wanted to advertise on, to a brand that USA Today, Rotoworld, and especially Athlon Sports and many others wanted to tap into my content for their publications.

On top of having a full-time job (at first with the NBA Detroit Pistons, then as Director of Marketing and Public Relations with a College), I built my first digital / internet based business.

It was part B2C, selling memberships to customers who wanted my advice to help them win their fantasy football leagues, and part B2B, selling my content to other publications who felt it was way better than what their own staff could come up with.

It took years of hard work to achieve this, and while I ultimately decided to stop it for good in 2015, it was how I developed many of the skills I use today in executing web design and development and digital strategy / marketing projects for clients.

What's ironic is that before this video from sitting between sessions at Vanderbilt Owen Graduate School of Management Masters of Marketing program where Kate Hickey and I taught Data Driven Academy this winter, I had kind of forgotten about this important pocket of my career.

I'm also humbled that people like Megan Nichols care enough to ask and follow.

This clip is a fun one for me as I talk about an enjoyable time in my career building my fantasy football business from scratch through doing the work, writing endless articles, constantly reaching out and making connections with great people.

The cool thing is that every stop on your career journey connects. It’s about relationships and experience. That’s the game. Ain’t shit changed. Same game, different details.

Thanks for reading, and have a great day!

Paul Hickey, Founder / CEO / Lead Strategist at Data Driven Design, LLC has created and grown businesses via digital strategy and internet marketing for more than 10 years. His sweet spot is using analytics to design and build websites and grow the audience and revenue of businesses via SEO/Blogging, Google Adwords, Bing Ads, Facebook and Instagram Ads, Social Media Content Marketing and Email Marketing. The part that he’s most passionate about is quantifying next marketing actions based on real data.

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