1. Charge for your product from Day 1.

People who pay for your product won’t hold back from offering feedback. If your product is offered to users for free, it’s much harder to create a feedback loop. The sports betting industry moves quickly so it’s important that you’re innovating. The best way to find ideas for innovation is to be in sync with your userbase.

Saying you will turn on the profit tap at a critical mass is risky. What if the market changes? What if a competitor passes you with a superior product? What if COVID happens and sports get canceled? The industry is growing like crazy RIGHT NOW. There is money to be made TODAY.

2. People will copy you if you have a good idea, but it doesn’t matter. 

Knock-offs are part of the game. @kiiLkenny started Moonshot years before Discord Launchpass links were every second tweet on your Twitter timeline. He established his Moonshot brand before the barrier to entry started to peak. Last NBA season, @ryanpropz saw rapid Twitter growth with his NBA Defensive Matchup cheat sheets. The same with @the_bmatt’s Prop Consistency Sheets. If people see that you’ve created something that generates traction, it will be copied and redistributed without compensation (or oftentimes credit). But it doesn’t matter. If you truly are the first to market with a new idea, your cost and effort to acquire a new customer or follower will be significantly lower than the person who knocks it off. That matters. People pay a lot of money in this space to acquire users. If you are able to gain traction through innovation and execution of ideas instead of spending, you will come out ahead regardless of the knock-offs.

Props.cash was first to market with a number of core ideas for the gambling community. One example is our charts that show a player’s performance overlaid with the current line. Being first to market with this simple idea allowed us to acquire users at a very efficient spend.

3. Develop a product based on a principle (and the principle shouldn’t be money related).

Our principle is “to build the best player props tool possible”. Props.cash’s biggest company decisions are centered around this principle. If our core principle was to maximize revenue at all costs, it would conflict with building the best player prop tool. 

Here is an example of this type of decision-making at props.cash. Part of researching props requires sustained concentration. An optimal environment for concentration should be free from distraction. Because of this, we’ve made the decision to not have advertisements dispersed throughout the platform while people are researching. Are we leaving money on the table? Yes. Are we losing sleep over this? No. Our core principle of making the best props research tool possible made this decision easy.

Pete Smaluck (Founder and CEO of props.cash)

---

More trends like this, as well as thousands of statistical insights can be found using our unique props software. Crunch the numbers faster and start making smarter, data driven, prop bets.