Some background

This was a tradeshow pitch I did at MIT’s Sloan Sports Conference in 2012.

I was working on Stattleship, a platform that gamified sports data.

This was just around when sports betting sites like DraftKings and FanDuel were starting up.

Stattleship was a platform for sports fans to interact with sports data - but wasn’t gambling.

Instead it created “stats games” combined features of sports blogging with game dynamics to create a new kind of sports experience around predicting the outcome of games, players achievements, and more.

Ultimately, the market for Stattleship never took off because 1) I didn’t go mobile first … first 2) people wanted to gamble for real money 3) even though I eventually built an autmoated stats prediciton engine to generate content, it had a hard time competing with the sports betting sites.

That said, the experience lead be to learn Ruby on Rails, work with toughtbot here in Boston, explore modern web app deployment, try out some early iOS development, and more.

Lessons were applied to Spogo, the next company I co-founded which was a mobile app for predicitve sports gaming that partnered with local bars and restaurants to create a new kind of sports experience around socializing and sports gaming. It was acquired in 2015.

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Slides

I still really like this logo. I made stickers. I still have so many stickers.

I thought fans might want something new, but turns out they just wanted to gamble away money. Sigh.

I also made the “mistake” of focussing on the NHL because I enjoy ice hockey more and was easier to write the stat games. But, in the US football and baseball are king. Tip: Know your market and ICP.

Essentially the stat game was a “prop bet” of a yes/no question. Remember Linsanity?

I automated scoring in “near real-time” by inngestsing a live stats feed first from XMLTeam and then Sportsradar. This was a great intro into queueing systems and background jobs.

Then gamified the experience by creating leaderboards and more.

I thought that social game dynamics would be enaging, but — again — turns out people just wanted to gamble.

Here I linked dynamics and behavior to content.

The original hero landing page. I still like it, but really should have gonme mopbile first. But it was 2011-12 and the complexity of an iOS app was daunting vs a Rails backend and a web app.

Shoutout to Scrambles! One of the OG Stattlehip players.