In this episode of the Knup Sports Show, host Ryan Knuppel interviews Jonathan Power, the founder of Voxbet. Voxbet is a company that has developed a technology that allows users to place bets using voice commands. The technology is aimed at simplifying the process of placing bets and targeting two specific audiences: the high-volume bettors who want a quick and efficient way to place bets, and the younger generation who prefer voice commands and are less inclined to navigate through a betting site. Power explains that the technology is currently focused on the English-speaking market, starting with soccer betting, and plans to expand to other sports and markets in the future. He also discusses the challenges of convincing operators to adopt the technology and the potential benefits for affiliates in terms of improving user experience and generating revenue. Power concludes by outlining the roadmap for Voxbet, which includes the release of a bet builder feature and a navigation feature, as well as partnerships with operators, platform providers, and affiliates.
Ryan Knuppel:
Hey, what’s going on everybody? How you doing? Today? We are live. Ryan Knuppel here, Knup Sports Show, episode 215. Hey, I’m attempting the live again. I know we did live back in the one hundreds and then I went to uploading things, but we’re back live. So if you have questions, if you have comments, we would love to engage with you a little bit. If you’re watching this and you want to talk to our amazing guest or you have questions for us as we go through our discussion today, please feel free to engage. That’s part of the fun of what we do here. So thanks for being here. Thanks for watching this show and supporting this show. It’s an amazing, amazing thing as it continues to grow. Alright, we have an amazing guest today. I’m super excited to dive in and learn about what this gentleman is doing with his company. We’re going to go ahead and waste no more time and bring him on. We have Jonathan Power of Voxbet. Jonathan, how are you doing, my friend?
Jonathan Power:
I’m really good, Brian. Thanks for having me on.
Ryan Knuppel:
I’m super excited to dive in and hear what you’re up to, where you’ve come, what you’re learning. As we talked about before, you’ve been learning a lot. But first off, how’s everything? You’re out in the uk, correct? Is that where you’re at?
Jonathan Power:
No, Ireland. A lot of people think it’s the same, but Well, not this side, not this side of the water
Ryan Knuppel:
That shows how educated I am outside of the us. Right?
Jonathan Power:
Well, I actually meant outside of the uk, but anyway.
Ryan Knuppel:
Well, I mean me outside of the us I’ve not very educated. I’ve actually never been outside of the country besides Mexico. So that’s a little tidbit I need to get over to Europe and some of those countries and really,
Jonathan Power:
You really do wait till summer. That’s my tip. Oh,
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Ryan Knuppel:
I love it. I love it. Awesome. Well, Jonathan, I’m excited to have you on. I’m excited to dive into Voxbet. But first off, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself, about your career journey and really let the audience know what brought you to where you are today?
Jonathan Power:
Okay. Well, I’ve always in the past described myself as somebody who’s come from a banking technology background, a FinTech background. I worked for James Martin and Associates Texas in which became Texas Instrument Software. In a recent interview, it only occurred to me that I’m actually longer in the betting industry now than I ever was in the banking industry. So I should probably stop telling that. We started in the betting industry with a text betting platform way back in 2006 before the smartphone, which is quite important, which would understand a bet that was written in a text message and about 75% of the time would understand it fully and place it on behalf of the customer, send them back their confirmation. So that’s still out there. There’s still people who placed a bet for the 2006 World Cup, still betting with us that way, but obviously the smartphone has created many, many more opportunities. But we decided a few years ago that if we can understand the bet that’s been written, why can’t we understand the bet that’s been spoken, which was a very, very simple idea when it was first articulated. It became quite tough actually, to work out how to do it. It wasn’t as simple as just using a Google or an Amazon engine to transcribe what somebody has said and Then put that through a text engine. We had to build everything new from the ground up and how we’ve done that. We’ve patented and we’ve spent the last two years solidly developing the product and we’re about to release something that we think is people are going to think is really, really cool.
Ryan Knuppel:
That’s amazing. That’s awesome. So yeah, you dove right into the product and I’m excited to actually pull it up here and show people what Vox be is, and I’d love for you to expand a little bit more, but your slogan and your motto that you’re using everywhere is speak type bet. Very simple, very clear message that you’re giving about your product. So why don’t you dive in a little deeper about what you’re doing and how it kind of works?
Jonathan Power:
Yeah, okay. So what we’re looking at doing is simplifying the process of getting a bet on, and We’re trying to do that with two very actually quite different audiences in mind. So what we’ve learned is that the place to put Voxbet is right inside the betting app where you can wake up the mic where you go, Hey, Voxbet, or hey FanDuel, or Hey dabble, whichever wake word is the technical term for that, whichever wake word the operator would like to launch. So Alexa is a wake word and Siri is a wake word. So people use them all the time already. And that when you come onto a betting site, if you are presented with an enormous amount of content,
And we think there’s two types of people that find that frustrating. One is who we call the one percenters. The one percenters, 1% of an operator’s business is typically responsible for around 50% of their revenue. So they bet a lot. Some of our customers on our text betting platform, they bet 160 times per month on average. That’s pretty prolific. And if you have to dig out the bet the same way as somebody who doesn’t really know what they want to bet on, wants to have a look around and maybe might bet two or three times a month, that’s a pretty poor service. We think those people who just want to get on your site, get their business done and get off, and if you can appeal to those one percenters, you don’t need to win many of them to have a very significant affection. You bottom line, the other side of the demographic we’re aiming for are the people beyond the boomers and the Gen Xers. I’m a Gen Xer myself. We learned how to use the interfaces that are there. We didn’t have a choice, But the Gen Zs and millennials won’t be inclined to do that or be less inclined to do that. And they need something that is more in tune with how they use Spotify, how they use TikTok, how do use everything else, how do they even use WhatsApp? A lot of those people are too lazy to type a message now. They have to send you a voice message so we can moan about those people or we can give them what they’re used to. And we think we’re very much aimed, we’re nicely tuned to give those people what they need.
Ryan Knuppel:
Yeah, I mean it seems like it’s kind of the next progression of betting. I mean, everything is going to voice, everything’s going to ai, everything’s kind of progressing. Why hasn’t making a sports bet progressed? And I think that’s where you guys are innovating and really creating something that the next generation I think is going to see as normal. What would you say to those people though that think it’s too hard or that actually are like, oh man, what if it screws up and actually makes a bet that I didn’t say or something? I’m sure there’s going to be this audience of people that think, man, that just seems like a lot can go wrong there. How do you guys address that challenge or that concern that people might have?
Jonathan Power:
Yeah, that’s a great question because it goes right back to how we started with text betting, because with text betting, when you’re sending texts, they can be, at the time they were quite expensive.
You have to fully understand what somebody said in their first attempt. And if you didn’t fully understand it with a hundred percent certainty, we have to go to an agent and ask an agent to say, look, can you make sure this is right before we execute? Because we can’t get this wrong because we break trust. So at the time, we were trying to compete with call center staff and make them more productive. So it was very obvious. The commercial drivers were very clear anyway, because 75% of them will go straight through. So what we’re doing at Voxbet is fundamentally different is we show you what we think you said, and we give you an easy way of changing it. So only we do not place any bet. It makes it a much simpler integration for the operator that we don’t place the bet the user decides. Yeah, that’s what I asked for. I want to actually, I’ll delete that. I’ll add something else, but it’s always, always must be confirmed by the user.
Ryan Knuppel:
I love that. Yeah, that makes total sense. Let’s talk a little bit about the integration. Well, first I want to talk a little bit about the partners that you’re working with. So I’m assuming you’re working with some sports books and operators currently. Can you talk anything about some partners that you currently have or are working with?
Jonathan Power:
Yeah, frustratingly, we can’t name any of the, we’re working on the, we had the horse racing product ready about six months ago, and we have a few horse racing brands that we’re working with.
What’s always been the frustration in the B2B in the sportsbook industry for us as a B2B provider is you don’t get to say anything about anybody until they’ve launched it first and we’re in the same boat. But we have some really, really good partners, not just on the operator side, but on the affiliate side because found a really interesting angle with affiliates that is really appealing to them. So they will be out there soon and we are about to launch something on the bet builder side, what you call in-game parlay, we call BET builders that we think is a real game changer and we think there’ll be a lot of people talking to us about that.
Ryan Knuppel:
Are you able to expand at all on what you just commented there about the affiliate side? Because I think a lot of this audience and a lot of people that probably relate to me and our show and what we do are probably affiliates or affiliate companies that are trying to make their way in that space. Is there anything more you can say about how this, I’m trying to connect the dots in my brain about how this would work with affiliates or is that to come?
Jonathan Power:
No, I will talk about that because I’m really keen to get that message out there to affiliates. So what your typical affiliate site has is some content surrounded by lots of ads, and that’s, that’s quite a difficult experience. If they trust their content, the content inspires a bit.
And when you can navigate a whole sports book by just saying what you want or typing what you want, by the way, we always talk about speaking it, but we shouldn’t forget that there’s a whole generation out there who like discretion, who might prefer typing it. And then there’s another generation that don’t give a hoot about discretion and they’re quite happy. They don’t care who hears ’em. But if you can do that with something as simple as a widget that you can drop in your site, whether it’s a wake word in an app or whether it’s a microphone on your page, it doesn’t matter to us. You can let your content do the heavy lifting. Your content inspires a bet. So what you could do, let’s take the wake word example and let’s say you could be reading content and this affiliate or will allow you to bet into any of fanatics, MGM, FanDuel, et cetera, Caesars, whatever, and you can go, Hey, FanDuel, and then you speak your bet and now you get a deep link directly into the FanDuel side to complete your bet. So what that allows, that gives the user a much better experience, gives ’em a much cleaner view of content, but it allows the affiliate to focus on what they’re really good at, which is to inspire the bet
By giving good content and Let the content do the work. So the tagline we have, so we’re calling that our media mic, so that really is our bet mic, but implemented in an affiliate site. And what we’re really saying is their content inspires, betting, keep it clean, and what we mean by clean is get the clutter out of it.
Ryan Knuppel:
I love that. Yeah, I think that’s going to be an amazing way for affiliates to address that challenge of converting people easier. I mean, that’s always a challenge with affiliates. They do a great job of the content, but then nobody clicks on those links. But I think something like that could be an interesting innovation that they can add that could, like you said, inspire more betts and things of that nature.
Jonathan Power:
And there’s two parts of that really. I think people have become quite an expert at hopscotching their way through a site that’s littered with ads where they don’t even see the ads, they just find their way through it, and they don’t even, you ask them after the visit to the page, what ads were on it? They said, I don’t know. But the other is is that it’s a revenue stream for them because if they have eyeballs, which the good ones do, of course they can charge to make the sportsbook accessible. So if you want to be able to say, Hey, FanDuel, well that’s a product, that’s a really valuable product that you’ve embedded into your site, that’s very valuable functionality that you should be able to charge straight out for. So what you’re saying is we’ve got great content, we’ve got loads of eyeballs, and we can make your site accessible from here without you having to put an ad on it. Well, it is not about displacing ad income, it’s about increasing it, but also increasing the space you can have for content.
Ryan Knuppel:
That’s amazing. That’s amazing innovation. I love innovation. And any space, especially in the sports betting space, how do you get operators? Because I’m assuming you need the operators to be on board with this, right? You need them to be on board and trust this. I’m assuming that’s kind of a challenge. How do you convince them that this is a good idea? And I’m assuming you’re going down that path now and trying to go down that path, but are you seeing any pushback to change in innovation like that? Or is it easier than I’m imagining?
Jonathan Power:
No, it is hard, and it certainly isn’t the case that operators aren’t interested in innovation. They’re always interested in innovation. It’s about what they can cut through on their roadmap.
One of our non-execs told us that when he was running one of the big sports book brands, they had a two day workshop where they considered, I think 96 projects for the roadmap over the next year. Four got on and three were compliance projects. That’s what, so they’re dealing with as the innovator, you can think, oh, why aren’t you just innovating all the time? But if you understand their challenges, challenges are a lot to do around compliance and it is difficult for them to get things over the line. So that is the headwind we face. And I think part of that headwind is on innovation. You can look at the sports betting industry and criticize the slow innovation. In my time in the industry, I can think of Inplay betting was an innovation, cash out was an innovation. And same game, parlay is an innovation or BET builders, we call them here. And within a few months of someone proving it, everybody had it.
Ryan Knuppel:
Yeah.
Jonathan Power:
So if that’s what innovation means to you is that yeah, we can be first like skybet, were first with request a bet. I don’t know if that might give them industry kudos. I don’t know if it means anything and when it actually comes to their financials, so I can understand that. So yes, we get Vox bed into an operator, then every operator wants it. That’s plan A for us. But we also have to be mindful of, well, that might not work for the operator so well because everybody having it within a few months means that I need it for longer to get competitive advantage.
Ryan Knuppel:
Totally makes sense. So what markets or global areas are you targeting or are you looking at? I’m here in the United States, I focus a lot of my efforts and kind of my attention on the sports betting market here in the us. First, what markets are you looking at? And then secondly, are you diving into the US and how complex has that been going through the US side of things?
Jonathan Power:
Okay, so the market we’re looking at is the English speaking market to begin with. We’re not restricted to the English speaking market, but we want to nail that one first because the product, what we’ve put together works really, really well in English. It’s very quick and it’s very accurate.
Ryan Knuppel:
Cool.
Jonathan Power:
So on English, what we have started with, and for two reasons, we’ve started with football, which football for you and football for me mean two completely different sports. So I’ll use your term and say soccer. We’ve started with soccer because in the pretty much everywhere, that’s the number one sport except in the US and it’s very complex. There are several hundred thousand footballers, there are thousands of football teams. So we will fix problems in that, that reach that we won’t hit when we do N-F-L-N-B-A, et cetera. Because I would think maybe north of 90% of betting volume on American football is on NFL, probably more than that. I know the college football is important, but it’s a much smaller, very high volume and a much smaller set of players, much smaller set of teams. So we’re not expecting any problems when we go to adapt this for the US market, but we do want to find the partner to do that with.
Ryan Knuppel:
That’s amazing. That’s amazing. Jonathan, power of Voxbet doing some amazing things. Jonathan, I love what your product does and what your mission is. So tell us a little bit about where it’s at and what the future looks like. I guess the roadmap of the product, the product lifecycle. Where are you at in this journey and then where does that future lead you to?
Jonathan Power:
Okay, so where we’re at right now is we have a bet mic, which allows you to speak straight to the bet slip. So you’ve arrived on the site, you want your bet, you say your bet. We have that working in horse racing and we’ve been working in football. Now, the next part thing we’re going to release is going to be a bet builder, Mike. Bet builder is a little bit different or same game parlay is because some of the things in a bet builder you’re committed to, so you’ll say most out to score Liverpool to win both teams to score. There might be three things you’re committed to, but you’re not really sure about where you want to go with cards and corners. Where if we said a bet builder had to be spoken straight to the bet slip all five legs, that’s a bit of a mouthful, and it’s a lot of decisions to make upfront. But if you said, when you go to do a bet builder, you’re presented with so many things and 90% of them I never bet on. So if I could say livable twin most salary to score both teams to score cards, corners, yellow cards, or cards and corners. So I’m going to make my bet builder out of those things.
I Always do, and that actually is one I would, so there’s the three things I’m committed to is that, yeah, most is going to score. Louisville are going to win. Both teams are going to score because they never keep a clean sheet. But I’m going to nudge up my price by playing around with the number of cards and the number of corners.
So what you give is we give you back a mini coupon and you hit the plus and minus buttons until you see the price you want. It says, yeah, I’ll go with that. That’s the right balance of price and what I think is going to happen. And then you go to the bet slip. So the bet builder, Mike, introduced a level of complexity that we didn’t expect when we started because we started out with that thinking, just speak to your bet, go straight to the bed slip. It needs to be more. And then we have, we’re following that with what we call a nav mic, which is just for the simple things. I’m on the homepage, I want to know what’s the price of, I dunno what, what’s the market for the next US president?
Ryan Knuppel:
Sure.
Jonathan Power:
If there’s rugby on, what’s the price of the next rugby match? If it is not on the homepage, it’s hard to find. You have a lot of horizontal and vertical strolling to do to finance. So we just say, show me next US president. Show me Super Bowl outright.
Who is Going to win the Super Bowl? I just want to have a bet on that, or I just want to see the prices for it. So we think that’s a very simple utility that would really improve the Sportsbook experience. And then we, of course, we have what we’re calling our media mic, which is more or less what I’ve just described, but implemented on affiliate sites. So that’s the set that we’re working with.
Ryan Knuppel:
You’ve got a lot going on, my friend. That sounds like an amazing vision and I think it’s really needed in the space, so I’m super excited to see where that leads. If somebody wanted to work with you, and I know you guys are B two B, you’re looking at all sorts of buckets of companies that may want to work with you or at least inquire more about what you’re up to, what’s the best way of getting ahold of you? Where can they learn more? Just some of the URLs that we can put in the show notes to lead people to.
Jonathan Power:
Well, there’s the website, Voxbet.com. There’s myself on LinkedIn, would be a good way of getting ahold of me or jpower@voxbet.com. It’s not just operators we’re looking to talk to, we’re looking talk to the platform providers. And we’re also, as I said, very interested in talking to affiliates.
Ryan Knuppel:
That’s amazing. That’s amazing. Any last words? Anything that I may have missed? I know we could talk for probably hours here, but for sake of time I’m going to get this going. But anything we missed? Any last words that you wanted to make sure that we communicate it here today?
Jonathan Power:
No, I just think the point I’d like to emphasize is that everything embedding is a numbers game. And if percent, if 50% of your business is coming from 1% of your customers, the gearing in offering something that really makes their life easier could have quite a profound bottom line impact. And I think that’s something people need to think about.
Ryan Knuppel:
A hundred percent. Great advice. Jonathan Power, really appreciate you being here. My friend. Man, we are speaking Betts. We’re typing betts before long. We’re just going to be thinking and we’re going to be making a bet, right? Is that the next innovation? Like, oh, I just thought about it. Oh, my bet’s placed.
Jonathan Power:
Yeah, maybe I’ll leave that one for the next innovator. We’ll stick with speaking and typing.
Ryan Knuppel:
Crazy. Crazy. Well, thank you for being here. Really appreciate it. If I can help you in any way, please let me know and good luck with everything you’re doing heading into the future.
Jonathan Power:
Thanks a lot, Ryan. It’s great talking to you.
Ryan Knuppel:
Alright, talk to you soon. Alright, that was Jonathan power of Voxbet. Amazing technology, amazing innovation that we’re going to start seeing a lot more of here over in the coming years. I’m excited to see where that leads. Thank you for tuning in. Thank you for being here. Again, we went live, I know several of you popped on and popped off. This will be up and there will be a full show notes with it as well, so you can go back and watch it on record. Please, if you have any guests that you’d like to see on this show, shoot ’em my way. I’m Ryan Knuppel. You can find me on LinkedIn or Twitter or any of the socials. KNUP typically is the handle that you can find me at. Alright, that’s it for today. Until next time, stay safe. Have a great day. Bye-Bye.
Relevant Guest Links
- Learn more about Voxbet.
- You can connect with Jonathan Power on LinkedIn.
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