foreign Erica is speaking with Alex Dubin founder and CEO of better off that's b-e-t-t-o-r-o-f-f the one stop shop for sports Bettors providing transparency and sports betting data and information thank you for speaking with us today Alex thanks for having me Ken our pleasure my first question um is sort of more about you I was wondering what's your background professionally and how did you end up at the helmet better off uh yeah so I'm an attorney by trade um I'm a I was a hedge fund and PE attorney um I did a year working for uh Louis free at the free group and then uh I was a hedge fund in private Equity associate at dla Piper um a lot of quants a lot of uh sort of fund building but figured out that it wasn't for me um I was a little bit uh a little bit I was not a corporate guy um ended up uh leaving the firm and starting a uh Quant hedge fund that was actually a daily fantasy sports hedge fund uh with three of my clients uh called Roto Capital um where we were playing DFS uh using Quant algorithms uh we ran that for two years uh we're very successful with it um ended up unwinding it when the DFS landscape shifted with uh uh Eric Schneiderman taking DraftKings and FanDuel the court um we then uh started a uh Sports data and analytics company uh that focused on Esports called Next take uh we ran that for a couple of years and were eventually acquired by Sports grid uh I served at sports grid for a couple of years and then left to start better off it was two years in July foreign so for viewers could you sort of uh give us the spiel about what better off provides what it does yeah so better off as you said it's an enhanced social media platform uh we're built to cater to the underserved sports betting communities on Twitter and to some extent on Instagram by providing value add features um so really everything that the sports Better Could want all in one place um and instead of just a a social media platform that happens to have sports Bettors on it uh which is how we see Twitter um we are built for sports Bettors so if you think about how LinkedIn is basically Facebook but built for uh the biz for business world right or twitch um is really just YouTube but built for gamers um we are that same social media platform but with tons of value-add features built with the sports better in mind could you perhaps uh elaborate on one or one or a few of these value add features so short the if you think about the things that as a sports better you need to go elsewhere to find um we had it all in one place so lines from over a dozen different books DraftKings FanDuel bed mgms Caesars um we also have by the click of a button uh the best odds feature so that you don't have to spend time figuring out which book has the best lines for which game which prop um groups and competitions the ability for a group of friends or family or a fraternity or work friends to compete and pick against each other with a leaderboard that tracks everything um but the real the Bedrock of what this platform is built on is transparency um bringing transparency into an incredibly opaque industry which is sports wagering information where on Twitter anyone can make any sort of claims they want about Roi about win rate um and none of it is verified right you can delete tweets you can delete entire accounts you can have multiple accounts better off all of the picks and all of the histories of every single user are stored on the blockchain and are therefore immutable um and so what we've created as a meritocracy where in Twitter as we've seen the most bombastic the loudest um they're the ones who get the most attention right you hit your 15-way parlay and turn a nickel into 50 Grand that's great and it will get shared all over Twitter but if what you're looking for as a sports bettor is good information from Pickers who win they may not be the most exciting people and therefore you may have trouble finding them on Twitter on better off the leaderboard is going to show who is actually the best and the most effective and that ends up sort of marketing the most effective Pickers rather than the most bombastic right um I was wondering because you know with all this talk social media and being online uh do you think this will help bring in younger people towards sports betting or do you think that's even necessary so younger people and and it depends where you are but really if we're talking about 21 um sports betting has always been massive um but what better off is meant to do is at in part meant to bring the younger better in obviously of legal betting age um but to introduce them into the world of sports betting um and they can do that free of charge everything is free except for if somebody wants to sell their picks and obviously you have the right to choose that or not um but for younger people to become part of the community and to be able to follow people who explain their picks to follow people who will uh who will speak with their users um it can be as it can be as educational as the user wants it to be all the way up to experts who are using you know terms of Art and Industry and very much know why they're there yeah um I was wondering what your business model is then if if you say it's free for uh people to use how are you guys making money oh man we're supposed to make money I knew I forgot something yeah um well so it's it's a freemium model right so our belief is that the core features and even the extended features of the platform need to be free because what we're trying to build here is a community and if you're gouging people from day one or if you're very clearly just setting up to upsell them to the only stuff that's valuable you're gonna tick them off um so literally 99 of what we offer stats data schedules scores lines all free um there will eventually be premium features um really sort of deep data and analytics um the ability to generate super deep reports on your own work um but right now we're much more interested in community building than Revenue but what you'll what you'll see first is the pro channels right so if you are a user who is great in any one area right now it can be something as well understood as the Lakers or it can be the University of Akron football um if you win you win uh and if you're there and you pick on the University of Akron and you're able to show to the community that you're a winner and you will rise through the leaderboard people will follow you and at whatever point you choose you see I have 10 or 20 or a thousand followers you can take your channel and you can monetize it you can go pro and you can set your price and users can actually make money off of their ability to pick we will eventually take a pro take a REV share of that same way sort of uber does with its drivers um but at the moment again we're much more interested in community building so uh for the foreseeable future we're actually returning uh full profits to the uh to the channel hosts gotcha gotcha um how about the development of this platform what I mean what's your team like it's you and your computer whizzes are you the computer was designing all this yeah no uh so the the most important thing for me was surrounding myself with people smarter than I am um which wasn't as hard to do as I would have thought but uh uh Ryan a rock star CTO um our Dev team is is tremendous uh we were able to build this um for IOS and Android at the same time um I think what we might be most proud of is the UI ux um our UI ux team is is incredible um because what you see in a lot of these Sports wagering sports information Sports social media applications and platforms is there's so much data and people developers get so excited about throwing it all there that they basically take you know a website worth of information and just jam it into your phone and give you the ability to go landscape and just hope that you have you know narrow Fingers um for us we are mobile first um and so the platform is really built to be elegant to be slick and to not sort of overwhelm the user on a smaller screen size yeah uh I was wondering how you go about marketing such a platform yeah so it's I mean that's that's the question right because no matter what a platform like ours offers without scale there's no value proposition right a community of you know a thousand people is in a community that's just a group of people talking Sports um we have to this point been entirely organic um so it's been social media um Tick Tock Instagram um Tick Tock has been our main our main means of sort of getting out there it's it's definitely the hottest social media channel at the moment um we've built up a user base of over ten thousand in that sort of organic no spend um strategy and we're we're thrilled that we've um gotten that popular without having to spend real money to this point yeah that's cool uh do you think what about Partnerships in the future do you uh do you see yourself partnering with anyone like even a sports book or anything like that so we're open to any partnership that enhances our use the experience for our users um whether it's Sports books or any other company that um by bringing our offerings together with theirs can add data add value um you know reduce latency um so there are sports books that you know you get direct API feeds you're able to get lines to the users faster they're obviously giveaways that you can do in Partnership we do live streams of games um the ability to have a sports book or any sort of sponsor who wants to add their Mark or their value to that programming knowing that they're getting their target demo right a hundred percent of our demo are sports fans and sports Bettors um so we're we're always open to to Growing the partnership area cool uh how long how long have you guys been active for uh let's see the company turned two in July uh we launched in November we turned on monetization and private channels for the last Super Bowl so uh you call it somewhere between November 21 and February 22. yeah how is the growth of the community going so it's great the the you know we are um we're under a year old so we're we're certainly much further along than we had expected we didn't expect to have um you know 11 000 or 10 800 and something um is obviously not a large gross number um but we've seen the viral or organic growth if you will spread much more quickly than we'd anticipated just through Word of Mouth um because of the offerings but also because of the experience because of the fact that everything is in one place and you don't need to have three windows open which obviously on a phone is is incredibly difficult to do um but the verification part the part where you can't delete picks you can only have one account um that that's something that this community hasn't had um you've had the ability to find people who bet on Twitter um but what you see is self-promotion and what we've brought what better off has brought into that world is a level of transparency and verification that that our users uh have come to expect and that we expect will will spread throughout the landscape cool yeah I wanted to ask uh it's kind of my final question what uh where do you where would you like to see better off uh 18 24 months from now uh so yeah that's it's a great question what we focus on is is user growth but not just through user acquisition through improving the user experience um we expect to keep working to iterate and turn the platform into the true One-Stop shop for Bettors where any for for for information um for Community for competition um really just to become synonymous with it the same way where if you say okay what's the social media platform for business I think everyone says LinkedIn right if you talk to a gamer and the gamer says oh I I stream uh you know I stream fortnite you know that you're going to their twitch stream right you're not thinking about what other channel um our goal in that you know even even 12 month period is that when you say you know what is what is social media for sports wagering where do you go to get information where you know where your picks tracked that that becomes synonymous with better off yeah do you think you have competition yeah there's always competition right especially in this space um you know nothing nothing is growing you know I suppose uh uh cannabis but really outside of that nothing is growing as fast as Sports wagering uh specifically in the United States where you know it's legalizing sort of state by state um you obviously we we have competition on the margins I would say for certain things that we do right we're not the only people who track picks we're not the only people who do social media um we're not the only people who have odds but as far as aggregation of all of those features bringing it together around a community where all of the picks are verified where all of the users can become experts and monetize for free um and where the user experience is as slick as really we've all come to expect from the mobile experience um our our belief is that we'll win out by delivering all of that in one place through the best user experience cool well I wish you the best of luck in that I appreciate it uh this has been Alex Steuben founder CEO of better office b-e-t-t-o-r-o-f-f thanks for speaking with gaming America Alex thanks for having me cam