Juice Reel: Elevating Sports Betting Engagement with Powerful Analytics and Automation
How can bettors make smarter decisions by analyzing their behavior stats with the help of a single app? DataArt met with Ricky Gold, Founder & CEO at Juice Reel, to learn more about their user-friendly tool, its unique business model, and the technology behind it. Ricky Gold shares insights on how they grow their audience and the power of Juice Reel by highlighting the integral role of personalization in the sports betting market.
Speakers
Russell Karp, Senior Vice President in the DataArt Media and Entertainment practice, focusing on sports betting.
Ricky Gold, Founder and SEO at Juice Reel. Juice Reel is the most comprehensive betting tool for sports bettors. Users can visualize and analyze their betting behavior through the app, including insights into the teams, bet types, and sports they bet on most right on their phones. They also offer a suite of tools and resources and provide opportunities to capitalize on more winnings.
Kevin Twitchell, advisor in the DataArt Media and Entertainment practice.
Watch the full video or read a shortened text version below.
Russell Karp: Tell us how you came up with this concept and what drove you to look at products such as this.
Ricky Gold: Yeah, absolutely. I grew up in a sports betting household, and the first idea that sparked this business was, that if you ask any sports bettor how they did this past football season, you’re rarely going to get a number as an answer. You’re going to get a good, bad, uh. And so, to me, there was a gap in stats on yourself. And people are interested in their self, their performance, how they’re doing over time. That was the first thing in my head that said, “The world needs this.” And then, with more and more features, it started evolving.
And what made me decide to start this business was when I realized that by creating a product for sports bettors that’s engaging, that’s helpful, that’s beneficial, that you can also use that experience to benefit sportsbooks by making sports betting more engaging for them and increase traffic at sportsbooks. That’s what drove me to start this business.
Ricky Gold
Founder and SEO at Juice Reel
Russell Karp: Yeah. Let’s dive a little bit deeper into your product because you have a lot of interesting things there, integrations with a lot of sportsbooks. Can you tell us more about all of the cool features that you have in your app?
Ricky Gold: Yes. I’d say is a sports bettor. You download our app from the App Store or the Google Play Store and you connect in your sports betting accounts. If you bet at DraftKings, FanDuel, or wherever you bet you connect in your account and all of your bet history automatically loads into our app. And from there, with all your transactions in our app, we show you stats and metrics on your past performance.
How have you done on the straight bets versus parlays and teasers? What are your best sports? What are your worst teams? All of those stats. And with everybody connecting in their betting accounts, we have pretty good insight into who’s a good bettor, who’s a bad bettor, how are good bettors and bad bettors, and what are they doing differently on a given game.
There’s a bunch of features that we offer, that help guide you to make the most informed bet at the best line. But it all stems from the fact that we’re accruing tons of data and in tons of lines from sportsbooks to help guide that decision-making process.
Kevin Twitchell: What I also liked, and maybe you can talk about the business model a little bit, is the whole subscription model. Can you explain how your team, your experts can advise me as a terrible bettor?
Ricky Gold: Yes. So, there are a few different payment models that sit in our app. I’ll talk about the juice model right now. So, we have an in-app currency. We call it Milliliters of juice. It’s not like a crypto or anything. It’s like a consumable that you’ve seen in most games online. And what we do is, with everybody connecting in their betting accounts, we automatically and anonymously put everyone’s bets up for sale to be unlocked by the rest of the community.
And because we know who’s a good bettor and who’s not, the best-performing bettors show up at the top of the list, and that’s the actual advice that gets sold. So, you spend our in-app currency unlocking what top-performing bettors are doing so you can copy them. And those top-performing bettors get rewarded as the rest of the community unlocks their bet.
So, different than the betting advice industry today are touts, people who are saying that they’re a good bettor and they’re convincing you to go pay for their picks and you hope that they’re a good bettor, but you don’t have any stats and metrics on them and they have to actively go and distribute the picks. You’ve got to collect the money.
It’s an active industry. Selling betting advice is not passive. You have to do a lot of stuff to sell betting and the whole industry is driven by how big your Twitter following is more than your actual betting performance. And so, what we’ve created is a marketplace that operates autonomously where everyone’s bets are put up for sale anonymously.
Ricky Gold
Founder and SEO at Juice Reel
Everybody has metrics associated with themselves, so you know what you’re buying. You’re buying a bet that someone has their real money on and you know how good of a bettor they are. And they don’t do anything to sell their bets. All they do is be a member of our platform to receive the rewards as their advice gets sold.
Russell Karp: And in terms of technology, how complex was it to come up with the right tech stack? The right programming languages to use? Not only to get off the ground but also keeping in mind that you want to be boys for growth and so forth.
Ricky Gold: Yeah, we’re a tech-focused company, and with our app, we rely on lots and lots of real-time information, tons of data moving around, and creating a seamless user experience. There’s nothing more important than deciding on what your tech stack is and making the right decisions about how to integrate tons of different data sources. So, we put a ton of time into that because that’s as critical as it gets.
I come from a tech consulting background and existing architectures and technologies evolved so quickly. Some of the technologies that we use wouldn’t be there, either didn’t exist or weren’t readily available 10–20 years ago; whereas having started our company only three years ago, the tech and the decisions around technology are a lot harder for these older companies to evolve all their systems and have them all link and talk to each other.
That’s one of the benefits a startup has. We can be nimble with technology. We’re not dealing with outdated systems. Everything’s on the cloud, things like that.
Kevin Twitchell: How are you getting the word out? How are you growing? How is the general consumer finding you and what’s that scale projection? What is that marketing conversation going on and how are you guys growing your business and your audience?
Ricky Gold: Yes, we launched our product for football season 2021. And we launched our product actually before raising even a single dollar. A lot of tech-focused people are all working for sweat equity. We took the product from inception to launch without any capital. And we’ve raised some money since then, and just three weeks ago, released a brand-new version of our app.
So, we’ve scaled up the initial version of the app for two years. Got us past 35,000 downloads, and around $600 million in sports betting handle into our ecosystem. But we did that through a lot of word of mouth, and a little bit of advertising dollars. And now with this new version of the one that you guys have been playing on, we’re looking to take a big step forward in terms of scaling up the amount of usage of the app through a mix of different channels.
Russell Karp: What do you see down the road here with sports betting within the next year, or two years, or five years? What does the future look like in the industry or more specifically for something like what your app does?
Ricky Gold: I think technology has a bigger and bigger impact on the sports betting industry. More of a focus on personalization, and more of a focus on the in-play experience, are two big things that are going to get bigger over these next 2 to 5 years. In-play is a difficult experience to capture with latency between how fast the player scores to systems updating and having to send things to other companies.
There are a lot of B2B relationships where it all has to be a matter of a second, where you can get burned for a lot of money. But technology has helped trim that gap. And more and more offerings in the live betting experience and more and more personalization around what’s presented to you, having exactly what you want to bet on in the sportsbooks app showing up right when you log in is a different experience than logging in and clicking NFL and then going to my New York Giants. I think personalization is probably going to be the biggest thing in my opinion that evolves.
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By Russell Karp,
Vice President of Media and Entertainment Practice at DataArt
Originally published at https://www.dataart.com.
