Show Notes from Knup Sports Show

Show #196 – Stefano Vaccarino of FTN Network on the Knup Sports Show

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RYAN KNUPPEL

Hey, what’s up, what’s up, what’s up? What’s going on everybody? Welcome to Episode 196 of the Knup Sports Show. I’m your host Ryan Knuppel here with you each and every episode. First off, thanks so much for giving us a little of your time, a little attention to watch and listen to this show. You know, we have another great, great guest here today. I’m super excited to dive in and learn all about what this guest is doing in business and what they’re company is up to and all of the above. Um, March Madness, we’re down to the final four as of this recording. I don’t think anybody would’ve predicted this final four, but we’re here, we got a unique set, and me living in Florida, I got two teams in Florida in the final four, that’s crazy. So, did not expect that to happen, but excited for that coming this weekend, Saturday and Monday. Alright, without further ado, I’m gonna go ahead and bring on my guest. Today I get Stefano Vaccarino of FTN. How are you, my friend?

STEFANO VACCARINO

Hey, Ryan. How are you doing? Great to be on, thanks for having me.

RYAN KNUPPEL

I’m doing amazing. I’m really excited to get to know you a little bit on this show, and uh, first off, how are things up in New York?

STEFANO VACCARINO

Things are good. Today, it’s a good weather day, right? That’s rare at this time to have a good weather day, but today’s solid, the weather’s been erratic as it always is. But, New York is good.

RYAN KNUPPEL

Yeah. There you go, that’s awesome. So, and I know I just mentioned the final four here in the intro. I’m sure you’re excited for it as well, but do you have any dog in the fight, any team you’re really pulling for, or what?

STEFANO VACCARINO

So, I have a U Conn future, so I guess I’m pulling for U Conn. I will say, I actually really regret this. A lot of our team was really on FAU and a couple people are holding FAU as champions tickets, and I didn’t tail them, so I’m a little mad at myself for not doing that. So I’m kind of secretly rooting for U Conn, but for FTN purposes, I’m rooting for FAU.

RYAN KNUPPEL

That’s awesome. Should be an amazing final four, and who would’ve expected, right? I mean, it seems like we say this every year. It’s like, you know “Oh, it’s probably gonna be some teams who we don’t do,” but then we all go out and pick the teams that we know probably should do it, and then here we are again with four teams that nobody expected, so. Always crazy, but, hey, I want to dive into you, Stefano. I want to learn a little bit about you. Why don’t you tell the audience a little bit about, you know, before we dive in to FTN Network, I want to hear about you, your path, um, maybe some of the experiences you’ve had, and just tell us a little bit about yourself.

STEFANO VACCARINO

Sure. Yeah. So, I got in this industry, so it was a couple years out of college, I was, like, working, you know, that traditional kind of desk job, 9-5, it was very boring, I wasn’t really having fun, and so, you know, this was right when DFS started kind of kicking off, and NBA has always been a passion of mine, sports in general has been a passion of mine, but I really focused on NBA, so I was having some success in the early stages of DFS, playing NBA DFS, and I was like, “You know, let me create a Twitter account just for some fun, right? I’ll put some tips on there, some picks, some analysis”, and I was doing it during my work break, my lunch break, sorry. Um, not under my name, because, obviously, I was scared that I was gonna get caught that I wasn’t actually doing work sometimes while at work. I was tweeting under an anonymous name, a really cheesy name too. The story was I was like “What’s the cheesiest name I could pick?”, and I chose “BigMoneyPlay”, um, and there it is. So, um, and, so yeah, I was kind of tweeting out NBA advice. I was picking up a little bit of a following, not a huge following, but I had 1500 or 2000 followers or something, I was getting good engagement, and then randomly someone who I used to go to college with actually followed me, and he didn’t know it was me because it wasn’t under my name and I had a picture of a cat as my Twitter avatar. And he followed me, and looking back on it, this is like so stupid, I was like “Oh, should I DM him? I don’t want anyone to find out it’s me so I don’t get in trouble in work”, as if him finding out would have any impact on that whatsoever, right? Um, and so he actually eventually DMed me, not knowing it was me, and he was doing like NFL advice, and we were, like, kind of exchanging NFL/NBA picks, and eventually, right after a couple weeks, I somehow finally found the courage to say “Hey, this is Stefano from St. Joe’s”, and he was like “Oh”, and we were friends in college, we lost touch out of college, so we just kind of reconnected, but we were very friendly in college, and so we were kind of exchanging DMs, and then fast-forward a couple months later, he actually got an opportunity to be the Chief Product Officer at a new startup that was actually called The Quant Edge, and he DMed me, he said “Hey, we’re looking to start an NBA product. I think you should interview, I think it’s a bit of a long shot because you have no experience in this space, but I figure I’d send you the courtesy.” And I was like “Yeah, cool, I’ll interview. I’m not having fun at my job right now, this sounds like a great opportunity.” And so I went through the interview process, honestly with super, super low expectations, and I went through the first round, I went through the second round, and then I had the third round and it was between me and this other guy, and they actually picked the other guy over me, which they should’ve because he had [inaudible] 25,000 followers and was a much biggest presence in the space than I was, and then he actually turned down the job at the last moment, so I ended up getting the job by default. By default, right? And I’ll take that. And so I became the NBA Produce Manager at The Quant Edge. I was hired by, I don’t know if you’re familiar with Eliot Crist. He’s now the CEO of Matthew Berry’s Fantasy Life Newsletter. Um, but that’s who my buddy is, and so, you know, started my, that was my first entrance into this space, and so as the NBA product manager, it was my job to build the product. This company was just finishing building really advanced betting models using quants and I actually had to teach the quants what’s important about basketball while also kind of creating content around basketball and selling subscriptions and all that fun stuff. Um, and, you know, I kind of took it upon myself to, I wanted to push the product as much as possible, so I took it upon myself to learn, you know, Facebook ads, Google ads, and just visual marketing in general, and that was really, I kind of taught myself how to run ads, and I was actually pretty good at it and had success, and so that’s essentially my path into the industry and then my path into the sports betting marketing space, and the operations space. Um, fast-forward a couple months later, actually not a couple months, a couple years later, I actually got laid off in February of 2020, about three weeks before the shut down. It was a pre-COVID layoff, it wasn’t a COVID layoff, even [inaudible], right? Um, and, um, so, you know, here I am, you know, I was like “Alright, this was a great opportunity”, I was looking for other opportunities in the space, and then the pandemic hit and, obviously, the sports world shut down, so it was not a great time to find a job in this space, and I linked up with Kevin Adams, who is the CEO of FTN, and I was thinking about starting my own thing because I knew how to bring in an audience through paid ads, and I was thinking I could do this on the affiliate side, I can, I knew how to get traffic even though I didn’t have a big audience, and he had a big audience, and he was starting FTN and had these huge plans, and so I was like “Yeah, this is the perfect time to start a sports betting business, right, when there’s no sports going on,” um, and so then I linked up with Kevin, and, you know, me and him and the team, you know, then launched FTN Network.

RYAN KNUPPEL

That’s amazing. That’s cool how everything comes circled around, and you know, sometimes you feel like you may have got the job on accident, but now you’re in the industry and now you’re just, you know, you’re a big part of it, and that’s awesome. That’s very cool. Do you miss your old job, though, the one before you got into this crazy space?

STEFANO VACCARINO

Absolutely not. I will say, it was like, the most fun was, like, sneaking around, tweeting at my desk during my lunch break, trying not to get caught.

RYAN KNUPPEL

I have some similar stories in that space, where like, yeah, use the alias names, and like, “Ooh, what am I doing here?’. Yeah, love that. [Laughs].

STEFANO VACCARINO

This is a little random, but it’s going back to my Twitter name, that’s like the one thing I’ve never changed, I’ve kept my handle BigMoneyPlay, because, I don’t know, I think it’s kind of funny and it’s my roots, right? It’s where I started, even though as I’m becoming more of a professional in this space, I probably should change it to @StefanoVaccarino.

RYAN KNUPPEL

Your name. Yeah. [Laughs].

STEFANO VACCARINO

Yeah. [Laughs].

RYAN KNUPPEL

Yep, that’s cool. Well, that’s awesome. Well, let’s dive in to FTN Network now. I mean, I know there’s lots of traction, things are growing, you guys seem to be everywhere, you know, you’ve got the fantasy side, the daily side, the bets side, the data side, you’ve got a lot going on, obviously, with you being a network. Um, where do we wanna start? Let’s start with the data side, because that’s a little more on the B2B side, explain a little bit about FTN Data first, and then we’ll dive into some of the other branches of what’s going on with FTN Network.

STEFANO VACCARINO

Yeah, sure. So, I guess I’ll start kind of, you know, continuing the story that I just had. So, essentially, it’s May, right, of 2020, and we’re building this business, and the goal is to build, essentially, a subscription service business, right? A fan subscription service, uh, that’s gonna focus on fantasy football, DFS, and sports betting across three different sites, and so we actually didn’t have plans to have a B2B wing and really become a data company, um, except you know, yeah, so essentially, you know, we were set to launch July 7th, and you know, we were looking for advanced NFL data packages, and they were all really, really, really expensive, right? And we were bootstrapping this, and it was just like, this is tough to afford, right? Even though we have to do this, or we’re gonna have to pay for it, um, and we stumbled upon another company that was at a cheaper price point, and we spoke with the guy, and he seemed like he wanted to, like, retire, this was his hobby, he was enjoying it, it was just a guy charting NFL data with a team for, you know, the past 20 years or so, and he was selling this really important and valuable data at a really great cost, um, and instead of buying a data package, we ended up buying a data company.

RYAN KNUPPEL

[Laughs].

STEFANO VACCARINO

[Laughs]. So that’s, that’s when, so that’s how FTN Data kinda spun off, and so then here we are, getting ready to launch our three sites. We just acquired a data company, and we’re like “Okay, we still need revenue because we’re bootstrapping this,” and so we were gonna, essentially the plan was we were gonna service his existing data clients while we’re sort of building that business, but really launch our three B2C sites, so that’s FTNfantasy.com, FTNdaily.com, and FTNbets.com, again, because we needed revenue, and so, the first year, right, we serviced the existing FTN Data clients, we weren’t looking to grow it, we were seeing what we had, what we could do while generating revenue, and then that revenue essentially was funding the FTN Data side, and then the next sort of 6-10 months after that, we needed to redo a lot of the back end infrastructure on FTNdata.com. As you can imagine, right, this wasn’t this guy’s full-time job, this was a hobby, and so a lot of the technology, we had the API and the back end admin, was kind of dated technology, it wasn’t strong enough to support our goals and our aspirations, so we spent the next 6-12 month redoing the entire backend infrastructure of FTN Data to the point where, you know, this past NFL season was really our first true season under our new backend, where it was our text, right? And we’re going into this NFL season as our first, sort of, like, go to market season where we’re really gonna try and scale our clients and some of our customers. And the whole, you know, idea about FTN Data, right, is where we were in this position where we needed an advanced NFL data package, it was too expensive, we were funding this ourselves, um, and there wasn’t an option, right? There wasn’t an affordable, reliable data option in our space, and that’s what we want FTN Data to become, that affordable, reliable option that, you know, we’re gonna help you customize what you want, right? We’ll customize feeds for what you want. Our data is essentially open. You can use it however you want, there’s no restraints to it, and we’ll help you build whatever you need to build in order to make that happen.

RYAN KNUPPEL

That’s amazing, and I see, you know, I’m scrolling through your sites looking at everything you guys are doing, but on the FTN Data, it look like you’re trusted by several partners already, I was gonna ask, how are things going, name drop some of the partners you guys are working with, but, I mean, you have a lot of them listed right here. It sounds like things are picking up and going pretty well on the data side, correct?

STEFANO VACCARINO

Yeah, exactly. And, you know, being in a, like, catering to, you know, smaller sites, and smaller businesses, or blogs, right, doesn’t just mean we only cater to smaller businesses. You know, Caesars, again, is a client of ours. And so, our goal, right, that’s essentially how we’re gonna, we want to take market shares. As the sports betting and the fantasy world, it continues to explode, right, this isn’t going anywhere, there’s gonna be, and again, as states become legalized, like California and Texas are still not legal, you’re gonna see more and more smaller shops, whether it’s an LA brand blog, right, that wants advanced NFL data to create content around, or a new DFS site, or a new sportsbook that’s gonna launch, there’s gonna be a lot more of those, and there’s gonna be a lot more opportunities in the market to capture, right? And we want to be that company that those startups come to for that super reliable data that they need.

RYAN KNUPPEL

That’s amazing. I got a little bit of a selfish question for you, because, you know, sometimes I know it’s hard, and I’m living proof of this, kind of some things I’m going through right now, to play on the B2C side and the B2B side together, have you guys, I mean, you’re having success doing it, but have you guys seen challenges just keeping up? Or is your team just so good that it’s just not even a challenge for you guys? Tell me a little bit about that, the hurdles you have to come across when you’re dealing with B2C and B2B at the same time.

STEFANO VACCARINO

That is 100% our biggest hurdle. Um, and you hear, with like, potential, I’m sure if you have VCs or anyone who invests in companies, some things they stand away from are people who are in too many lanes, right? They’re not just focused on one thing. And that’s been our biggest challenge. However, we embrace it, because that’s sort of what we want, we want to become almost a conglomerate in that space where we’re covering everything. So while we, we like to say that some of our parts are unique because we really cater to everything, and we want to cover everything. We have an affiliates side, we have a free side, that’s just like free content, we have a subscription service, and we have a B2B side where we can service, some would say competitors, on our three B2C sites, but even competitors, we want to view them as partners, as clients, and so yes, it’s a huge challenge, and it’s a credit to our team that, you know, everyone is in it for the same goal, we all want to blow this up, and we don’t really have office hours, we’re all grinding, we’re all working a ton of hours, um, we’re, like, I like to say we’re a large but also super small team. We have about 12-15 full-time employees, but we have another, maybe like, 40 or 50 contractors that do smaller jobs, and so that’s essentially how we’ve divvied up the work, where it’s like “Okay, we can hire a contractor for maybe this part of the business, and he’ll only focus on this part of the business” and then we have a couple full-time people that are looking at the overall business.

RYAN KNUPPEL

Sure. Amazing, awesome. And I know you’re specializing, I mean, I’m sure you have your hand in a lot of different areas in the business, but you’re doing a lot on the marketing side, so I’d be remissed if I didn’t ask a little bit about the marketing and how you guys are able to see through all the noise that’s going on, I mean, because there’s a lot of companies right now, I mean, tons and tons of companies and people, and just a lot of things going on. There’s a lot of people fighting for, you know, that position, jockeying, not fighting, jockeying for that position on the B2B side, on the B2C side there’s just so much going on, there is, well, from a marketing side, how do you guys compete, what is some of the secret sauce that you’re using to really, you know, try to stay relevant and seen in this crazy space?

STEFANO VACCARINO

Yeah, absolutely. So, essentially, we have multiple, kind of, funnels, right, to get people and to, let’s like, we’re looking at our marketing funnel, and the top end is just the top part of our traffic that we want people to, we just want people on our website. And then when we get people on our website, right, it’s through SEO, that’s something we prioritize. We want our traffic to be as organic as possible. We want FTN to be found if someone is searching ‘fantasy football rankings’. So we put a really strong emphasis on building our domain authority and building our SEO rankings, right, and fighting for important keywords. Last year, for example, we were super pumped, we were in the top 3 for ‘fantasy football rankings 2022’, for like, a good 4-6 months, and then once some of the big boys came in towards August, right, we started dropping, we were in, like, the 5-8 range, but to us, that was like a huge, huge accomplishment because it’s tough to get that authority in such a short amount of time. So, we really prioritize SEO. My background is really in the digital side in terms of just social ads, or Google ads, right? And so, we’ve just, we’ve done a bunch of campaigns that allow, essentially, brought traffic to our website on the top end of the funnel at a super low cost per click, anywhere between, like, 7 cents, and we’ve gone up to $1, that’s on the higher end, but really if we’re getting a click at under 50 cents, we’re pretty happy, and so we’ve had different marketing strategies around content that we want to push that we think is going to click well if we put money behind it. And we also have that social presence, we have a lot of, a lot of our content creators have a really strong following, and we want to make sure that they’re pushing links to our site, because what we really care about are those link clicks that come to our website, um, and then it’s on me to just essentially retarget them all, whether it’s through Facebook ads, through Google ads, through email, right, we collect someone’s email, and then we’ll put them in our retargeting funnel, and then we continue to retarget people until they eventually convert, right?

RYAN KNUPPEL

Yeah. Well, thank you for that. Yeah, you gave me a lot there, that’s amazing, that’s awesome to hear that you guys are finding your success through, you know, I love, personally love hearing that you still are using SEO, because, you know, I love the content side and everything that’s going on there. Man, it’s such a fun game to see where you’re ranking and try to beat others for different terms and things of that nature, so…

STEFANO VACCARINO

And that’s the [inaudible]

RYAN KNUPPEL

It’s refreshing to hear a company that’s still valuing some of that.

STEFANO VACCARINO

Yeah, SEO is the most important, in my opinion. If you’re really gonna go for it, you need to find a way to just try and rank well, because for, even like a term that you don’t think is that popular, let’s say it’s like, I’m using, let’s say, ‘Chiefs Bengals week 13’, right? Just random, and you target that keyword, there’s less competition on that keyword than ‘Best NFL Picks’ or something like that, right? And so really just having a strategy and an understanding on SEO and knowing, like, what to compete for, like, we’re not gonna, like, where we are for FTNbets specifically, we’re not gonna compete for ‘player props’, that keyword, but we’re just, it’s not gonna happen. We need, like, another 5 years of authority in order to compete with some of the sites that have been up for 10+ years, right, that have been ready for this. But there’s ways to compete for keywords that do have good traffic that essentially aren’t as competitive, and so SEO, I’m glad you’re a fan of SEO. I think it’s the most important aspect in any sort of, like, content company. Just understanding what Google likes, what you need to do, and just slowly build, because it’s a long game.

RYAN KNUPPEL

You said it right there. I was gonna say, you’ve got to be patient with SEO. It’s not a quick win, it’s not paid ads, it’s a long grind, but let’s shift gears for a second. I want to talk about the future. Um, what’s the future look like for you guys? Any breaking type of news that you guys have, or is it just much of the same? Continue to build the B2C and the B2B side and keep growing in all ways?

STEFANO VACCARINO

Well, the future is really on the B2B side, and that’s, like, really scaling FTN Data. And that’s not minimizing the three other sites, like, we’re gonna continue to grow those sites. We want those sites to operate, we want those sites to continue to drive revenue, but you know, currently on FTN Data, we’re only doing advanced NFL data, so we have, like, 25 charters on staff who are chartering every snap of every game. We want to basically double the amount of charters we have so we’re able to push our data out quicker to clients. I think last year we got all of our advanced data out by end of day Tuesday. We’re trying to push for end of day Monday, which is tough, right? It’s challenging, uh, with so many games, especially with Monday night, and then really starting to scale to other sports, right? We have NBA, PGA as our next two that we’re ready to go live with, um, and essentially we want to become, the future is FTA Data becoming a full service data company that covers, that essentially has every single sports offering and an advanced data package for every sports offering.

RYAN KNUPPEL

Cool. Cool. Big, uh, big dreams, big visions, I love that, that’s amazing, and it’s cool to hear that you guys are really gonna focus on that B2B side. Quite a bit of the audience that’s listening is other B2B people, other company owners, other leaders, other executives, startups, entrepreneurs, what, I don’t know if I want to, say, “ask”, what you have, but, I mean, if there’s one challenge, or one thing you’re looking for or you guys might need that others listening might be able to help with, is there anything that comes to mind?

STEFANO VACCARINO

That’s a good questions. Um, I would say, honestly, I think introductions are the best, right? And that’s like the best way to form a partnership, where it’s like, you know, I’ll drop my email in case anyone wants to email me, but let’s say someone emails me, stefano@ftnnetwork.com, um, and just even, like, any of those soft intros, just start a conversation, whether it’s with you or you want to intro someone to someone else, um, it just, it’s just super helpful. It’s something I kind of pride myself on, too. We were in, I’m not sure if your familiar with Techstars, but we were in Techstars, um, just the sports cohort in 2022, yeah, last year, and so, I remain friendly with a lot of the others, a lot of the other companies, right? Like the CEOs or COOs or CMOs that I met when I was in Indianapolis for a couple months, and one thing that we all kind of do that’s almost like a community, is like if someone needs something or someone needs an intro to another company and another person has an intro, that soft intro goes so far, it’s really, really important, so it doesn’t feel like just like, I’m blanking on the name, but you’re just randomly calling someone, cold calling someone, right? Or cold emailing someone, and so, I would say, not just for FTN specifically, but I think it really goes a long way to make a soft intro to anyone who you think might be a good connection.

RYAN KNUPPEL

100%. And I’ll put, I’ll make sure to put your email in the show notes, I know you dropped it there, but say it one more time just so people that didn’t catch it, what was the email in case they want to get a hold of you?

STEFANO VACCARINO

stefano@ftnnetwork.com, so just my first name @ftnnetwork.com.

RYAN KNUPPEL

Perfect. We’ll make sure to put that out in the show notes, Stefano, and hopefully people listening, if they like this interview, like what you guys are doing at FTN across the board, they’ll get a hold of you. Hey, we got baseball starting, like, today, we got final four this weekend, I mean, some think it’s a slower time in sports, I’m excited for baseball and final four. Do you have a baseball team? I have to ask real quick, a personal baseball team?

STEFANO VACCARINO

So, I’m a huge Mets fan. Um, I would say baseball’s not, like, my favorite sport, but growing up, my family, the Mets were the team that I rooted for the most because my family was always around it, so it’s just, like, nostalgic for me to be a huge Mets fan, um, and so I was a miserable Mets fan, but now with the Steve Cohen era I’m a happier Mets fan, right? I like where we’re going as an organization, so, you know, our opening, or our first game’s at 4 today, so hoping for a positive season. Losing Edwin Diaz wasn’t great, but, you know, good thing our owner isn’t afraid to spend money if he has to, so I’m looking forwards to the Mets season.

RYAN KNUPPEL

Well, amazing. Well, thank you for your time today. Any last words, anything we missed, anything you wanted to say before I let you go here?

STEFANO VACCARINO

No, I appreciate you having me on. This was a lot of fun. If anyone wants to connect with me that’s listening, feel free to email me of shoot me a DM on Twitter. I have a pretty unique name, so if you just search Stefano Vaccarino on Twitter, um, I wont use my actual handle because I don’t want to embarrass myself, but, um, feel free to send me a DM, I would love to kind of connect with people, and I had a great time. Thank you for having me on.

RYAN KNUPPEL

Amazing. Thank you for joining me, Stefano, and good luck to the FTN Network team, and I’m excited to see what you guys do on the B2B side as well with FTN Data, so we’ll keep an eye on ya, and we’ll drop all those links in the show notes here, but appreciate your time today.

STEFANO VACCARINO

Awesome. Thank you.

RYAN KNUPPEL

Alright, my friend. Take care.

Alright, that was Stefano Vaccarino of FTN Network. Really cool. Man, that guy has so much going on, I could spend all day diving in to all of these, you know, three B2C sites, and the FTN Data, and all sorts of stuff going on there, so if you get some time, click on those links, check them all out, see what all they have going on over at the FTN Network. Alright, that was Episode 196, thank you again for tuning in, I’m Ryan Knuppel, @Knup out on most socials you’ll find me somewhere up there if you search for @Knup. Appreciate everything, appreciate you tuning in. Until next time, stay safe, talk to you soon. Bye-bye.

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