FARMERS's son Nigel Eccles, who runs the fast-growing Fanduel sports operation in Edinburgh and New York, has come a long way quickly with a business that began life as a post it note on a Texan shed in 2009.

Fanduel's games, which allow players to bid for cash prizes by pitting their team selection skills in games like American Football against thousands of others, have attracted a huge following in the USA.

This week the company announced the number of paying gamers using the site had passed the magic million mark. In the last quarter of 2014 Fanduel paid $330,000,000 (£220m) back to users, which it claims is a record for the industry.

A mathematician by training, Mr Eccles talks with boyish enthusiasm about the way in which Fanduel's games appear to have captured the imagination of sports fans.

"You find players after they become Fanduel players increase their consumption of sports by 40 per cent."

American football fans, for example, become more likely to watch games to the end because they have chosen one of the quarterbacks in the game for their fantasy team.

"Lots of players say they are more excited about their fantasy team than their home team," says Mr Eccles. "I created that team, they are playing for me."

The feelgood effect is being felt in the Fanduel boardroom too.

"I'm more excited about the company today than I have been at any point," enthuses Mr Eccles, who comes from Northern Ireland.

Fanduel, which takes a commission on game fees, had $37m revenues in the latest quarter, compared with $7.4m in the same period a year ago.

Mr Eccles, 40, believes Fanduel could become a multi-billion dollar business. A flotation may be on the cards in coming years.

The sales effort is run out of New York, where Fanduel has its headquarters and employs around 60 people.

But the Edinburgh-registered company's success has been good news for Scotland.

There are around 60 staff working in high-skilled jobs in Fanduel's software development centre in Edinburgh and the company plans to open one in Glasgow in coming months.

It expects to double employee numbers in Scotland this year.

And yet Mr Eccles may never have got involved in fantasy sports had things not gone better for him earlier in life.

With a background in consultancy and online gaming, Mr Eccles visited Texas amid signs things were not going to plan with the first business he developed, Hubdub.

Founded with four other young graduates, Hubdub was a news prediction website that showed enough promise to attract backing from names like Scots technology entrepreneur Kevin Dorren.

Advertisers, however, didn't show the same degree of excitement.

"Hubdub was growing, it was a fun product but it was very hard to see where it was going to get the scale to deliver venture capital type returns," muses Mr Eccles. "We realised the assumptions we had about advertising were wildly off."

The team went to Texas to attend the important South by South West technology conference early in 2009 in the hope of coming up with fresh plans.

They decided to brainstorm suggestions for what kind of business to develop next by writing ideas on post it notes that they attached to the wall of the aforementioned shed.

While the approach may sound offbeat to some, others might feel it reflects the resilience and resourcefulness that true entrepreneurs have to show.

Fantasy sports emerged as the pick of the bunch of ideas.

"We thought fantasy sport was interesting," recalls Mr Eccles. "It was very widely played, there were 26 million players at the time, there are 41 million now. People who played were passionate gamers."

The fact fantasy game firms can offer cash prizes and are not considered to be engaged in gambling in most US states increased the genre's appeal.

"We knew sports was one of the biggest categories and fantasy sports you can play for money. We knew we had to move from an advertising model."

Mr Eccles had long been keen on the online gaming world after working on ventures with the likes of Dermot Desmond, the Irish entrepreneur.

"The great thing about a market place business is if you really get scale it's very hard for someone to compete".

After deciding to give fantasy gaming a shot the team moved fast. They started developing their first game in April 2009 and launched a product three months later.

This was a baseball game in which lone players competed against an opponent selected by the site.

Mr Eccles reckons the team laid the foundations for the venture's success by developing games that only lasted a day, rather than keeping players waiting for a season to see if they had won.

While Fanduel could only spend $5 a day on marketing initially this proved to be enough to confirm there was real demand for fantasy sports products even in simple form.

After signing deals with media partners that did not deliver the expected volumes of business, Fanduel focused on doing its own marketing. The venture has always believed that money spent on acquiring new players will likely be repaid. Mr Eccles says the current payback period for money spent recruiting a new player is 11 months.

Revenues broke the $1m barrier in 2011.

Within six years of its launch, Fanduel has become a serious player in the US sporting business.

The company has signed marketing partnerships with big names like the LA Lakers basketball club.

It has raised $88m backing from investors such as NBA (the US National Basketball Association), broadcasting giant NBC and the Comcast and Pentech private equity ventures.

The company believes it can increase its market share from around 80 per cent currently. Fanduel has considered acquiring rivals but was concerned this would involve buying businesses that got most of their revenue from customers who were already on its books.

Fanduel expects to move into the UK eventually. While fantasy gaming is classed as pool betting in the UK, Mr Eccles believes the firm should be able to get the necessary gaming licence.

He expects the company to remain a hybrid, with operations in Scotland and the US.

Fanduel recently moved into new offices in Edinburgh close to where the fast-growing Skyscanner flight search business is based.

Mr Eccles has put down roots in Edinburgh since moving to the city from London in 2006 in search of a better quality of life.

He moved to work as a business development specialist at the Johnston Press newspaper business under Tim Bowdler only to be left with a nagging feeling that he really had to start his own business.

""I probably was a frustrated entrepreneur for years. I was trying to figure out what my idea was going to be. But I felt it was getting away from me. I had two children, a big mortgage and I felt if I did not do it now I would never do it."

Now a father of three, Mr Eccles spends half his time in New York but says Edinburgh is an unbeatable location to live in.

Fanduel can access a big pool of highly skilled workers in Scotland.

Edinburgh may not be in the same league as Silicon Valley but the support infrastructure for growth companies has improved markedly in recent years.

Mr Eccles says Skyscanner has provided a very important example of what can be done.

"Whenever the board have said to us do you really think you can build a world class engineering team in Edinburgh, I've been able to say, well look at Skyscanner. I think without then it would have been much harder to do and one day we may have had to put the whole thing into New York."

He concludes: "It's definitely good; it's a good supportive environment and it's better than five years ago. I'd say today it's a good place to start a company."