Today’s Q&A interview was with Brad Kronthal, the COO and founder of Alloy Sports. He co-founded the sports betting research company alongside his brother, Spencer Kronthal, and friend Seth Sholk.
What are you working on at Alloy Sports?
Alloy Sports is a mobile-first sports betting research platform that gives fans the power of 10 years of historical data in an easily digestible platform. Fans can easily curate their own betting strategies with over 200 stats and filters to find the best games to bet on.
We’re building the ultimate pre-bet research app for sports fans to get their data-driven insights so they can confidently place winning bets.
How did you get this idea? What key insight led you to pursue this opportunity?
Spencer’s background is in materials engineering. As an engineer, we had software to help you find the correct material for a specific job. For example, if you needed something strong and light, it would tell you to use carbon fiber.
If you plugged price into the equation, something more reasonable like high-strength steel might come into play. My background (Brad) is in sports production, and Seth whose background is in data analytics, we realized this applies perfectly to sports betting, where if you could plug in the attributes you thought led to winning a game, you could build a winning strategy around that.
A few key insights were realizing the rise of analytics in sports and the need for user control in technology.
When we looked at the sports betting market, we saw that both of these massive trends had yet to take root for consumer research.
Therefore, we set out to let users easily and affordably conduct high-quality, data-driven betting research.
How did you turn your idea into a company?
We made this company a reality by playing to the strengths of our 3 co-founders. With backgrounds in engineering, data analytics, and sports production, we were able to execute the build of a complex platform.
The main goal was to build a powerful platform that is quick and easy to use for the average sports fan.
We first mocked out our vision and tested it out on Excel. We then joined a startup incubator (Launchpeer) that helped us propel our idea into a product. They provided us with tools for legal assistance, business development, fundraising, and more.
We raised a pre-seed round from friends and family to build our beta for the NBA last spring. During that time, we also added to our advisory board and executive team.
We added leaders in the sports, tech, and data space. Following our successful beta launch, we raised more funding to be able to bring our tech team in-house.
We hired US developers to double down on the product as our core competency. Since bringing the team in house, we developed and launched our mobile NFL product on iOS.
What’s the addressable market and how do you go about capturing it?
The US sports betting market, while already massive, is only going to continue to grow as more states legalize and the market grows in territories already legalized.
In 2021, there was over $50B bet legally in the US, before states like New York legalized mobile betting.
Our target market is the casual, weekly bettor. There are currently 23.5 million people who bet weekly in the US. As almost 90% of people do some form of research before placing a bet, we see a massive opportunity to better inform people’s decisions before they bet.
We look to capture this by providing the most value to our customers. We are packing millions of data points into our backtesting engine with truly unlimited combinations of statistics and filters for a bettor to find their winning strategy.
At the same time, we are making this powerful data easy to use, so you can build your first winning strategy in 20 seconds or less.
We are looking to reach fans where they are, especially on social media and through partnerships to ensure that as many fans as possible have access to make data-driven decisions with their betting money.
Who is your core customer? How are you acquiring them? How will you increase your customer base?
Our core customer is that big sports fan and casual bettor. Someone who knows the teams, players, and stats and may be betting a few times per week or at a moderate unit size of $15 to $50 per bet. Our core user is in the 21 – 36 year old age range.
We’re acquiring customers by giving them a product they’re missing. They want to move beyond the “thrill” of sports betting and into the profitable realm of it.
Sports betting is fun, but it’s not fun to lose. Our product empowers users to not only build systems based on their own intuition but join a community where we share successful data points and tactics to help them.
We offer full transparency. This means showing every stat and filter that goes into a successful betting strategy and sharing it with our users. We are a community of sports fans looking to win more money, together.
We have been active on college campuses across the US with brand ambassadors as well as on social media with strategic influencers.
In addition to our app, we’ve built communities on Discord, TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram. We were also the most upvoted sports betting research company to have launched on Product Hunt.
Our customer base grows as we grow. We have partnered with multiple media players in the industry to provide more quantitative content.
More features and sports will be added to Alloy as we grow. We plan to push out more advanced and predictive data sets that help our users win more bets.
What are some milestones you’re targeting over the next 3-6 months?
Over the next 3-6 months, we are looking to grow the momentum that we’ve started since launching our mobile app in September. To start, we are rolling out the NBA platform later in December.
Once NBA is launched, we are looking to refine the app with additional features to make the app even more powerful and easier to use. We will be introducing more strategies for users to start with and streamlining the experience further.
As we continue to grow our user base, we are also looking to develop key strategic partnerships to grow our reach and brand awareness. We are excited to be working with influencers and sites to provide data-driven content to their readers.
Our goal is to make data-driven betting mainstream and educate thousands of users in the next 6 months.
Any other information you would like to share?
Right now, the betting research space is filled with many talking heads and qualitative information.
We started this company because we were looking for a solution to help us find our own winning edge. Most people can’t code their own models.
Our platform is at the forefront of the betting analytics space, making sports betting data and modeling super quick and easy to use, right on your phone.
