In this episode of the Knup Sports Show, Ryan Knuppel chats with Sam Factor, founder of WalterPicks, about his journey from a high school math teacher to leading a top-ranked sports app. They dive into how WalterPicks leverages AI and content creation to revolutionize fantasy sports and sports betting, offering unique insights and tools for users. Tune in to discover the secrets behind the rapid growth of WalterPicks and get a glimpse into the future of sports tech innovation.
Ryan Knuppel
Hey, what’s going on, everybody? Ryan Knuppel here, Knup Sports Show, episode 231. Welcome to the show. Appreciate you tuning in to another great episode. As you know, we love to talk to amazing people doing amazing things in the sports world, and we have another great guest today. I cannot wait to jump in and hear about this gentleman’s path to get to where they are today. I have a feeling you are going to know what brand we’re talking about when we get in here and dive into the guts of this show.
But first, I have a little bit of housekeeping. We’re proud media partners of SBC. The SBC Summit Lisbon is coming up here in September. So we’re just under a month away from that event. If you do not have tickets, make sure to use New Partner VIP as your promo code. Save you a ton of money. Super, super awesome people there at SBC. And this gaming show is supposed to be one of the biggest ever. And so I’m personally not going, so I’m very sad about that. I won’t be making it to Lisbon from Orlando. But I know a lot of people that are going. So if you are going, enjoy that show.
Football’s right around the corner. We’re going to dive into that a little bit here with my guest. But man, I cannot wait for football. It’s like the summer goes by so fast. And then all of a sudden football’s here. We’re like, yes, football. And then it’s every weekend, and it just consumes every minute of us. So I am excited for that as well. Hopefully, you are too. All right, without further ado, let’s bring our guest on today.
Sam Factor
Today, we have none other than Sam Factor of WalterPicks. Sam, how are you, my friend?
Ryan Knuppel
I’m doing great, Ryan. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, really excited about this. Excited to get to know you a bit and hopefully introduce you to the audience as well. So tell us a little bit about yourself, Sam. What got you started? What’s your path look like? What’s your journey look like heading back in the day?
Sam Factor
Yeah, for sure. So I’ve been in the fantasy football space for the better part of a decade now. I started actually as a content creator. I started as a fantasy football writer, really fusing my passion for math—I got my math hat on today—and fantasy football. I started as a writer for a site called ffstatistics.com, which no longer exists. It got acquired a while back by DLF, if you’ve heard of them. Then I landed my first paid opportunity in the space shortly after. This was around my sophomore year of college, around eight, nine years ago, at a site called NumberFire. If you remember them, they still are around. They got acquired by FanDuel. They’ve actually, I think, rebranded to a new name since then. So I’ve been creating content about fantasy football and about the NFL and sports betting for quite some time.
Shortly after graduating college, I really fused together three of my favorite things in life into the company that is now WalterPicks, which is content creation, math, and fantasy football and sports betting. That’s really what WalterPicks is—those three things combined. And those three things are also what’s driven a lot of our success to date. But yeah, that’s a little bit of my background in the space.
I actually started WalterPicks part-time. I was a full-time high school math teacher when we started the company back in 2020. I did a program called Teach for America. If you’ve heard of that before, if not, no worries. But I was a high school math teacher in Chelsea, Mass, for two years. I started WalterPicks in my second year of teaching. So I was full-time high school math teacher, part-time founder and CEO. And we grew WalterPicks big enough in that first year for me and my co-founder, Dylan, to go full-time.
Fast forward to today, we’ve grown a ton since then. We’re number seven in the sports app rankings right now, which is super exciting. Our third straight year in the top 10, which we’re super proud of. There’s seven of us full-time now. We have a really big part-time team of content creators that have driven a lot of our success as well. And we’re really just growing super fast this time of year and gearing up for football season. Like you, I’m also a huge NFL fan. Can’t wait for football season. I feel like this sort of week is like Christmas for me, and I can’t wait to have real games on the TV screens very soon. But yeah, that’s a little bit of the background for me and sort of where we started and where we’re at today. Happy to talk more too about the app, WalterPicks, and sort of where we’re at now and where we see ourselves going.
Ryan Knuppel
For sure. We’re going to dive into that for sure. But you’re speaking my language with content creation. I mean, I’ve been in the content creation space for 20 plus years in some way or another. And it’s always fascinating to me. You know, we’ve worked with a lot of freelance writers that are coming up through the content creation space, and it’s always fascinating to me to see what that next path looks like. And it sounds like you took that kind of passion for, you know, the content creation side, paired it together with the math side, and built this amazing app. So props to that. I mean, I’m sure that journey was not easy to get there and get started and kind of transition from content creator to business owner. But props to you for making that step.
Sam Factor
Yeah, yeah. Thank you. And I actually, I’m still a content creator today. More so short-form video content creation is where I’ve found myself more and more over the last three, four years. I definitely create less content as a percentage of my day than I used to say three, four, five, six years ago, but still love making content. And I think writing is a really, really great place to start because all the structure of written content can really be applied to all platforms—the title, the hook, you know, the analysis, the conclusion, all of that flows through to short-form video content, to podcasting, to whatever platform you’re going to be creating content with. But yeah, I still consider myself a content creator, even though one of the toughest things for me is balancing that with also being owner, CEO, and oftentimes, you know, choosing which to prioritize at any given moment.
Ryan Knuppel
I understand that for sure. It sounds like we have a whole other episode where we can just talk content creation with Sam and Ryan. I think we could probably dive into content creation as a whole other topic. But today we’re here to talk about WalterPicks and really dive in a little bit further into the app and the platform you’ve created. So let’s do that. I’m actually going to pull it up on screen here, just WalterPicks.com. And why don’t you, I know you kind of give a really high-level, just, hey, here’s what it is. But dive in a little further. Tell us what it is, what it’s designed to do, who it helps, all the above.
Sam Factor
Yeah, for sure. So we’re called WalterPicks because Walter is the AI model that powers our entire platform. My name is not Walter. My name is Sam. That’s a classic mistake. There’s not a great story behind the name Walter. It’s really just what we landed on early on, and it stuck. But that’s why we’re called WalterPicks. And really, we help answer any question you could possibly need to answer throughout your entire fantasy football season and with any sports betting decision you have. So any fantasy football decision, any sports betting decision, you can get help with that decision in the WalterPicks app.
On the fantasy football side, you can sync your ESPN, Yahoo, and Sleeper Leagues, get personalized insights based on your custom roster and league scoring settings for draft day. So we give draft insights pick by pick. It’s a live draft tool. So you can sync your leagues. Every pick that happens, our insights are going to change and update based on who you’ve already taken, who’s on the board, and who’s already off the board. And then there’s a trade analyzer custom to your league settings, start/sit tool, rest of season rankings, and waiver advice. We were telling people to pick up Kyron Williams and Puka Nakua after week one last year. That’s the type of league-winning advice you’ll find in the app on the fantasy side.
The fantasy football side is actually where the app originally started. When we first launched the app back in 2020, it was just a draft tool. That was it. That’s also where a lot of our content, like our organic audience on social media—we have over a million followers across our social accounts—has grown organically over the last three, four years. And a lot of that is around the fantasy football space as well. But yeah, really, every decision you have to make from draft day to championship day, we got you covered when it comes to fantasy football.
And then on the sports
betting side, it’s a similar thing. Any decision you have to make, we have analysis on every single player prop, every single game. And we also, one of the main things we’re really focused on, on the betting side, is helping people with bankroll management, which is really the most important strategy when it comes to sports betting. Proper bankroll management is key because if you are losing more often than you’re winning, then it’s really optimal to scale your bet size down. A lot of people really struggle with this and end up actually trying to win back their money, which is a really bad strategy. But also if you are finding winning bets, you want to be scaling your unit size up and maximizing that edge that you found. So bankroll management through our bet tracker—we also sync to all sportsbooks—helps you get personalized insights on the bet tracking, the unit sizing, and also what types of bets you’re best and worst at. Are you best at NBA or NFL? Are you best at parlays or straight bets? This is the type of insights you can find with our bet tracker. And ultimately, we’re trying to build the home for fantasy sports and sports betting.
We really see both these two things with a ton of overlap. I think that’s a really exciting piece of this from the market opportunity in terms of just the 70% of people that play fantasy also sports bet—a big overlap in the audience is there. But also they’re both becoming one and the same in terms of just the sports fan experience more and more. And for future generations, being a sports fan means playing fantasy and betting on sports. And we’re really the only app in the app store right now where you can get all of the insights in one place for both of those things.
Ryan Knuppel
So much to unpack here. So much to unpack. I have so many thoughts and questions. First thing I want to start with is, you know, you mentioned you’ve been around five or so years, I think you said, and you make it very clear on your site now that you’re embracing AI. And obviously, back when you started WalterPicks, AI was not really a thing, maybe a thing, but not really a thing in the world. Talk about that journey and what you’re really using AI for. Because I’m super techie. I’m super into AI. I’m a huge believer in using AI to help us in whatever we do in life, right? And so I’m curious to get your perspective on that and how it’s transitioned the old WalterPicks into a new WalterPicks and how you’re really using it.
Sam Factor
Yeah, for sure. That’s a really, really great question. And it’s funny, we like to sort of joke internally—we’ve been doing AI since long before it was cool, and now all of a sudden it’s cool. My co-founder and I, Dylan, the two original founders of WalterPicks, actually met in a machine learning class in college. That’s where we originally met, and that’s really where the origins of the company began. So we actually have been an AI company since day one. Machine learning is one of the branches of AI. Machine learning is one of the core things powering this big boom in the large language models. So we are powered by machine learning, which is a really old branch of AI that’s actually been around for a very long time.
So we’re powering the app with both our manual assumptions powering the app from our expert projections team and then combining that with an AI model, a machine learning model that projects all the efficiencies for every single player in every single game. Combining those two things and really, I think, from the machine learning perspective and trying to get the best projections possible for players and games, it’s a combination of good manual input—like actual human intervention—and AI modeling with things that can be much more efficiently modeled than a human can do. And that’s really where WalterPicks has fused those two things together.
On the recent developments in AI, I agree they’re super exciting. I’m definitely very bullish on what that’s going to lead to across all industries, including the industry we’re in, in fantasy sports and sports betting insights. We definitely see some really exciting applications with LLMs within our products over the next couple of years. So we’re excited to continue to be pioneers in the AI space within this industry and in that realm. But more like imminently for us, over the last six to nine months, just the use of these tools internally for our development team.
We have seven full-time people on our team right now. Five of them are full-stack engineers. I do not code. I have a math background, content creation, and a sort of managerial background. But then we have our head of product and five full-stack engineers. Our engineers have been building at an insanely rapid pace over the last six, nine months, leveraging a lot of these tools. I think they probably increased their development speed by 50 to 150% at some times. There are just some tasks that are so fast now that didn’t used to be nearly as fast. So I’m really excited about that. But I also think there’s going to be some user-facing applications of some of this AI stuff within our product. And you’re going to see more and more of that popping up across all industries and in our industry elsewhere as well.
Ryan Knuppel
Awesome. Yeah. Thank you for that insight for sure. And I totally agree. We’re only scratching the surface of what we can do with some of this stuff, and it’s exciting to be kind of on the forefront of it and really embracing it. So excited to see where that goes with WalterPicks as well.
Let’s shift gears a little bit and talk a little bit about, you know, you mentioned you’ve grown your community to, like, I think you mentioned over a million people. So you’ve grown your community heavily. What’s that experience been like? Because I feel like there’s a lot of people that kind of start a business or start a side hustle or start something, and then they kind of get stuck there where it’s like, oh, I can’t get people’s attention. I can’t get people to follow or do stuff. Talk about how that happened. How did you grow that way? Was it all organically? Was it through content? Just talk a little bit about that growth pattern you’ve seen over the last five years.
Sam Factor
Yeah, for sure. That definitely is sort of where one of the three favorite things I mentioned, sort of fusing WalterPicks together, really comes a lot from content, content strategy. For us, I was in charge of launching all of our social media accounts back in 2020. Started on Twitter and Instagram—was growing painfully slow. Like I mentioned, I was a high school math teacher at the time. To me at that time, TikTok was this annoying app that my students wouldn’t stop using in my class. And quickly realized it was much more than that once I got on there myself.
I think it was the third or fourth video that I posted on TikTok back in 2020 that got 300,000 views. It drove thousands of installs to that very first version of our app, which was not ready for thousands of installs yet. It was just a draft tool at that time. And it was really clear to me sort of right away that this was a huge opportunity for organic growth on this platform that the industry—the fantasy and betting insights industry—really hadn’t realized yet. Most industries hadn’t realized yet back in 2020. For most people, I think they thought of TikTok at that time, like I thought of it initially, as this annoying app kids were using and doing dances on. And that was sort of all it was.
So that first season, I really only focused on TikTok as our platform in terms of social media. Grew that account from zero to 60,000 followers in that first NFL season. Just posting the same type of content I would write about in my articles, right? Like who to start this week, underrated sleepers for your fantasy drafts, players that you need to be trading for. The same type of content I would be writing with a math analysis, but in short-form video content instead.
So after that first season, we had reached hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of impressions in that first NFL season—60,000 followers. I realized still this was the platform to really focus on. And so after that first NFL season, that offseason, I recruited 32 content creators, one for each NFL team. They all would run individual company-owned accounts, and I would train them all on what I learned about how to make short-form video content—everything I knew about content creation that was working.
This was tremendously successful. We’re still doing this strategy today. So we have a team of 32 content creators on our team, one for each NFL team. Fast forward to now—we grew from 60,000 to now, I think we’re around 1.5 million followers across all of our accounts. So really leaning into this sort of creator-first social media strategy. And we really believe in creators, just the immense importance of a creator-driven strategy. That’s worked really well on TikTok, and Instagram has sort of become a second TikTok over the last year as well, which has been great for us. We’re growing actually faster on Instagram right now than even TikTok, where we’re still growing really fast. So that’s a little bit about how we’ve grown the community so large—it’s been largely organic growth and has unlocked some opportunity in terms of paid advertising as well. Since people are recognizing our face on these platforms and we built the community, we can advertise our products more
efficiently now to them as well. But a lot of this has been organic growth and has continued to be a really exciting organic growth. Ironically, looking back to 2020, the fastest way we were able to grow our Twitter and Instagram audience was actually just to post on TikTok, which is really funny to look back on and pretty ironic. But yeah, that’s a little bit of how we’ve been able to grow our audience.
Ryan Knuppel
Thank you for sharing that. It’s super interesting to me. And I think eye-opening. Everybody in business needs to really reflect on what you just said, because I think there’s a lot of lessons to be learned from that, right? I think a lot of content creators, a lot of people in that same hybrid role where they’re business owners slash content creators, get a little frustrated with that lack of growth. You know, “Oh, I’m posting on TikTok every day,” or “I’m posting on Instagram every day,” and the growth isn’t there.
But something you said in there just kind of clicked. It’s like, well, I had one thing that got 300,000 views, and it drove this many downloads. And it’s like one small thing can really change the entire trajectory of your company. Stay persistent, stay consistent, get out there, make things happen. Yeah. Amazing story there.
Sam Factor
I really think, too, the takeaway for me, I think from that, from our story, isn’t necessarily everyone go post on TikTok and Instagram, which you probably should try. But I actually think the takeaway is similar to what you were just sort of saying that stood out to you—find the thing that works well for you and really focus on that thing. If your platform that you’re really good at is writing articles or podcasting or Twitter or Instagram or TikTok, really focus on what you’re best at. I think sometimes people spread themselves too thin, trying to be great at so many different things. You’ve got to test a lot of things, but then once you see what’s working, really hyper-focus on that. I think that’s been a big strength of our strategy and elsewhere in our company strategy as well.
Ryan Knuppel
Amazing. We’re getting business lessons today without even me asking the question. So thank you, Sam. Let’s dive back into WalterPicks, though. Football season’s here. I mean, for lack of better terms, it’s here. Are you guys prepared? One and two, because I’m assuming it’s your big it’s your Super Bowl season. It’s the main season for you guys. Are you ready for that one? And then the second question is where are you guys heading? What’s the future kind of look like as you head into the NFL season and beyond?
Sam Factor
Yeah, absolutely. We’re ready. We’re as ready as we can be. I was just joking with someone just this morning. It’s always a little bit hard to brace for the extreme seasonality that happens with fantasy football, but honestly, that’s a good problem. If we’re growing faster than we expected, that’s a good problem to have to deal with.
But yeah, we’re definitely ready. We’ve had thousands of drafts happen within our app already this season. And yeah, we’re in the peak of it in terms of the fantasy football season. This is it. This is the peak season that everyone’s drafting. Everyone’s hopes are as high as they’re going to be before injuries start kicking in. This is peak time of year of optimism when it comes to fantasy football. But yeah, on the fantasy side of things, we’re barely ready to get going. And we’re just starting to see the first player prop lines come out. And obviously, the NFL game betting lines have been out for quite some time. But we’re really excited for the betting side of things and ready there as well.
This will actually be the first NFL season we have game betting insights in our app. For the longest time, we’ve only had player prop insights since that was a really good overlap for us to start with, with the fantasy football player projections we already had and projections for every player, every game. We worked really hard this offseason to get a really good game betting insights projection out there. And this is also the furthest along our bet tracker has been, which has been in beta for like nine months or so, and it’s just coming out of a beta version now. So really excited to see that in its first NFL season as well. But yeah, we’re definitely ready.
From here, it’s really just continuing to expand the offering on both the fantasy side. There are so many platforms and different types of games that people are playing in fantasy—from Dynasty to IDP. We have the three major fantasy platforms, ESPN, Yahoo, and Sleeper, but some people are also playing on CBS and NFL and even more niche platforms than that. We want to be working for all the platforms, all the types of leagues. We’ll be expanding to Dynasty, Best Ball—I’ve been a Best Ball bro for quite some time. I’ve max-entered the big Underdog contest. I think I have like three drafts left actually to max-enter it this year, but we’re building products for that audience on the fantasy side.
And on the betting side, there’s just so many markets to cover. There are so many niche markets that are getting popular. So there’s a lot to expand to there as well. And then just getting—this is really the MVP, sort of the initial version for us of our bet tracker as well. We sort of envision—and I was talking to you about the bankroll management—but ultimately, we want to be sort of your AI assistant when it comes to sports betting. We want to help you identify where the best lines are, but also teach you how to be smarter based on what has happened in your sports betting history so far.
So there’s so much we can do there, and we haven’t even sort of scratched the surface on integrating some LLM technology into the app as well. So there’s a lot over the next 12 months that we’ll be working on. But we’re certainly ready for the season, excited for it, and it’s always, with such a seasonal business around the NFL, it’s always exciting once the season comes back around.
Ryan Knuppel
Who’s your team?
Sam Factor
I’m a Patriots fan. You can see the Pats…
Ryan Knuppel
Oh, yeah, yeah, okay. Yep, yep. I missed that in the background.
Sam Factor
I’m from Boston originally. I live in South Florida now, but I’ll always be a diehard Boston fan. Honestly, a bit of a fair-weather fan base, I would say, over the last five years. It’s a very spoiled fan base, but I’ve been a pessimistic Pats fan really since Brady’s last game. I was at Tom Brady’s last game. I knew it was going to be his last game, and a lot of people didn’t think so at the time. And I have some optimism at least for the future. Now we have like an actual young offensive core for the first time. We finally started drafting offensive players, which was great to see. I’m a little bit uncertain if Gerard Mayo will be a real good coach in the NFL since it’s pretty rare to hit on good coaches in the NFL. I think that’s something Pats fans right now are a little bit too optimistic about potentially, but yeah, I’m a Patriots fan. We’re probably in for a long season based on the Vegas odds.
Ryan Knuppel
Well, now you’re down in Dolphins country, so you’ve got that little rivalry, I’m sure. I guess you call it a rivalry. I don’t know if you can call it that. I think that whole division feels like just a big rivalry between them.
Sam Factor
Yeah, and suddenly it’s one of the toughest divisions in the NFL.
Ryan Knuppel
Yeah, agree, agree. Awesome. Well, this has been an amazing chat. I only got a few more questions for you here. You guys are killing it. You guys are crushing it. I’m really, really just—I’ve loved this chat. I love hearing where you started, where you’re headed, where you’re going, all of the above. Talk a little bit about maybe some of your needs. What do you guys need? What are you looking for? What’s something that maybe somebody in the audience that’s listening—we got a lot of other business owners, people in all different verticals and sports that pay attention to the show—what would be an ask or just something that you guys may need help with at WalterPicks?
Sam Factor
Yeah, for sure. So, I mean, a few things come to mind. We’re always on the lookout for content creators, especially content creators excited to dive into short-form video content. So that’s one thing that always comes to mind for me.
Also, on the product side—which I think is really where your question is coming from—any type of API integrations that can help with some of those things I was explaining, right? Expanding to more markets, expanding to more sports as well. We’re always looking into that. Right now, our betting product works for NFL, NBA, and MLB. We plan on expanding to college basketball this season as well. But obviously, there’s a lot more markets than just those. So we’re always interested in opportunities
there. Those are the things I think that come to mind first.
And then on the team side, I mean, we’re growing really fast. We’re definitely going to be adding to our social media team from sort of the management perspective and managing this huge team of part-time content creators. And we’re always looking for talented product people as well to help manage the engineers. We’re outnumbered right now. We’ve got more engineers than product managers, so we’ll work to even out that balance in the coming months as well. But yeah, anything in line with what I was saying, sort of where our product is going, anything that can help us sort of get there faster and more efficiently, we’re always interested in.
Ryan Knuppel
Awesome. How would people get ahold of you? I know it’s walterpix.com and we’ll put that up on the screen as well, but how would they get ahold of either you or your team? What’s the best communication?
Sam Factor
You can reach me directly at sam@walterpix.com. And yeah, that’s probably the best email to reach out if you’re trying to get in touch—sam@walterpix.com.
Ryan Knuppel
Cool. Awesome. Last question. Do you miss teaching math?
Sam Factor
I do at times. There are definitely parts that I don’t miss. It was a really challenging job. I actually was not very good at it when I first started, which I think is common for honestly starting any job, but definitely as a first-year teacher who did not get a teaching degree. I was a math major in college, but right as I was getting good at teaching, we transitioned to remote online teaching, which was a whole different ballgame. But yeah, at times I miss parts of it. At times I don’t miss other aspects of it. But honestly, my current job is a dream come true, so I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
Ryan Knuppel
Of course. Well, Sam, thank you so much for your time today. Really appreciate it and wish you best of luck with WalterPicks. We’ll make sure to put all those links in the show notes as well. And I look forward to following your journey and seeing where that leads. So thank you so much for being here.
Sam Factor
Thanks, Ryan. Thanks.
Ryan Knuppel
All right, that was Sam Factor of WalterPicks.com. I hope you really enjoyed that show. I know I did—I learned a lot from that. And it’s always interesting to me to see these brands, you know, certain brands that pop and certain brands that don’t, and what makes that difference, right? And a lot of times it’s the leadership and it’s the people. And I think you can tell that Sam knows what he’s doing and is doing an amazing job with WalterPicks. So I encourage you to go out, download it, check it out, especially if you’re getting ready for your fantasy football drafts right now.
I know we have several coming up this week and my oldest son does most of my fantasy drafting. It’s crazy—the more I get into sports business, the less I get to enjoy sports. I don’t know. That doesn’t seem to work. But it’s like I get busy, and then I’m like, wait, I’m not enjoying sports. This sucks. So that’s a rant for another day. But anyway, some of you that are out there playing fantasy football and enjoying that, go out and download the WalterPicks app and check it out.
All right. That’s all I have for you today. Hopefully you enjoyed the show. I’m Ryan Knuppel at KNUP out on the socials. Until next time, take care, stay safe, and we’ll talk to you soon.
Relevant Guest Links
- Learn more about WalterPicks on their website.
- You can connect with Sam Factor on LinkedIn.
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