In the Summer of 2019, I was at Heathrow Airport waiting for a flight to a poker tournament in Belarus. While scrolling through various social media apps on my phone, a thought struck me:
‘Why is there no app for sharing and bragging about my successful sports picks and predictions?’.
We have Facebook for showing off about our lives; Strava for exercise; Instagram for photos. But nothing for Sports. Why isn’t there a way to boast to friends how great I am at predicting the outcome of sporting events? It does not matter if I prefer soccer, NFL, NBA, NHL, baseball, or all sports, there should be an app that provides a way to challenge and compete against my friends and others.
Of course, there are hundreds of sports betting apps, but these are restricted to real money gambling and have no social sharing experience. They also do not provide a way for users to boast about their selections or challenge their friends in any meaningful way. Success in sports betting can earn you money, but it does not earn you recognition from peers. No one is aware of your success or failure. It is a very solitary experience. I couldn’t find anything that came close to a social Sports Prediction Game.
At this point I should mention that I have worked in the sports betting and casino industry for almost 20 years. I have experience of how users interact with sports betting apps, what they like and what they dislike.
As I was boarding the plane it was becoming clear to me that there was an opportunity to create something fun that anyone could play, without the prospect of losing real money in the process.
During the flight I created my hypothesis for a Sports Prediction Game which Perfect Picks came to be based upon.
Sports bettors who place real money wagers on games, do so for the following main reasons:
· To make the games more enjoyable to watch.
· To experience the satisfaction of being proved right about their prediction.
· To boast to their friends.
· To know if they are good or bad at predicting sporting outcomes.
· To give them something to talk about with others.
Much lower down the list of reasons for sports gambling is to win money. Most bettors realise that, in the long run, the house always wins.
By the end of the flight, I was feeling confident that I could create an app for users that generated the first five experiences above. If that could be done well, it would not matter that real money bets are not part of the experience and would be beneficial to users.
Creating an app that allowed users to compare themselves against one another, win a Contest, gain a world ranking, and know how well they are doing, required a consistent scoring system.
The first challenge faced was to design a scoring system that measured users’ predictions in a uniform way across all sports. This is the reason Perfect Picks has the 100 points per Contest scoring model. Regardless of the sport, or how many games are in a Contest, the maximum score is always the same. This scoring model – I believe – is the successful foundation of the app.
The next set of decisions were all related to how users compete against one another, how to calculate world rankings, how to manage private leagues and perhaps most importantly, how to populate a news feed that brought the app to life. I will elaborate on these items in future blog articles.
This article provides a brief insight into how the idea Perfect Picks was born. Follow us on our social media channels, listed at the bottom of this page, and feel free to share this article and comment below.
Thanks for reading.