Oh, you thought Yahoo was done with the whole acquire-everything-in-sight bit? Nope!
Yahoo has announced that they’ve acquired Bignoggins Productions, a one-man iPhone development shop which had previously built a handful of fairly popular Fantasy Sports mobile apps.
Up until today, Bignoggins had at least two apps in the store: Fantasy Monster ($5), and Draft Monster ($3). Both apps were built as all-in-one tools, meant to let Fantasy Sports nuts manage their pretend football/baseball/basketball/hockey teams across Yahoo, ESPN, and NFL’s competing services.
The bad news: as part of the acquisition, all of Bignoggins’ apps were immediately pulled from both the App Store and Google Play. The better news: in a blog post on his own site, Bignoggin’s founder (and sole full-timer) Jerry Shen says that the tech he’s built so far will soon be baked into Yahoo’s official Fantasy Products products.
The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but I’d bet that Shen probably made out alright in the end, here. His $5 app had thousands of reviews and had danced around the top of the App Store’s best selling Sports apps a few times — it was almost certainly selling well enough to keep it’s creator fed and happy. Not bad, for a company that never had to hire a second employee. To quote his personal site:
I’ve never hired any full time employees. As a result, I would talk to myself frequently about the direction of the company. After one particularly fiery argument I nearly fired myself but reconsidered once I realized I had no employees.
Oh, and he never took any outside investment:
I’ve never taken any outside funding. Not even from my mother. Unless you count raising me and paying for college. Ok I guess that counts. But other than that, 100% bootstrapped, baby!
Most importantly, Shen says this is what he’s always wanted: “I’ve been playing Yahoo! Fantasy since high school, and have wanted to work here since college, so this is really a dream come true for me.”
[Tangent: You know how some words start to look wrong after you’ve typed them a bunch of times? “Bignoggins” starts to look weird on about the second or third pass.]