Betsperts on bettering the bettor through social media

Keen to take advantage of the US betting boom, but without any previous industry experience or partnerships, entrepreneur Reid Rooney and his business partners have set out to deliver an industry-focused social network for novice bettors and seasoned tipsters to share their experiences and streaks.

Twitter has long been considered the platform for disgruntled (or even quite successful) sports bettors to let off steam and share their tips and picks with the wider betting community. But the site is rife with trolls and has proved relatively difficult to navigate when searching for specifics.

Betsperts is a global platform that ranks bettors based on their wins and gives them an opportunity to reach a wide audience of others looking to share their tips and strategies with the community.

The firm is in the process of securing up to $3m of additional investment to fund expansion and further modernize the platform, which reached 12,000 users during its so. launch in March. Rooney, alongside his business partners Sam Russell and Austin Harper, anticipates the commencement of the NFL season will draw up to 50,000 new users to the site.

Betsperts founders: Reid Rooney, Sam Russell and Austin Harper

He has been pleasantly surprised by the interest from operators, with one new entrant in talks to integrate the platform into its product as a potential acquisition tool. EGR North America talks to co-founder Rooney about the strength of social media influencers in promoting its platform and establishing operator partnerships.

EGR North America (EGR NA): How did Betsperts come about?

Reid Rooney (RR): We started looking at the emerging markets of crypto, cannabis and sports wagering and I don’t think any of us know very much about the first two.

I’m probably the biggest gambler of the three of us. I always bet with my gut and for entertainment but I’m not particularly successful so I reached out to a bunch of sports gamblers in my network and found out a lot of people pay significant amounts for advice or for one person’s picks and there is not a lot of accountability [on the networks available].

What we tried to do was find a good platform that was crowdsourced, open and gave the user an edge, but we couldn’t find one so we brainstormed what Betsperts could be and it’s evolved past what we could have expected.

EGR NA: What has the response from the betting community and the industry been like?

RR: We so. launched during March Madness and we really haven’t gone hard since then because of the few significant betting events throughout the year. We became the 11th most downloaded app during March Madness and we had 12,000 profiles created the one week we were really marketing it. I think we’re expecting around 25,000 to 50,000 profiles to be created during the first couple of weeks of September.

I think we’ll have a significant amount of traction, but it was still only a so. launch in March. The feedback from users has been extraordinary and honestly the industry feedback has been even more positive than I’d expected. We’ve talked to a few operators and they understand that sports betting is going to become more social in the next five to 10 years when the race to go live in each state is finished. They think this is the type of platform a sportsbook will utilize for keeping players on their products for much longer.

Operators think it’s a great tool for user acquisition as people will test their gambling abilities and see how profitable they can be. It’s been a positive couple of months as we’ve been starting to find the right partner.

EGR NA: What would a partnership with an operator look like? Are you also considering affiliate deals?

RR: There are a couple of different routes we’ll take. One might be a white-label so when you click into Betsperts it will give you an operator’s lines specifically. At the moment we use the consensus lines.

With operator lines they will be able to feature their own promotions and marketing. Say you hit your first parlay, they might offer you $20 to try it for real. We will become a CPA affiliate, although we’d like to rebrand it as referrals because we’ll never make money off people’s losses. We’re trying to make people better at betting. There is a good partnership we’re forming right now on that side.

We also have the technology to integrate operators’ platforms and we are in deep discussions right now with one particular operator about that.

EGR NA: Considering the industry’s keenness for social betting and the likes of Sky Bet’s Group Bets product in the UK launching this year, do you see yourselves moving into that space?

RR: I don’t think that’s the immediate route Betsperts will be taking. When we say social betting, we’re referring to actual social media. One of the main pages we have is a Betsperts feed that can be filtered specific to sports betting, unlike say Twitter which has great betting information but it can be tough to find at times.

The top Betsperts rankings show everybody’s profiles, which can be filtered by their expertise all the way down to a team level, timeframe, ROI or streak, and you can follow their picks because they are all public. It’s not so much a group betting method, but more of a community of bettors and granular level experts where you can get the support in areas you might not have. You can be part of a conversation that’s dedicated to sports gambling.

On the group betting side, I know there are a couple of folks in the US trying to do it and there have been a couple that have tried previously and been unsuccessful. I think the legal challenges in the States right now have caused group betting to be difficult.

Screenshot of Betsperts rankings from the app

EGR NA: How are you attracting Betsperts to the platform? Where is the value in joining for them?

RR: What we have found in our users is people join to track their picks more easily. People join to track their history or to see other bettors. Not everybody is an industry-considered expert. I’m looking at the top leader board and a couple of the top-ranking guys I know personally and they are just active gamblers.

They don’t have a voice in that world yet and this might help them get there. If you look at their history, there are really good gamblers that don’t do it professionally and don’t understand how to create their own profile. We’re trying to bring them to light.

EGR NA: How are you getting bettors off Twitter?

RR: I think we have a two-tiered approach. We are using social media influencers in the sports gambling world. I think getting the Betsperts name out continuously by people that are respected has been our best ROI so far so we will continue to go down that route. We also have the advertisement platform of Facebook that we will continue to use.

Those are our best approaches at this point but we are also actively looking for some marketing expertise and other folks who have scaled a social media company or a sports gambling company to bring in-house. We have a couple of large events planned with our social media influencers and we expect those to be quite successful for us.

EGR NA: Are you looking to expand the platform and offer more markets and more features?

RR: By the end of the month to the middle of September we are going to add golf and soccer. We will have the MLS, the Champions League, the Premier League and the PGA Tour. We are in the process of [testing out] player props and a few other categories for sports and we’re going to continue to expand significantly, but we need to do it piece by piece at this point.

The platform is worldwide and is getting traction from a lot of countries we didn’t expect it to reach.

EGR NA: What kind of betting behaviors have you picked up from those frequenting the platform?

RR: It’s interesting because we knew Major League Baseball would be slow because fewer people gamble on it, but what we have found is people love the quarters bets, or in baseball the first five innings. People really like straying away from the typical bets that are the total of the spread for the full game.

They like variance and variety in baseball. During March people liked to bet on every game. But what we expect from football season is teasers and parlays in the US, which are still very popular even though they might not be the most profitable route. I think the variance of wagers and props will be a main staple of American betting moving forward.

We’ve also found via our hottest or coldest feature that some of our users love to follow the hottest users if someone is on a significant streak. It’s interesting when someone thinks they have an edge or a tradition or superstition because they vary so much.

EGR NA: How challenging was it to build the platform in-house?

RR: It was pretty significant and we went out and raised a good amount of money. We self-funded for a bit to build the site and then raised a pretty significant chunk of change. We are actually going out and starting a seed round right now. We are looking for a $3m investment to expand the team and start to market much more significantly. Building the platform was not cheap and it was a lot of hours of work to be honest with you. I think we did it the right way with the right developers.

EGR NA: Did you face any setbacks in having the app reviewed by Apple?

RR: It was actually quite easy. When they first saw the platform, yes, they turned it down, but we had to explain to them that we don’t accept real bets. There is no real-money gambling in the subscription. It’s a free site or app and you can subscribe for more statistical data but there won’t be any gambling on our site. Once we explained that concept Apple was great to work with and we haven’t had any problems.

EGR NA: What has the response from potential investors been like?

RR: The interesting part is we’ve pretty much just started having our first conversations with potential investors, but within the sports betting industry we’ve had a couple of conversations that have led to follow-ups and more serious conversations.

There has been interest internally from other companies or others looking to get into the industry and wanting to partner up as an investor. That was a nice surprise. We’re just starting to go out to Silicon Valley and some of the former investors that might have invested early in the sports gambling industry and understand it.

I don’t think from an investment perspective that sports gambling has as much of a black mark against it as people expect. They see all the legal movements and everyone has seen what crypto and cannabis and other industries that might have had black marks against them have done in the last five years. Investors are actually really excited to get into the industry.