Mark Phillip of RUWT + MetaBet Joins the Knup Sports Show
In episode 241 of the Knup Sports Show, host Ryan Knuppel sat down with Mark Phillip, the founder of multiple sports tech platforms including AreYouWatchingThis.com, MetaBet, and ICantFindTheGame.com. With nearly two decades in the business, Mark brings a seasoned yet forward-thinking approach to building technology that solves problems for sports fans and media partners alike.
Mark’s entrepreneurial journey started back in 2006 in Austin, Texas, where he left a secure job to pursue his frustration of missing thrilling sports moments. What began as a simple idea to track and alert fans to exciting games has grown into a suite of B2B tools that support discovery, engagement, and monetization in the sports media landscape.
AreYouWatchingThis.com: Where It All Began
AreYouWatchingThis.com (RUWT) was the first tool Mark built, aimed at solving a simple but common problem—missing an epic sports moment. Using real-time excitement analytics, the platform measures game dynamics like win probability swings to detect and alert users when a game heats up. This became a valuable data service that large media outlets like Fox Sports and USA Today now rely on.
While RUWT looks like a B2C product, its DNA has always been B2B. It was designed to plug into larger ecosystems, helping major outlets automatically highlight the games fans should care about. Mark shared a compelling anecdote about an early opportunity to work with Siri—yes, that Siri—before it was acquired by Apple. At the time, he passed on the opportunity in favor of sticking to his B2B roots, a decision that reminds us all how unpredictable startup life can be.
MetaBet: Turning Sports Excitement into Revenue
In 2019, MetaBet emerged from RUWT’s infrastructure to offer media companies a new kind of value—monetization. MetaBet enables automatic embedding of sportsbook affiliate widgets in sports content. If an article is about the Dallas Cowboys, the system might insert live betting odds or player props related to Dak Prescott right into the article. These live, dynamic elements outperform static ads by 7–10x in click-through rate.
Mark emphasized simplicity and ease of integration as MetaBet’s standout features. For instance, their WordPress plugin allows companies to integrate dynamic betting widgets with a single line of code. Media companies and sportsbook operators alike benefit from this seamless solution. As Mark put it, “Our API is like magic.”
ICantFindTheGame.com: Simplifying Sports Discovery
Next came ICantFindTheGame.com—a deceptively simple B2C-looking site that serves as a live demonstration of Mark’s technology stack. It merges curation, discovery, and monetization into one user-friendly platform. Users can see which games are worth watching, where to stream them, and what bets are available—all explained in clear, non-jargon language.
The platform avoids intimidating betting lingo like “spread” or “moneyline.” Instead, it uses plain English to explain betting options, lowering the barrier for casual sports fans and first-time bettors. Mark sees this as a solution to poor UX in the sportsbook industry, where complicated interfaces scare away potential users.
Staying Grounded in Business Fundamentals
When asked for advice to young entrepreneurs, Mark didn’t hesitate: find a real pain point. “Ask people what was frustrating about their day,” he said. “If it hurts enough, they’ll pay to make it go away.” This simple yet powerful principle has guided his success across multiple platforms.
As for artificial intelligence, Mark takes a pragmatic view. While his algorithms might be classified as AI by outsiders, he prefers to describe them as machine learning built on thoughtful, rule-based coding. He sees AI as a tool—not a product in and of itself—and cautions businesses against leaning too heavily on buzzwords.
Looking Ahead: What’s Next?
Mark is excited about deeper partnerships with sportsbook operators and expanding MetaBet beyond gambling into other sports-adjacent monetization opportunities. The goal is to make curation and discovery table stakes in the industry. As sports content becomes more fragmented, tools that unify the experience for fans and businesses alike will only grow in importance.
From solving the problem of missing great games to helping media outlets drive affiliate revenue, Mark Phillip’s career is a masterclass in identifying pain points and solving them with elegant, scalable technology.
Relevant Guest Links
- Learn more about: AreYouWatchingThis.com | MetaBet.io | ICantFindTheGame.com
- You can connect with Mark Phillip 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.
- This episode was sponsored by Coded Content — data driven AI sports content unique to your brand!
- Listen to more episodes of the Knup Sports Show.
- Want to be a guest on our show? Setup a time that works here.
- Subscribe to the Knup Sports Show on iTunes here.
Full Transcript for This Show
Hey, what’s going on everybody? Ryan Knuppel here, Knup Sports Show, episode 241. Hope you’re all doing well today. It is Tuesday, May 27th here.
We just got back from SBC. Great event there in Fort Lauderdale. Saw many of your smiling faces, so it was amazing to see most of you and that many of you.
Hope you all had a good conference. We’re back at it. We are back with another episode and excited to bring on our guest today.
We have an amazing guest, somebody that I’ve known in the industry for quite some time, and we’re long overdue to have this conversation. Yeah, we’re in the middle of NBA playoffs and NHL playoffs. Lots of great endings of sports going on right now, so hopefully you’re enjoying that.
Then we go into the slow period of sports, which kills me. We get into just baseball, but we know then we get to ramp up for football season come August, September. It’s the cycle of sports that we all know and love, but that’s what we’re in today.
All right, without further ado, we’re going to bring on our guest today. I have an amazing guest. I cannot wait to bring him on and share his story.
We have Mark Phillip of MetaBet. Are you watching this? Mark, how are you? Doing well, my friend. How are you? Doing amazing.
Thank you for joining me. Really appreciate it. How’s everything in your world today? Things are good.
You know, it’s no longer triple digits here in Austin, so that’s, you know, you take the wins where you can get them. But yeah, things are going well. Post-SBC, you know, inbox has been packed down.
Things are a little bit more calm, so no complaints. Yeah, it’s like we were talking about this off air here before, but man, it’s like you get back and you just, you take a deep breath, but you feel sick. You have no voice.
You have a thousand things to do on your to-do list, but it’s like, we love it. We still love it. Absolutely.
It’s a great time of year for lots of reasons. Absolutely. Well, Mark, I really appreciate you spending some time with us today.
Let’s dive right in. I’d love to hear a little bit about your backstory, kind of what brought you to where you are today. So rewind us a bit and tell us a little bit about your story that brought you to where you are today.
You know, I’m a Brooklyn, New York native. And so I think being in Texas for more than half my life is, is something I never ever expected. But I was here in oh six.
And that’s when I had the idea for, are you watching this as a lifelong Yankees fan and just sports fan in general, there’s nothing I hate more than waking up in the morning and realizing I missed a great game the night before. You know, whether it’s a triple overtime, a no hitter on, you know, WGN or some other random channel. That’s not always in my usual flow.
I was young and naive enough to quit my job, leave my great healthcare behind and, and try to solve this problem of not being the loser at the water cooler the next day. You missed the great game. So fast forward a few months, a Boise state, Oklahoma in the fiesta bowl, 2007, the statute Liberty play was the first alert we ever sent out.
And it was, you know, burning the ships and doing everything we could from there. So we’ve built this company starting from excitement. Analytics is what we call them.
You can kind of think of it as a, if you envision what a wind probability graph looks like, might start in the middle, might go up or down based on who’s winning generally, the more violently that graph goes up and down generally, the more exciting the game is. So we’re a B2B company. We licensed our data to folks like big media companies like Fox sports USA today.
But, you know, fast forward 13, 14 years past the falls and we decide to expand from just sports excitement into the monetization of that sports excitement. And that’s where Medivac came from. So in late 2018, 2019, we started building these automated tools.
So for anyone that has sports eyeballs, mostly, you know, content generation sites, we can insert widgets directly into their articles that help them drive sports book affiliate revenue, like an article about the Cowboys. We’re going to insert a widget for NFC East odds or Dak Prescott MVP odds. And so when you zoom out, we kind of have three silos.
It’s curation, discovery, and monetization curation. What should I be watching? What game is hot right now? One of four days of the year has more than a hundred sporting events. So being able to curate real time is important.
Discovery is where the hell is the game? What channel is it on? You know, whether it’s on Apple TV or Peacock, I still forget how to watch Messi sometimes when I just want to watch him. And I know that he’s playing. Yeah.
And then you have monetization, which is where Medivac comes in, you know, adding a monetization hook to this excitement. And that gives us our Holy grail of, if I can send you an alert that LeBron James has 60 points in three quarters, do you want to pay 99 cents to watch the finish? Or do you want to place a wager? And if you’ll be Kobe’s 81, place a wager and we’ll let you watch for free. So that curation, discovery, monetization all together, that’s what we’re striving for.
I love that analogy. And I love that, you know, you know, most, most people that come on this show, they have a, their backstory starts before sports years, like started way back when, but it was like, you’ve been doing this for so long, my friend, which is amazing. It’s a, you’re a true journeyman in this industry.
Actually. What’s funny is I think I remember some of those first alerts because I, I was in, I was one of, I don’t know, but I remember receiving some of those first alerts because yes, this has always been a problem as a sports fan. Like you just want to know when something’s happening.
You hit the nail on the head there with that. So it’s infuriating. And we’ve all been there.
I mean, sitting at a bar knowing that a great game is on TV or at least the great game for you is on TV and feeling like a pain, trying to get the bartender to put the best game on. We’ve all been in that situation and it’s, it’s infuriating to me that we still have to deal with it. I’m sitting in a bar in San Diego.
I think it was for a conference and there is a literal no hitter through eight happening. And it’s me and another guy watching it on our phones. And the entire bar has no idea what’s going on.
And this is like a 30 TV bar and it is sports is special and unique. And we, we tear our hair out, trying to find all these complicated ways to work with it. When really sometimes we just need to get out of the way, let the sports do the job and just sort of ride in its wake.
Well, let’s, let’s, so let’s peel back the layers. Now let’s dive in a little bit more into each of these. Right.
So, you know, you kind of explained the three areas that you got, I’m actually going to pull up some of this on the screen and kind of dive in, but let’s go. So are you watching this.com kind of your first silo, right? Your, your first, your first journey, let’s dive in a little bit, like talk a little bit more in depth about this specific piece. Sure.
This is where it all started. And from the beginning we’ve been very B2B focused. And I think that’s, I think it’s an Austin thing, you know, to paint with an unfairly broad brush.
If you’re in the Bay area, generally you’re looking for a B2C app. You want to have 10 million users installed yesterday. B2B.
I mean, Austin rather is much more B2B focused. And I think a lot of that comes from the DNA of the city. You rewind a few decades, the folks that made the money in Austin were all B2B.
Those folks grew up to be VCs. And then you get this, this reinforcement cycle of the people that have the money and investing care about B2B. So more people start B2B and it just, it just cycles.
So for us, it’s always been unique because we kind of look like a B2C app, but B2B has always been the focus. And let’s take a small tangent back in the early days. This was maybe 2010, 2012.
I need to go back and look. Anyway, I got an email from a guy named Dag. It was a cold inbound.
The subject line was, hello with like nine O’s in it. Who is this guy? And so I hopped on a call with him because I knew, you know, inbound stuff is hard. And I remember taking a look.
It’s like, tell your phone, one restaurant reservation and get it for you. I didn’t really understand what it was, but we hop on the call and he said, Hey, I’d love to use your data. I can send you users in return.
And I was like, Oh, we’re B2B. I was trying to stick to my guns. B2B track doesn’t do anything for me, but you know, keep us in mind.
And if, if things go well for you, then, you know, we can work something out. Dag was a CEO of a small little company called Siri that got bought by Apple 18 months later. And I told him I didn’t want to work with him.
So, you know, B2B has been great, but I’ve definitely gotten some things loud wrong. We all do my friend. We all do.
That’s a great story though. That’s the thing. 18 years in, you have some good ones, whether it’s, you know, losing your bags on your way to the sports illustrated swimsuit edition party or, you know, turning down Siri.
I have every possible one you can imagine in that sense. I love it. I love it.
So let’s, let’s go to the next silo. Let’s jump into MetaBet, you know, let me pull up that and let’s kind of talk through that a little bit and what that looks like. MetaBet was us catching lightning in a bottle.
You know, are you watching this was a long, slow slog to get to where we are. And MetaBet was built on top of, are you watching this? And that’s why we’re able to jump to the front of the line with innovation because we already had all the tech built. It was just adding in a new bit of data to it.
And so with MetaBet, the ability to automate this for folks has been way more compelling than we realized. Yeah. I mean, even just building a WordPress plugin for folks has been a big win because it’s all about ease.
I just posted this on LinkedIn the other day, you know, I built all this cool stuff over the years. Like, Oh, this is the coolest thing ever. Customers will buy this as soon as I release it.
And it took me a few years to really realize that it’s not about how cool something is all the time. It’s often about how can they get this integrated? Do they have the dev horsepower to make it happen? It doesn’t matter how awesomely cool I think it is. And so the ability to make it a one copy and paste line of code and get people up and running within hours has really been the big win for us.
And it’s, I think the best compliment I’ve ever gotten from someone with MetaBet is our API is like magic. And I will, I will, I’ll put that on my gravestone. Like the best thing I can get as a developer that it’s easy to use and easy to integrate.
So with MetaBet, we pull in all the lines, all the official books, no scraping, just going into officially partnering with the books. And we look at ourselves as sort of a, a marriage counselor at times. We sort of sit between the media companies and the operators, helping them work better together.
When our tiles are dynamic, live tiles are used versus a static banner ad like, you know, Kevin Hart saying, go bet on an NBA game. We found seven to 10 X increase in click through rate. So anything we can do to help the entire ecosystem, we always say we try to grow our slice of the pie.
We don’t try to grow our slice of the pie. We try to grow the entire pie. You know, when we can focus on that as a North star and just sort of sit in the middle and make everyone work better together, everybody wins and we win as well.
What a great lesson, you know, early on, you just said that, you know, it doesn’t always have to be just ease of, of implementation is so important. And I relate to that. And I think a lot of business owners can really take that and probably apply that to whatever they’re doing.
Because sometimes we make things so complicated that it’s like, Oh my gosh, this looks cool, but I have no idea where to start. And so it sounds like perfected that ease of implementation, which then turns into more business. So I love that principle.
It’s been great for us. And I’ll say it was sometimes accidental, but it’s been really our Trojan horse. Amazing.
Amazing. Well, let’s dive into the third, the third silo here. Let’s let’s get, I can’t find the game.com pulled up and we’ll get on the thing we talk about.
I can’t find the game.com. This looks fun. This is another one that is looks B2C, but really is B2B. So we built this as a demo to help our customers understand perspective customers really understand what we’re about.
So in I can’t find the game we’re taking our curation, our discovery and our monetization and tightly weaving them into one site. So if you look at any of these games that we have up and running, you’ll see that we have a headline of sort of why the game is going to be interesting. We give you how to watch it.
So whether it’s Sirius XM or Masson or WNBA League Pass, and then we give you the actual lines if you want to bet on it. And you’ll notice we don’t ever use the word spread. We don’t ever use the word money line.
We try to make things as simple as possible. Yeah. So I don’t know, click on a wing son, for example, where are we at here? That’s the just to the left a little bit.
Oh, yeah. Click on that game. Cool.
And so here, here’s a good example of, here’s an online stream. One click. You can watch the game right away.
Click on odds. And then we’ll tell you in plain English, the different bets you can make. There’s no minus one tens.
There’s no plus two fifties. Instead of saying, you know, the spread is three and a half. We say wings to win by more than four points is $1.91. Yeah.
That’s the win outright is $2.65. Because I think one of the biggest problems we run into with sports gambling is UX. So many folks walk past a sports book and won’t ever walk into it. You know, imagine you’re a bachelor party in Vegas because they don’t understand what’s going on on the board and we make it so hard.
It’s almost like a secret handshake. You have to learn just to say, I think the wings are going to win this game. Yeah.
And so we’ve tried to eliminate a lot of the, the, the Greek, so to speak, and try to keep things really simple. If you bet a dollar on the wings to win outright, you can win a dollar 54 just to keep it simple and easy to digest. Love that too.
Yeah. The, the simplicity, it seems to be a common theme here, which I love Mark. That’s a, that’s amazing.
Products all look super cool and super amazing. Let’s talk a little bit about more on the business side. I have one question for you.
I’m curious how you guys are either one embracing or ignoring AI. AI is obviously the big buzzword all over the place, but you guys, you know, you’re doing a ton of data stuff. You’re doing a lot of things that I I’m sure AI could lend a hand to.
Curious what you guys’s perception and kind of business practices are around AI. For customers it’s nil, you know, and part of that maybe is to my detriment. You know, I’m, I’m a purist when it comes to computer science.
And I think a lot of folks that had our tech would probably call it AI, but it’s, it’s not, it’s, it’s just really good coding machine learning. Yeah. Philosophically, when you look at our excitement analytics, I think there’s an argument that can’t be done with AI.
Let’s say you have an NBA game tied with 30 seconds to go and a WNBA game tied with 30 seconds to go, which one’s more exciting. And I think reasonable people can disagree. I think some people can say NBA rights costs more.
It’s more exciting. There are more people in the seats than NBA game. That should be more exciting.
For us though, our algorithm treats them the same. NBA, WNBA, college basketball, a tie game is the same. Now, if it’s tied at 130 points, that’s different than if it’s tied at 44 points, because that leads to, you know, how quickly baskets are being scored.
So a tie game might mean something different, but all things being equal, the algorithm, even though we think of it as completely objective, is built based on my own beliefs. Yeah. There’s no, there’s no source of truth for which games are most exciting.
We all can agree on some of the epic ones like, you know, Syracuse UConn going into six overtimes, but there are other things that we disagree on. And so you can’t train AI on this is right and this is wrong. But for this algorithm and getting in my soapbox for a second and any algorithm out there in the world is influenced by the people that are building it.
And so for us, it is very hands-on. We give it rules. It learns, it evolves, it understands what a rivalry is and we’ll treat rivalries different in different years based on how it thinks the teams are progressing and developing.
But for us, all the AI we use is internal for operations to, to take notes, to streamline for followups to help generate press releases and things like that. But AI isn’t a part of what we sell to our customers. Amazing answer.
Amazing answer. And you know, I, I agree with you on many, many points of that AI is as computer science purists, right? It’s one of those like, Oh, we want to use it. But then again, it’s like, Oh, it doesn’t do everything.
And how do we embrace it without overdoing it? So yeah, you’re, you’re right on with some of that. So man, but it’s here to stay, right? It just keeps creeping in and in different ways. So it’s definitely invading our lives.
Absolutely. I have a good friend of mine who’s on, who’s on dating apps and she, she was going on like the third date with a guy and she was really excited to see his dog again. And she realized that the only reason why she was spending time with him was his dog, like his entire personality was his dog.
And once she realized that and sort of took the dog out of the equation, this guy actually isn’t very interesting. And I think about that every time I see a new AI startup where their entire personality and their domain name is about dot AI. And I, I think it’s really important for all of us to take AI out of the picture.
Anytime you’re looking at a new product or new, or new customer or new vendor. If you take that out, if there’s nothing left of their personality, of their business value of what they’re offering you, then maybe they’re not the right fit for you. But for the companies where AI is their only, only selling point, AI is a tool.
It’s not a, it’s not an end. Correct. Correct.
Amazing. Well, cool. Well, Mark, I know we’re running out of time here, but I got to pick your brain on just some business principles because I, you know, you’ve been in this business 16, how many years now? 18.
- Okay. So you’re a veteran.
You know, you see business after business, after business coming into this space, right. Of either sports betting or sports business, whatever we want to call it. Lots of new businesses.
And we all meet them at these conferences, new CEOs, upcoming startups, things of that nature. What would be just one piece of advice you would have for, let’s say this college kid coming out of college who’s starting up something. I don’t care what it is, but just a CEO mentality tip for them to get started.
Oh, there’s so many. There are. What comes to the top of mind for you? Top of mind is find a pain point.
I think there’s all sorts of things that we want to solve because they’d be cool to solve. I’ve talked to a lot of folks that want to build something really badly, but just don’t know what to build. And I always tell them, talk to family, talk to friends and ask them what was painful about their day.
You know, what about their day was just frustrating. And often when you can pin down something like that, and if you’re in the sports industry, talk to sports fans, go to a sports bar, chat with someone and just see what they’re up to. When you can find pain points, those are things that people are willing to open their wallets for.
And if you focus on building a brand, focus on building experience. I’m too old to give you good advice on how to be an influencer and all that stuff. But if you’re looking to build a profitable business, pain points are what you need to focus on because that’s where revenue comes from.
And without revenue, nothing else matters. And so that would be probably the one thing I would give. Great advice.
Amazing advice, Mark. What’s the future look like? Do you have another bucket you’re heading into? Or what’s the future look like for MetaBet? I can’t find the game. Are you watching this? Yeah.
And so there’s a lot of things that I’m excited about, but I’d say the two biggest ones are working closer with operators. I think curation and discovery is going to be table stakes for operators before the end of the year. We’re all tearing our hair out, trying to find the game, give folks a way to understand, okay, here’s the thousands of things I can bet on at this moment.
Show me the bets that I can watch on my TV or on my phone right now. So whittling it down and filtering and curating, I think is going to be huge. And then we have a big expansion coming with MetaBet.
Everything we’ve done for sports gambling, we’re expanding into other sports adjacent worlds. So I’m excited about what we’re going to watch for the football season. Amazing.
Awesome. Well, Mark, I appreciate you being on here. What did we miss? I know we limit this to 20, 25 minutes.
And so I know we don’t miss anything, but what did we miss? What did you want to say that maybe we didn’t touch on? I can’t stand the Pacers. I’m feeling good about the Knicks tonight. I’m going to be crushed if we don’t win game four.
We never do it the easy way, but I think the world will be a better place with the Knicks winning championship. Tell you what, we’ve had some good series, some entertaining series here in the finals. I mean, yeah, that series has been one that’s like, I just can’t quite predict it.
But yeah, we’ll see what happens. The road team seems to have the upper hand in that one. I hope so.
I mean, after game four, let’s switch it back. But yeah, there will be a lot of pacing and shouting at the TV tonight. Awesome.
Well, Mark, thank you for your time. Appreciate it. And I can’t wait to have you on in a few years and see where everything is once again.
So thank you for all you do for the industry. And thank you for coming on the show today. Thanks for having me, my friend.
All right, Mark, take care. That was Mark Phillip of MetaBit. Are you watching this? What an amazing person.
What an amazing company. Like I said, I’ve always enjoyed our friendship and, you know, seeing him at all the events and things of that nature. I always kind of looked up to him as an industry veteran in this industry that we all play in.
Hopefully you enjoyed that and learned a little bit of something. I encourage you to go out. We’ll put all the links in the show notes, but I encourage you to go out to AreYouWatchingThis.com, MetaBit.io, I believe, and ICantFindTheGame.com. Again, we’ll put all the links in the show notes so you can get right to them.
And then we didn’t ask Mark for his information, but I’m sure you can reach him on LinkedIn. And if he has an email that he wants to share, I’ll put that in the show notes as well. All right.
That’s it for Episode 241. Until next time, I’m Ryan Knuppel. Stay safe and we’ll talk to you soon.
Bye bye.
