Caleb Dykema, the co-founder of Vault joins Ryan Knuppel on the show to discuss his sports betting tracking app.
Ryan Knuppel:
Hey, what’s up everybody? Ryan Knuppel here. Knup Sports Show, episode 182. Hope you’re having a great day. Thank you so much for tuning in and listening, watching, reading, whatever you’re doing with this show. I appreciate you consuming it as usual. Today, we have an awesome guest, one that I’ve met before, and I think he’s doing some amazing things in this community and in this world of sports betting that we all love and adore. I’m excited to bring him on and talk more about what’s going on. So without further ado, I’m going to jump right in here and I’m going to bring on Caleb Dykema of Vault. Caleb, how are you?
Caleb Dykema:
How you doing, Ryan? Good to be on number 182. This is awesome.
Ryan Knuppel:
There you go. I’m excited to have you on. I’m excited to dive into Vault and hear what’s going on, but first and foremost, where you living these days? What you up too? Where you call home these days?
Caleb Dykema:
Yeah, so I’m actually living in Atlanta right now for the next three weeks or so. I actually grew up southeastern Wisconsin, so not too far from you. Grew up on a farm there, spent good chunk of my life in Wisconsin, schooled there, worked there, that kind of thing. Just recently moved down South because I hate the cold.
Ryan Knuppel:
So the real reason for that question was, and now I can ask it in either/or, Packers or Falcons?
Caleb Dykema:
Packers. Yeah. We’re not going to change teams that quickly. Been here nine months, Ryan, I don’t think I’m going to change teams that quickly.
Ryan Knuppel:
Hey, you never know. You never know if it was like the Bucks or somebody that you were jumping on a bandwagon maybe.
Caleb Dykema:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Ryan Knuppel:
Well cool. Awesome.
Caleb Dykema:
[inaudible 00:01:46]
Ryan Knuppel:
Yeah, well that’s awesome. Well, tell me a little bit about yourself from a career side before we get into Vault and knowing you’re the co-founder of Vault, but leading up to that, what kind of got you into the entrepreneurial world and what was your path like?
Caleb Dykema:
Yeah, no, I appreciate the question. So I actually started, my parents grew up on a farm. My parents were very entrepreneurial, really taught me kind of anywhere from boots on the ground, feeding chickens and pigs all the way up to selling at the farmer’s market, things like that. So that’s really where it started. I went to school for mechanical engineering. I really thought that was my career path initially, and I loved it at the time. I actually, while in college, I invented and patented a product called One Swipe. I was basically watching one of my engineering professors clean this whiteboard and he was an older guy, had arthritis. He was using this little tiny eraser to clean this massive, huge whiteboard, and it was just literally just the whole way, just going across. I’m sitting there in class, I’m like, “Why has this not been solved?” White boards have been around for ages.
So in my college house I invented One Swipe. It was basically this whiteboard eraser that spanned from the top of the board to the bottom of the board, had a track across the top and all you’d have to do is grab the handle and push it across and erase the whole thing in one swipe. So yeah, that was really the big spark into entrepreneurship. Really my first major startup there. From there, so I graduated a couple years back, went to a mechanical engineering role, did not like it. Sticked around for about six months, left that and went full time with Vault, so that’s my career path. It’s been an exciting ride and kind of started in engineering and now it’s more marketing, sales, operations.
Ryan Knuppel:
That’s amazing. Thanks for that background and I envy you a little bit because you realized right away, that corporate world, may or maybe not for me, six months in.
Caleb Dykema:
Made it six months, man.
Ryan Knuppel:
I spent 15 years in the corporate world and looking back where I’m at now, I’ve been out like seven, eight years doing full time all of this. Looking back, I wish I would’ve only spent six months of my life in that setting, but we can talk about that another time. Yeah. So Vault, let’s dive in. You’re co-founder of Vault and Vault, the number one sports betting tracking app. So it’s a tracking app. Give us just a high level for those that may not understand or know what it is. I’ll pull it up on the screen while you’re talking, but also give us a high level of what it is.
Caleb Dykema:
Cool. Yeah, so really our goal at Vault is to engage the better, enhance that experience for sports betters by bringing friends and bets together. So what Vault does is it links to a sports better’s sportsbooks, all of their sportsbooks and automatically tracks all their bets, their stats, their trends, where they’re most profitable, their bankrolls, all of that in one central location. So really that central hub, that dashboard to give them a bird’s eye view of their betting history.
Ryan Knuppel:
Yeah, that’s awesome and it’s much needed from a consumer and somebody that’s on sports. Especially if you are betting across different apps, right? If you bet on one app, maybe or maybe not, you don’t need it, I’m sure there’s some stats and some dashboards that really help you dive into your stats. But if you’re doing stuff across sports books, which I would strongly suggest doing if you really want to be serious about betting, something like this is super important. Tell us a bit about some of the operators that you’re integrated with and that you’re pulling bets from for somebody.
Caleb Dykema:
Yeah. And really just going back to your last point, Ryan, it’s just really exciting. So we’re constantly talking to our users. We’re a startup, so we’re always trying to get feedback, and it’s really interesting to see the different types of sports betters. I was talking to somebody literally yesterday where they only use one sportsbook, DraftKings but I would consider them, kind of weird that they don’t use more than one, but I would consider them semipro. It sounded like they were very good at what they do. Even then it’s still, DraftKings, these sportsbooks, they’re not giving you this transparent information because it doesn’t fit with their business model. So even then being able to see transparently into how I’m doing is a better, even if I only use one sportsbook, is super valuable. So just wanted to throw that there.
Ryan Knuppel:
No, no, and I agree with you and I think, yeah, that was the point I was going to kind of make as well because you guys do next level, regardless of how many operators and sportsbooks you’re using, but breaking down bets by team and what type you’re good at. And as we’re looking at the screen here, just you can really get your own trends in what you’re good at and what you’re not. You may think you’re good at over enders or total bets, but what is your actual win loss percentage and your profit on those? I think that’s really neat and something that’d be powerful for anyone. I mean, we’re all stat data geeks these days and so this is just another level of that.
Caleb Dykema:
Exactly. That’s the idea. That’s the idea.
Ryan Knuppel:
Cool. Awesome. And so how’s it going? So tell us about where you have the app out there. It looks like it’s on the Apple store. How’s it going currently?
Caleb Dykema:
Going really well. So when we started, I just love digging into our users, our customers. I want to know everything about them and really understand why they use the app, how they’re using it, what are we doing well, what we’re doing not so well. We launched our beta back in December, a long time ago. So we started really early on just getting feedback and it sucked initially, but we knew that going in and from there we’ve just been able to make so many improvements because we put it out there so early. So right now it’s going fantastic. We pushed it out to the public officially for this football season and people are eating it up. We’re really growing right now. It’s exciting to be able to finally put the foot on the gas for football season, because it was always just slowly growing getting feedback, and now it’s like, all right, let’s put the pedal to the metal.
Ryan Knuppel:
That’s amazing. Good for you. That’s awesome. And we’ll put the links to the app and all of that, the website and everything out there in the show notes. But I got a kind of tough question for you.
Caleb Dykema:
All right.
Ryan Knuppel:
As we all know, there’s many, many companies jumping into this crazy sports betting eye gaming world, and there’s probably, I don’t know how much competition to this, but there probably are other apps that are doing very similar things. I know we’ve had a couple on the show that are doing very similar type things. So my question to you is, what’s your secret sauce or what would you consider your unique selling point? Maybe over some of the competition? We don’t have to talk about who those other apps might be, but do you guys consider something that you guys do better than others, or that maybe is something unique that you guys do?
Caleb Dykema:
Yeah. I mean, it is our secret sauce, so I don’t want to give away the whole secret sauce.
Ryan Knuppel:
I love it.
Caleb Dykema:
But to give you an idea of high level of what we’re really doing is really just making it more intuitive experience. We realize going into this space that sports betting apps, sports betting platforms, were just so hard to understand. If you’re a more experienced better, you can understand a crap ton of numbers on a page. But for somebody that’s less experienced or even a mid-level better, that’s just overwhelming. And when it comes to UI, when it comes to improving an experience, you really want to have a clean look.
So I would say one of the big things that differentiates us is instead, when we started building our app, we didn’t look, Ryan, at other sports betting apps. We actually looked towards the financial industry, the FinTech industry, Coinbase, Intuit Mint, Robinhood. We realized what they were really, really, really good at is being able to present very complicated information, numbers, graphs, things like that in a very simple, easy to understand way. We realized that other sports betting apps and platforms, whether they’re a competitor of ours or not, didn’t do that. And so we really focused on designing and building surrounding that FinTech space idea.
Ryan Knuppel:
Sure, sure. That’s amazing. So thank you for sharing that, by the way. I appreciate, I know that’s a tough question to answer sometimes and I appreciate your transparency on that. Another question I have, let’s talk a little bit more on the business side and maybe the economics of what’s going on here. So is the app free, one, and secondly, what does the revenue model look like? How are you guys making money on this or why is that a good thing for you guys?
Caleb Dykema:
Yeah. Because what’s the point of doing this if we’re not making money? So, yeah. Right now the app is completely free and we plan to keep the app free for the foreseeable future, if not forever. We do plan to have pro plans where users are going to get more in depth insights, information, different picks, whatever that might be. I still haven’t figured out, nailed that down exactly, but that is the plan in the future. And then right now our main revenue stream is through affiliates. So working with different sportsbooks like BetMGM, Unibet, BetRivers, etcetera. Working with them, driving users to their platforms is our main revenue model right now.
Ryan Knuppel:
Yeah, that’s amazing. That’s a nice revenue model. I like the affiliate side, obviously it has a little sweet spot in my heart because that’s one of my passions, and a lot of my friends are affiliates and I’m an affiliate in all the above. And so I think that space is growing and emerging and heading down that and with an app like this, it makes some sense as well. So, yeah, go ahead.
Caleb Dykema:
Well, I was going to say, so one of the things I think we talked about before the show was just this idea, I really think sportsbooks need to improve in how they market to customers. Right now, to me it’s just this shotgun blast idea of marketing where you’re slapping a billboard up or putting an ad on a bus, right? These are great for this initial push for sportsbooks to get users and to get customers, but we all know this is not going to work out in the long run. Sportsbooks really need to look towards other industries, what they’ve done, really creating more personalized, more valuable to a specific user type promotions, things like that. I think it’s just a matter of getting that data, finding out what that user likes, and then pushing out those promotions in a more targeted way.
Ryan Knuppel:
Absolutely. So what’s the future look like for Vault? I mean, where you guys headed? Obviously in a great spot right now with the app kind of rocking and rolling, football seasons here. I’m sure gaining market share is a big part of this, but what does the future look like for you guys?
Caleb Dykema:
What’s the grandiose vision? Yeah, so really right now we’re very focused in sports betting in the states. But our goal is we really want to take this not only to sports betting, but daily fantasy esports. Really any eye gaming is going to be fitting for our model, and we want to take that not only in the states, but Canada and across the world. We’ve looked just briefly at other countries and again, it’s still lacking this idea of transparency, this idea of engaging this better by enabling them to see their stats, things like that and we think that we can take that across the world into the future.
Ryan Knuppel:
That’s awesome. Very cool. That’s awesome. Moving across the United States and then across the world- [inaudible 00:13:39]
Caleb Dykema:
Exactly.
Ryan Knuppel:
So how can we help? And when I say we, myself and maybe some of the audience, some people that are watching and maybe new to Vault, maybe other business owners. What do you need? What do you need help with? What’s an ask you might have of our community here?
Caleb Dykema:
Yeah, so I think the biggest things right now is always just looking for more partners, more affiliate partners, more potential ad partners, things like that. Whether that’s any sports related type company. Then also we’re raising around as well too. So if there’s any investors or individuals that are looking to join our journey, those introductions would be helpful as well.
Ryan Knuppel:
That’s awesome. Yeah, for sure. I would urge people to get a hold of you and definitely talk, especially if they’re looking to invest in an up and coming tracking app. Looks amazing. Caleb, clearly you’re a bright individual and young, bright, talented in this industry. I got one last question for you, and it’s a little more, I’m curious, right? You’re young, you’re talented, you’re an entrepreneur. What’s one of the biggest challenges you’ve experienced? Because I know everything’s not always green and rosy, right? What’s one of the biggest hiccups / challenges you’ve had in launching this over the last couple of years?
Caleb Dykema:
Yeah, no, that’s a great question. I think, it is going to sound kind of cliche, but it’s just getting in your own way. When you’re being young or whatever age you are, creating a company, there’s so many different roadblocks that you face. There’s so many times where you’re just like, “What the fuck am I doing?” Is what I’m doing actually the right thing? Is what I’m doing actually going to work in the long run? And it’s just having that ability to be stoic, trusting your gut, having that faith and pushing forward and just understanding that every single, failures are going to happen and understanding that that’s part of the ride.
Ryan Knuppel:
Great advice. I mean, that’s a hundred percent. A lot of times you have to take imperfect action. You have to move fast, be decisive, just make things happen. And it’s not always going to be the right decisions, but that’s when you move on and you figure out what is better going forward.
Caleb Dykema:
Exactly. It’s probably a cliche answer, but at the same time, everything I think boils down to that. You’re going to have problems, but if you can work it through for yourself, you can make it happen.
Ryan Knuppel:
Yeah, absolutely. All right, Caleb, well I really appreciate you being on the show. If somebody wanted to get ahold of you, first of all, where would they find you best?
Caleb Dykema:
Yeah, you can shoot me an email. It’s just caleb@vaultsportshq.com.
Ryan Knuppel:
Awesome. And then vaultsportshq.com is your website. We’ll put that link up there. They can download the app, called the Vault Sports HQ app as well, out in-[inaudible 00:16:24]
Caleb Dykema:
Just Vault or whatever you want to call it. Yep. Vault app. Yep.
Ryan Knuppel:
Awesome. Well, awesome. Any last words? Anything we missed before I let you go here, Caleb?
Caleb Dykema:
No, Ryan, this was great. Glad to be part of 182 and yeah, excited to see what this football season has for all of us.
Ryan Knuppel:
Amazing. Hope to have you on, on 282-
Caleb Dykema:
Let’s go.
Ryan Knuppel:
…And we’ll still tick in this industry.
Caleb Dykema:
Well, it will be iPod by 282, right?
Ryan Knuppel:
Oh, that’s amazing. That’d be great for you guys. So hey, if there’s anything I can do for you, let me know. I appreciate your time, Caleb.
Caleb Dykema:
Thanks, Ryan. Appreciate it.
Ryan Knuppel:
All right, take care. All right. That was Caleb Dykema of Vault. Really cool. Really good guy. Doing some amazing things in this space. I urge you guys to go out there, download the Vault app, check it out, get your sportsbooks plugged in and just see if it helps you, right? I mean, what’s the worst it can be, you don’t like using it, but I mean I think you’ll see that right away it really helps you gain some clarity to one, the types of bets you’re making, two, what you’re good at, and three, just makes it easy to see at a dashboard level what my balances look like and what things are there. So I urge you to go out, take a download there and go forward. Thanks for listening. Really appreciate it. I’m Ryan Knuppel, at Knup out on most social medias. If you need anything from me, please let me know. Until next time, stay safe. Have a good one and enjoy football this weekend.
Relevant Links
- Learn more about Vault on their website at https://www.vaultsportshq.com/
- You can connect with Caleb on LinkedIn.
More Knup Sports Links
- I refer to Knup Sports often in my show. That’s our sports passion site. Check out KnupSports.com here.
- If you are looking for my services you can find more information on the Knup Solutions website.
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- Knup Sports is a proud part of the Sports 2.0 Network
Contact Ryan Knuppel
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanknuppel
- Email: ryan@knupsolutions.com
