Show #171 – Zac Litwack of Savage Ventures on the Knup Sports Show

Listen in as Zack Litwack, Partner at Savage Ventures, talks about their entrance into the sports & sports betting space.

RYAN KNUPPEL

Hey, what’s going on everybody? Ryan Knuppel here, Knup Sports Show Episode 171. I hope you haven’t been missing me too much, I took a little vacation in July, went down to the lake in the Ozarks. No, I didn’t do any money laundering, nothing fun like the TV show. Everybody always asks me, “Oh, you went to the Ozarks. Is it just like the movie and the TV Series?”, and I’m like, “Yea, not so much”. But, spend some time on the lake, uh, relaxed, kind of refreshed the brain, and now we’re back with episode 171, so really appreciate you tuning in, listening to this. I have another special guest here with me today. I’m really excited to hear from him. Let’s bring him on now. We got the partner at Savage Ventures, Zac Litwack with us. Zac, how are you, buddy?

ZAC LITLACK

Good, Ryan, thanks for having me, man. I love the pod, so I’m excited to join you in the conversation today. 

RYAN KNUPPEL

Thank you, really appreciate you coming on 171, man, you’re a special guest, 171. So, thanks for being here. I’m excited to hear about what you got going on. First of all, where you at? Where are you located right now? Are you in anywhere fun, or what?

ZAC LITWACK

I think it’s fun. It’s Nashville, TN. It’s like the bachelor/bachelorette party of the world, so…

RYAN KNUPPEL

Gosh. I wanna go to Nashville so bad, I’ve actually been telling the wife. I’m like, “We gotta make a little, a little weekend trip, 3-day trip down to Nashville,”. I’m a country music fan, so we gotta get down there and see it, so I’m jealous.

ZAC LITWACK

Everyone’s gonna be hitting me up now, but I’ve got a rental house, it’s right near downtown. Ryan, just give me a couple months heads up, you can stay there.

RYAN KNUPPEL

Ooooh, there you go. Alright, we have it. We’re gonna be hitting up Zac for that. But, Zac, tell us a little bit about yourself before we jump into Savage Ventures and Savage Sports, tell us a bit about yourself, and uh, kind of the background that you have.

ZAC LITWACK

Yeah, it’s an odd background. I was in the music industry for, like, 7 years and was a producer, and, uh, investor in the studio owner, recording engineer, and I oddly found my way after that stint into start-ups, growth hacking, digital marketing, technology start-ups, and I fell in love, honestly, I had a renewed love for a whole different industry. I kind of reinvented myself. And that led me to, uh, through a bunch of start-up failures, it led me to starting Savage Ventures about 3 years ago with a handful of partners and this has been, I would say, like, “my first success story”. We’ve got hundreds of employees now, and we’ve generated about $415 in enterprise value in this short amount of time, and uh, we specialize in investing in and acquiring and operating digital media companies. We specialize in affiliate e-commerce, and we’ve got some direct consumer healthcare branch too. 

RYAN KNUPPEL

Yeah, that’s amazing. And we’re obviously, you know, being Knup Sports Show, we’re obviously going to dive into the sports side, but I do find it interesting that you guys, you’re not only sports. You guys are all over the board. Give us, I know you kind of just did, but give us kind of the, a little bit more about Savage Ventures as a whole, but we’ll really dive into the sports side. I mean, uh, you gave us a little bit there, but uh, what kinds of things do you have going on internally there?

ZAC LITWACK

Yeah, the main difference between Savage Ventures and, like, a traditional venture capitalist firm, or even a PE firm for that matter, is we’re investing in and acquiring companies, and we’re actually operating them, too. So everyone down, everyone from the partnership level on down, is helping to grow these companies, and, obviously, as a company matures, we get more dedicated full-time employees for specific companies, but that’s the main difference in us between everyone else. And, we found a specialization from, like, a systems and processes that we’ve put in place, but also from a skillset and capabilities standpoint in digital media specifically, or just doing stuff online. So, the only types of businesses we tend to work on or work with are our digital businesses, and to kind of get us into the sports lane here, we, one of our first companies that we started was called Outkick. It was with a sports personality reporter named Clay Travis. It was a joining venture with him, started that back in 2020, grew like crazy. Um, one of our revenue streams was sports betting, ended up selling that to Fox, but, it was our introduction to the sports betting market. After we sold that company, we had a whole other host of brands that we felt like we could also market sports betting through. One of the brands is called Total Frat Move, which is a very, like, Barstool-esque brand, in the sense that it’s not really a sports media co., but they, we produce sports content a lot and we talk about sports, and especially college sports, and so we ran an experiment this past football season, so the 2021-2022 season, around promoting sports betting products for the sportsbooks through this brand and a couple of its sister brands, and um, it worked really well. The experiment proved out, and so after this football season, we rebranded this sports betting media side of the business to Savage Sports, and that’s where all the brands are housed right now, and we’re in the process of, of uh, investing in and acquiring assets to get ready for this football season.

RYAN KNUPPEL

Yeah, let’s talk about a few of those brands, I mean, are you able to talk about the few of the brands that currently make up, uh, Savage Sports?

ZAC LITWACK

Yeah, it’s, it’s changing rapidly right now, because as we’re talking, you know, we’re a month out from the football season, so we’re signing, you know, deals right now, but our goal is to create the largest U.S. specific sports betting media conglomerate, and to provide the sportsbooks, specifically, with very quantity and quality players, because I know that’s going to be, that is an issue for them, especially as they’re partnering with traditional media brands. And, we do that, we’re doing that in this way, so we’ve got a couple of, just, non-endemic media brands, like I mentioned one of them called Total Frat Move. We’re about, I can’t say their name yet, but we’re about to have another one that’s as big or bigger that’s a non-endemic brand. And then we’ve got, now, a few sports betting-specific influencers on board and we’re actually developing a whole media co., a mini media co., around them. Uh, one is called Moonshot, it’s uh, his moniker is @kiiLKenny. He’s got, um, about 5,000ish paid Discord members in his community, and we think we can scale it up to 10, maybe 20,000 this football season, and they’re all handicappers, so we’re going to be bringing a bunch of quality players to the sportsbooks. And then, we’re also starting to partner with, and also acquire tools, like we’re in the process of acquiring a free-to-play app called “Vig it” with, uh Joe Barbar, who’s actually become our Director of Business Development for Savage Sports. And so we’re going to use that as a tool to acquire users mostly in a preregistration fashion, I think, for the sportsbooks. And then the fourth bucket is retired athletes, we’re in the process of bringing in a couple of retired athletes into the portfolio. So this is basically, uh, going from “we’ve got a couple brands and we know how to market these products” to “now let’s make this a real company, essentially”, so that’s what we’re doing at Savage Sports. 

RYAN KNUPPEL

That’s amazing, you know, congrats on the success. The influencer side is super intriguing to me, because, you know, I’ve heard that in several conversations over the last month or two, of “Oh, we brought on an influencer,” or “Oh, we’re trying to partner with different influencers”, and I’m curious, you know, diving into that space a little bit further. Because, you know, you’re seeing it a lot. You’re seeing these younger kids, or people, trying to become influencers on TikTok and Instagram, doing their, you know, unique sports betting spin. How has that been going for you guys working with people like that? Has it been easy, hard? I mean, is it easy to get influencers to want to work with you? Tell me a little bit about that experience so far.

ZAC LITWACK

Yeah, we have influencers attached to a bunch of different verticals, across portfolios, so we’re becoming better at working with them. The main advantage of, of partnering with us, though, is that we’re actually treating, I think there are going to be different flavors of our influencer agreements, but right now, what it’s looking like is we’re actually like, starting a business together. You know, we’re doing [inaudible] venture, and so we’re not, sure we’re using them as a platform to promote some Savage Sports products, like some sports products we have and some DFS products that we have, but we’re also using their platform to actually help them to diversify revenue streams, like, for example, we just launched a YouTube show with that Moonshot brand called The Daily Shot. It’s already doing really well, and one of, kind of tangible companies we own is called Savage Media, and it’s a video production house basically, so we can just launch shows quickly, and um, distribute those shows quickly. And then, you know, we bring more brand partnership capabilities to the table. We bring other video monetization opportunities, like we’ve got a good relationship with Twitter, we’ve got a good relationship with Snapchat, and so, um, and then merch too, we’re launching merch with Moonshot. So basically, we’re taking these influencer relationships, and instead of it just being “Hey, hey, guy/girl, here’s $1,000. Promote this ‘bet $10, get $200’ offer for PointsBet,” it’s like “Hey, let’s actually partner and build a real company inside Savage Sports”. And so that’s our, that’s the types of relationships we would prefer. Because that’s a real business relationship, it’s not a one-off, and then we get to know each other, we get more bonded to each other, it gives us a natural ability to learn and improve over time.

RYAN KNUPPEL

That’s amazing. That actually, yeah, that really differentiates you guys from others that are going out, and uh, using influencers and just paying them a one-off fee, so I really like that model. I think that’s really cool. And you mentioned PointsBet once or twice, I’m curious on the sportsbook side of things, who are you working with? Are you working with a number of different operators? Are you guys working with just one or two? Who all are you working with over there on the operator side.

ZAC LITWACK

Yeah, interesting question, cause at Outkick, we had an exclusive with FanDuel. So, we weren’t ever able to experience the, what I call the multi-book strategy, which, I would encourage, if you’re a young affiliate out there, just certainly explore a multi-book strategy. So, to answer your question directly, we work with all the sportsbooks. I mean, we’re even, you know, going to start working with Sports Illustrated, um, here in the coming weeks, and then we’re going to start working with Fanatics when they launch, too. So, we’re, we are experimenters, so we’re down to experiment with ay partner, any company, and, and see how the audience likes it. You know, I can tell we’re providing value to the audience when, you know, we’ll get DM’s on one of our big Instagrams, like, “Thanks for the BetMGM promo, love their app. Thanks for showing it to me,” or something like that, so we use that feedback loop to inform, like, what we prioritize moving forward. And then, obviously, there’s an economic component to that too, you know, “How do we like working with the affiliates, or working with the sportsbooks?” from, you know, everyone from like, the affiliate manager, you know the people we’re interacting with everyday, to “How does their backend work? Do we have data quickly? Can we create our own stuff like that?”, you know. BetMGM has traditionally actually been really good at that, for example, where they’ve got a portfolio built out, and we can create our own links, and it’s very, as a, you know, a technical marketer, it’s home sweet home for me, and so we prioritize companies that, you know, make it easier for us, obviously. But yeah, to answer your question, we work with all of them, we love all of them, but we, at the end of the day, we listen to our audiences, and we figure out what they like, what they’re liking the best. And from one thing I’ve noticed is it’s very state-specific, so in one state, users might love PointsBet and in another state users might love FanDuel or whatever, for a multitude of reasons, but, but yeah. It’s a lot of fun, man. [Laughs]. 

RYAN KNUPPEL

I feel like we could do an entire show on the intricacies of the operator platforms and links and all of the, how all that works, because you made some good points there, that, yeah, the ones that are easier to work with, and that you can get links easy, and they’re not changing promo codes every two weeks, and all of the above, those are the ones that you’re probably gonna give a little more priority to, because it’s not creating extra work for you. So that’s an interesting point, that most people don’t say, but it’s really, I mean, it’s just the truth out there, that ease of use sometimes is important. So I feel like that’s a, that’s a follow-up show. Maybe I’ll bring you on, and we’ll just do a [inaudible].

ZAC LITWACK

About all the, all the affiliate platforms. And, one thing I’ll say is that the U.S. market is just very new. It’s very young. And, even in these more senior, seasoned operators that are coming over here, it’ll get better and better. And we understand that, but we’re willing to actually work with the sportsbooks. You know, I tell everyone that I’m an open invitation if you ever want to do a call with me to discuss how you can optimize your platform. Anything from like, how you’re presenting data to us, when you’re presenting data to us, for how we create links, for how frequent you’re giving us offers, how long those offers are, like, I’m open for conversations for sure. 

RYAN KNUPPEL

Awesome, awesome. So where are you guys heading in the future? I mean, we’ve talked a lot about what’s going on now, but what’s the, what’s the big path in the future? Is it just to continue to acquire and continue to partner with different people, I mean, is it as simple as that? Or do you have some really big future plans coming with Savage Sports and Savage Ventures as a whole?

ZAC LITWACK

Yeah, for Savage Sports, we’re, I talked about those four buckets earlier, so we’re looking for the right partners to fill those four buckets, and, I mean in the near term obviously, we’ve got some states that are going to be going live soon, so we’re generally just gearing up for football season. Long term, though, we just created Savage Sports, I mean, it was, um, a company that was obviously doing a decent amount of revenue that, especially a lot of affiliate revenue, but we formalized the company when we decided to rebrand to Savage Sports, and I think in the long term, we’re gonna actually have branded Savage Sports content shows and it’s gonna feel more like a real company than a company that just houses all of these brands that are around sports and sports betting. 

RYAN KNUPPEL

That makes sense, totally makes sense. Uh, let’s flip gears, I’ll let you go soon, I know you’re a busy man, gotta get back to work, but I’m gonna switch gears, and, you know, I can tell you’re a very knowledgable entrepreneur, you have a lot of digital media experience, affiliate experience, so, and you actually already gave it by telling new coming affiliates, but, if you had to give one, you know, piece of business advice to somebody starting, you know, let’s say starting their own affiliate side, or their own affiliate business or something, one, just high-level business advice from Zac, what would that be?

ZAC LITWACK

Yeah, don’t spend a ton of time creating a plan, because your plan is always going to be different than what it’s gonna be at the beginning, so just start getting your product, whatever that is, in front of as many people as possible so that you can start that feedback loop. At Savage Ventures, for all of our companies, we have a core process called high tempo testing, and basically what that means is that our goal is to run as many thoughtful experiments in a given week against our priorities as possible. You know, and experiments can be, like, an A-B test on a landing page, but it can be like, “Hey, let’s test this whole new channel to promote our product,”. It can be, “Let’s launch an official influencer program, make him be a multitude of things,”, and we quantitatively rank those experiments, but at the end of the day, I see way too many companies starting out creating these, like, 30-50 page business plans when they don’t really know anything. You know, create one, a one-page plan, and then build the product if you don’t already have it, and then actually get that product in the hands of as many people as possible, and that’s gonna set you up for success much more so than the other way.

RYAN KNUPPEL

Great advice, greater advice. Some people get paralyzed by planning, right? They just plan so much that they’re never actually taking an action, so, as you’re saying, take action, get out there, make it happen. Um, that’s great advice out there, Zac. I appreciate that. 

ZAC LITWACK

Yeah, absolutely. 

RYAN KNUPPEL

Cool, man. Well, I’m gonna let you go here, so let’s do the roll call of how to get a hold of you. So, where should we send people? What links, how do they get a hold of you if they want to talk to you? Where should we send them for checking out Savage Sports and everything?

ZAC LITWACK

Yeah, Savage.Ventures is the parent company site. Savage.Ventures/sports would be how you get to the sports, Savage Sports specifically, page. And I’m not super active on socials, but definitely more active on LinkedIn. I’m not active on socials personally because I’ve got young kids, I don’t really have time. I’m doing it for our businesses all day, every day anyway, so I’m on the platforms all day. Um, so, yeah anyways, LinkedIn, connect with me there, send me a message. Happy to chat about anything from venture capital to entrepreneurship to the sports betting industry, and specifically, if you meet one of those four buckets Savage Sports is looking to add to its network, definitely reach out.

RYAN KNUPPEL

Awesome. Well, we’ll put all those links in the show notes, we’ll make sure it gets those so you guys don’t have to scramble and write them down, they’ll all be in the show notes for you after this, so, Zac, really appreciate your time. Any last words, anything we missed, just anything you, uh, I’ll just leave it open at the end. Anything you wanna say before we let you go here?

ZAC LITWACK

I don’t think so, Ryan. I’m just really excited about where sports betting is headed in the U.S., and uh, it’s great getting to meet you, man. I’m sure we’ll chat many many more times before, uh, the end of the year.

RYAN KNUPPEL

Yeah, likewise. I mean, when we talk sports betting in the U.S., that, come on, we’ve got to get Florida legalized soon! Come on, people. Get with the program.

ZAC LITWACK

Well, when you visit Nashville we’ll do some betting.

RYAN KNUPPEL

Yes, for sure. I’ll make sure to look you up when I head that way. So, Zac, I appreciate you. This was Zac Litwack, a Savage Ventures partner, I appreciate you being here, Zac.

ZAC LITWACK

Yeah, thanks again Ryan.

RYAN KNUPPEL

Alright, take care.

Alright, that was great hearing from Zac. Hopefully you enjoyed that episode. We’ll put all those links out there, I really encourage you guys, if anyone has interest in working with Savage Sports or Savage Ventures, I encourage you to reach out to Zac on LinkedIn, and check out what they have going on. They have a lot going on, I know I’ve talked to Zac several times over the past few months, and just a great guy in the industry, so I’m wishing them all the luck. I can’t wait to see what they have coming from football and into the future. Alright, that’s all I have, I’m Ryan Knuppel. You can find me @Knup, at Ryan Knuppel out on LinkedIn or any of the socials out there. Until next time, take care, stay safe, and we will talk to you next time. Bye-bye.

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