Zach Doctor of WagerWire joined the show to talk about his product WagerWire and what they are up to in the industry.
RYAN KNUPPEL
Hey, what’s going on everybody, Ryan Knuppel here, Knup Sports Show Episode 178, we’ve got another awesome guest on today, I’m super excited to bring on our guest here in a bit. But first of all, we’ve gotta talk some football, we’ve got football coming up, I’m sure we’ll speak about it on this show a little bit. But, as of this recording it’s Tuesday, and we have a Thursday night game coming up that should be fabulous between the Bills and Rams, then going into Sunday we’ve got a full slate of NFL, so I’m excited about football being here, hopefully you are too. Thank you so much for tuning in. This show just continues to grow, we’re getting lots of people that are interested in hearing from the amazing guests that continue to pile onto this show. So, we wouldn’t be anywhere without the guests that come on, so I wanna thank all of them first and foremost, but I wanna thank you for giving your attention and paying attention to what’s going on in the iGaming, sports betting, sports business world. So, without further ado, let’s bring our guest on today. Today we’ve got the cofounder and CEO of WagerWire, we got Zach Doctor on with us. Zach, how are you, my friend?
ZACH DOCTOR
Doing great, doing great, thanks a lot for having me on, Ryan.
RYAN KNUPPEL
Super excited to have you. I’m excited to hear about WagerWire, but first, are you excited for some football?
ZACH DOCTOR
Oh man. Yeah, it’s that time of year again, I can’t wait. Yeah, I’m a big NFL guy, so I’m looking forward to the kickoff on Thursday, but obviously, college football’s already in swing, had a good weekend this weekend catching up on some games and everything. So it’s a good time of year to be a sports fan, for sure.
RYAN KNUPPEL
Absolutely. Like, the sports schedule does funny things to you, right? Like you get all, like, hyped up for football, and then football comes and comes and comes, and then all of a sudden it’s like over, and now it’s like basketball and March Madness, and all of that, and then you’re like, “Now what?”, you’re kinda bored, you’re like “Eh, it’s just baseball”, and then it happens again. And so, we’re here, we’re in football season, everybody’s energetic throughout the entire industry, which just makes it amazing. So, Zach, where are you located? Tell us a little bit about where you’re located at.
ZACH DOCTOR
For sure, for sure. Yeah, no, I’m based in Los Angeles, you know, been down here about a decade. I went to UCLA, so I’ve been sticking around in LA every since, and happy to see my Bruins did okay this weekend, although, you know, it looked a little iffy [inaudible] in the first half. Frankly, I was a little scared about it, but then we ended up pulling it out and actually looked pretty good by the end of the game, yeah.
RYAN KNUPPEL
Crazy things can happen. Yeah, I’m here in Orlando, and like, everybody’s like big Gators fan, so that Florida Utah game, the end of that was just crazy too. Florida pulled it out there at the end, which was fun. It was exciting to watch. Yeah, it’s awesome. That’s why we all love sports. Because, you know, anybody can beat anybody on a given day, and just lots of action, and things happening. But, uh, cool Zach, well I’m excited to dive into WagerWire, I’m excited to hear what you’ve got going on, but first, tell me a little bit about yourself and maybe your background career path, and what got you to start WagerWire.
ZACH DOCTOR
Cool, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, before jumping into WagerWire, I was working in the finance industry actually. Uh, so I worked at PNC Business Credit, you know, I was, I quickly grew to being a VP over there at a very young age, which was exciting. It was a really great place to start my career. I started there right after UCLA and did I think 7-8 years. And by the end of it I was a vice president, I was sourcing deals, I was bringing in new deals that we would do with private equity sponsors when they would buy a company, we would put up the debt. So, you know, kinda of like when you get a mortgage to buy a house, private equity groups get mortgages to buy companies, and we would put up that debt on the front end of the deal. Uh, and everything goes along with that. So it was a great place to start out, but I had always wanted to get back into entrepreneurship. I actually had a, uh, you know, a little bit of an entrepreneurial story as a child. You know, when I was just 12 years old, I started a bicycle tire company with my older brother, and, you know, doing that just from selling bike tires in our garage all the way up to, you know, now we have a warehouse outside of Portland, Oregon. We have a couple of websites, you know, to this day, my family still runs it. So, I’ve always wanted to get back into the start-up world and WagerWire has just been a dream opportunity, um, and really I think it started on the couch, you know, like a lot of ideas do in this industry. Uh, you know, I was watching a game one day, and it was a Packers game, it was a couple years back. You know, I had grabbed a Packers -3 before the game, my buddy Travis, who’s now one of my cofounders, he comes in the house, you know, halfway through the quarter, and the line had already moved to -7 because the Packers had jumped out to a lead, and you know, he didn’t really want the live line, he wanted the line that I got at the start of the game, he wanted to ride the bet with me, and we just started kind of pulling that thread. Like, is there a way where, you know, I could sell you my bet? Or I could sell you half of my bet? And that’s where the idea for WagerWire was born, and now we’re, you know, a couple years later, we’re pushing full steam ahead. We’ve raised a seed round, uh, we’re really looking forward to getting this marketplace stood up, and it really is that. It’s a marketplace for open sports bets, so any bet that you placed earlier in the season or at the start of the game, you’ll be able to sell it on our platform to your friend or to some other random person on the other side of it. Really just create this liquid marketplace around bets is the idea.
RYAN KNUPPEL
Yeah, that’s really cool, I mean you led me straight into talking about WagerWire, which is amazing. So it’s crazy that you had an entrepreneurial experience that’s still going on. Congrats on that, by the way, that you got a business, it’s at seeding, and so you kinda have that in your blood, which is amazing, right? You have that entrepreneurial spirit, and now doing it with WagerWire, so congrats on that, first of all.
ZACH DOCTOR
Thanks a lot, yeah, no. I mean, that was a wild ride, uh, it was fun, you know, we had built racking in our parents’ garage, they couldn’t even park their cars anymore. We were having 18-wheelers backing up to the house to drop off palettes of tires, and you know, having the customer service line forwarding to our cell phones at school [inaudible]. So it was like the full, and like, this was living in the Bay Area in the 2000s, it’s very much, like, that Silicon Valley vibe, and, uh, it was a great place to kind of see this world. Obviously, what I’m doing now is a different business completely. But like you said, it gives you that, kind of, entrepreneurial bug, and just have always wanted to get back into it.
RYAN KNUPPEL
That’s amazing. So lets dive a little deeper into WagerWire here. I’m gonna pull it up here on the screen as well, you know, bet like an investor. Um, you talked a little bit about how you can, you know, buy and sell your previously placed sports bets, but uh, I guess, explain to me, so you actually gave the perfect analogy right out of the gate, right? Somebody wanted the line, uh, that was changed already because the game already, explain why they would buy a bet out of WagerWire instead of just taking the live line. It’s cuz they wanted that initial line, or what? Explain a little bit further, I guess, the benefits of using WagerWire over the live betting concept.
ZACH DOCTOR
For sure, for sure. Yeah, I mean, look, where we stand, we’re really all about giving the bettors more optionality, right? We think that you should have this optionality that after you place a bet, it’s not a zero-sum game, it’s not just win or lose, or now, you know, some sportsbooks are offering cash out, but it’s, you know, usually very low values, so we wanted to create this system where you can take agency over your bet. That bet that kind of previously was looked at as a risk or a liability, it’s now kind of an asset that you own, that you can choose to do what you want with it. Uh, so you could sell part of that bet, you could sell just half your bet, you know, get your initial $100 back and let the rest run risk free. Um, so I think from the sell side, there’s a lot of different strategies you can do. Like at the start of an NFL season, like this for example, you might put futures down on a few different teams that you think are gonna start hot, and then, you know, by week 3, week4, if they’re winning, you could sell off enough of that bet to get initial risk back, and then have all the rest risk free, like that’s a pretty cool idea. So it’s also, but then it’s also, like, for hedging strategies. So, you know, maybe you, maybe last year, you’re one of those lucky guys that bet on the Bengals at the start of the year, when they’re 100-1, and they go all the way to the Super Bowl, and you want to take some chips off the table, but maybe you don’t have $5000 bucks in your account to hedge it, to place on the opposite side and try to lock a bet, lock a win in, and so instead you could just sell part of that bet. And then from the buy side, to your point, it’s really about getting the best odds available, right? So if you’re a buyer, if you’re a prospective buyer, um, you’ll be able to get better odds on our marketplace than you would from a sportsbook directly, so you’re gonna be, we should be the first place you check, in our minds, you know? If you wanna place, if you wanna get a Packers futures bet, then you should go first to our site, but it’s not just futures. It could be straight bets, you know, parlays are a really good use case too. You know, if you hit 3 games on Sunday, and then you have the Monday night game in your parlay, then maybe you wanna sell that bet before the Monday night game kicks off. Um, so I think parlays are another really good use case too.
RYAN KNUPPEL
That’s amazing, yeah. That actually really makes sense when you’re talking props and some of them, or I’m sorry, some of the futures that could really, uh, really make sense. So explain the logistics of how this works. So, I make my bet, I’m ready to sell off a portion of it, do I place it up in the app and just wait for a buyer to come in, or is there some sort of, do I put my odds on it, or my price on that ticket, or is there a negotiation that happens? Explain a little bit of the logistics between buyer and seller and how that transaction takes place.
ZACH DOCTOR
Yeah, great question. So, what a user will do when they come to WagerWire is they’re gonna sink their sportsbook accounts with us. So you’ll type in your username and password with your favorite sportsbooks where you bet, then we’ll be able to read back what bets you have in your account, and then you can pick any bet you have in your account and decide to post it for sale. You can post it for whatever price you want. We are gonna suggest a price, though. You know, we’re gonna use some math, we have a little algorithm that’s gonna spit out to you a suggested price, and then you can post that bet for sale, and then buyers can browse the marketplace, they’ll see all the bets available, and then they can go through, they can make bids, they can make offers below the price if they want to, or they can just check out and buy it now. And then we’re also gonna give a deal score to every bet, so from a buyer’s perspective, they’ll have an idea of whether this is actually priced competitively, you know, compared to consensus odds. You know, that’s the kind of [inaudible] it is, the suggested price and then [inaudible] to kind of help.
RYAN KNUPPEL
That totally makes sense, and then, so, does the, the bet doesn’t actually change hands in the back end of the operating sportsbook, does it? All that magic is happening within the app, correct? Or is it actually changing place in the sportsbook.
ZACH DOCTOR
That’s a little bit of the secret sauce here. So we are actually partnering with the sportsbook operators. We have a couple deals that we’ll be able to announce later this year. Um, and we’re gonna be actually integrating their systems, so it really will move ownership in the sportsbook system for our integrated partners. And I don’t mean to break through, you know, you’ll be able to buy a bet, and then go to your sportsbook account and it’ll actually be in there, and if you win the bet, you get the payout directly from the book. And we also have a B-to-B product, so we have a plug-in version of this for a sportsbook, and some of the sportsbooks we’re talking to really like the concept so much that they want to bake it right into their apps, so we have a way where they could have now some bet trading functionality right in the sportsbook app and it would be powered by the WagerWire back-end, and they can have their own little internal marketplace going on in their apps too. So that’ll be rolling out as well, fast-forward a couple years here, you should be able to sell your bet in the sportsbook app or on WagerWire, and we’ll hopefully have coverage of the entire industry by that point, you know?
RYAN KNUPPEL
That’s amazing, I mean, yeah, I think you really covered what it does and how it works. You know, I’m curious how it’s going. I’m curious from your side, you know, how it’s going? Where do you guys add? Are you, um, cuz as we all know the name of the gam in any of this space, it’s customer acquisition, it’s getting people to use it and actually making transactions. Can you tell us any numbers or how this is going, you know, from a beginning part here for you guys?
ZACH DOCTOR
Yeah, no, absolutely. So we are, um , we’re gaining a lot of momentum right now. We just closed our seed round this summer, so we raised $3 million. Thank you. Our lead investor, uh, is Roger Ehrenberg, he’s one of the co-owners of the Marlins. He’s really just been a, you know, a seed investor his whole career, very [inaudible] investor, and so that’s been really great. We’ve got a really good backing now, and this is all about getting our product out to market, this phase, so we are, um, finishing up the product development and the partnerships, and then we’ll be rolling out the product live as quickly as we can, yeah.
RYAN KNUPPEL
Very cool, very cool. So, and then the real fun begins, right? Then you get, uh, the customer acquisition phase and kind of really start blowing up from there. Now, do you guys anticipate having an Apple app and an Android app and all of the above? Or what’s the platform that you’re gonna be running on?
ZACH DOCTOR
That’s right, yeah. We’re gonna have apps in the app store. We also have WagerWire.com, and I encourage people to even go to the website now, you can sign up for the link already. I do think you’re right about, you know, a big part of this is kind of building that community out. So we are trying to build a marketplace. You need buyers, you need sellers, you need liquidity, so we’re really starting, we’re already starting now, well in advance of launching, building out our community, you know, our social medias, and starting to build the traction everywhere we can, and it’s really just about getting some excitement going this fall. Uh, and getting people to start thinking about it this way, right? It’s a little bit of a mentality flip to think about, “Hey, my bet isn’t just gonna win or lose. I could actually play it, the ups and downs throughout the game and throughout the season”, and so that’s what this fall is all about, is driving awareness and driving that educational component, which I actually wanna shout you out too. You know, through your site, you’re doing a lot of great stuff on the educational side, and community building and everything. I think that’s a big key here. And so hopefully we can, you know, share some insights that we’ve seen and share some strategies and some systems that we think will be fun, but we really want people to start building their own strategies and building their own systems around this, and that’s where the sky’s the limit at that point.
RYAN KNUPPEL
That’s awesome. Well I appreciate the shout out, I try to do my small little piece of the ecosystem here that we all love, you know, the whole sports betting world that we all try to do our part to make it a great experience for people, and so I appreciate that. But yeah, that’s amazing. So do you have any timeline you can talk about of when it may be released to the public, or is that kind of still what you’re trying to figure out?
ZACH DOCTOR
Yeah, we definitely have an internal timeline in place. We haven’t publicly announced it yet, but we will, uh, we’ll be leaking that out shortly I think. Uh, and, yeah, like I said, we’re just trying to build the community up in the mean time, get people excited about it, get people on the waitlist, and then we can really hit the ground running when the time is right.
RYAN KNUPPEL
That’s cool. The one line, not the one line, the line that stood out to me on your website as I was going through it that really resonated with me, “Your bets are now a portfolio of assets that can be bought and sold at any time”. If you think of your bets as that, it really changes your mindset a little bit, right? It’s just “Ah, I just made a bet and blah blah blah”, no, “I have this portfolio of assets that now I can buy and sell and trade and do all of this cool stuff with”. I think that really resonated with me most as I was going through this.
ZACH DOCTOR
I love that. Yeah, no, I mean that’s the mentality we’re trying to instill in people, is that you’re not hostage to your bet. You placed it and now you have options, right? And maybe you want to get kind of aggressive and maybe you’ll place a bigger bet than you normally would have because you know you can sell half of it later, or you might take a riskier bet than you would have because you know you have this off-ramp. You might place more bets, you know, I think March Madness, maybe you place a dozen bets at the start of March Madness and manage those off throughout the rounds of the tournament. Things like that, so…
RYAN KNUPPEL
Interesting. You really think of it differently as you go through making the bets, cuz you know you have some options with them.
ZACH DOCTOR
Exactly, exactly. So we want to get people just out there, like riding momentum, trying to play that change in odds and make some money off of it. And then ultimately, you know, it’s downside protection too, right? If you have that bad feeling in the stomach after the first quarter that your team doesn’t look right, and maybe the score doesn’t reflect it yet but you can see it on the field that you’re not doing so hot, and you just wanna get out of your bet and get the chips off the table and live to fight another day, so it’s also just as much about the downside protection I think as the upside and the riding momentum.
RYAN KNUPPEL
Yeah. Very cool. Very cool. Well, Zach, so you know, this seems like a lot of work. I mean obviously you have some experience in the entrepreneurial side, you had a successful business going earlier, still going actually. Tell us some of the challenges, and just some of the, I guess, from more of a business side. Man, what are some of the challenges you guys have run into as you’re going through this massive undertaking to launch a product, right? You know, what is some of the biggest hurdles you guys have came into as you went through this whole process, because it truly is a process.
ZACH DOCTOR
Yeah, you’re right about that. It truly is a process, and it’s one that we’ve been working on for a couple years already. And look, this is a little bit different business than, like, one where you could just spin up an app and see if it works, right? We’re kinda going B-to-B with this business of bet trading, and so, um, that’s both the opportunity in that you can get this massive distribution if you close these sportsbook deals and then they’re rolling this out to their users as a new future, you get this massive distribution. But, then the flipside is, you have to be in this sales process with them, right? And we’re talking with them, we’re knocking on the doors, we’re hitting them up on linked in, we’re getting introductions to all the people we can, and so that is one of the challenges of this business too, is that the sportsbooks are, you know, it’s a regulated industry, they’re kind of the gatekeepers to all of this, you know, there’s like the 25 or so sportsbooks and really only [inaudible] that are doing a lot of volume, and it’s all about winning those deals, and so everything we’re doing, every step along the way is to win those, is to, you know, eventually win those big tier 1 deals. And everything that goes along with that. You’re definitely right that it’s a lot of wood to chop, but we’ve got a nice team behind us now, I think we’re up to 11 people now, and, you know, with our investors and backers, it’s like, you know, its switched a little bit. Like in the very beginning, the founders, there’s three of us as the founders, you’re literally doing everything, right? You’re wearing every little hat, you’re running around, you’re doing marketing, you’re doing bus-dev, you’re doing fundraising, and now, it’s like, we’re starting to silo it off a little bit more, we’re having teams that work on different things with interns, all this good stuff, so it’s, uh, it’s a different challenge now, but it’s a good one now. We’re in the execution phase, you know?
RYAN KNUPPEL
That transition from true start-up to start-up with funding is an interesting one that really kind of changes from a founder and a CEO side, it really changes your mindset, I’m sure, of how you need to now operate to scale, and use that money that you now raised efficiently, and make things happen, so I think that’s an interesting topic that we could talk about as well at some other time. But, uh, just uh, that transition, I’m sure, has been fun for you guys, but a lot of work as well.
ZACH DOCTOR
Yeah, that really is, like, the infection point, where it kind of switches, and, I don’t know, someone told me, I thought it was kind of a clever line, was that in the beginning, as a CEO your job is to do everything, and then once you have the money secured, your job is to actually do nothing.
RYAN KNUPPEL
Yeah, exactly.
ZACH DOCTOR
Delegate as much as you can, not to literally do nothing, but to just focus, you know, anything that’s a menial task, that’s just gonna be taking up my time, is to delegate that type of stuff out, get the team around us so that, like, we can focus on the important stuff, which is the business development with the sportsbooks, you know, rolling the product out, all the kind of highest priority stuff.
RYAN KNUPPEL
For sure. Awesome, Zach. Well cool. Well, I know you’re a busy guy, I know you’ve got lots of meetings and things going on, so I’ll let you off the hook here shortly, but anything we missed, anything you wanted to touch on, throw out some plugs, I know WagerWire.com, people can go ahead and sign up for a pre-list and get on that, but where else? How can they get a hold of you, anything we forgot? What do you want to say before we get off here?
ZACH DOCTOR
Cool, yeah. No, I think I mentioned, definitely head to WagerWire.com if you’re interested in signing up as a user. Uh, definitely on Twitter as well, that’s our main following on socials, is just @WagerWire. I would encourage people to reach out. Another thing that we’re doing right now as far as this community building, it’s like, maybe if you’re interested in doing more than just being a user, maybe you have a small podcast of your own, or you put out a blog every once in a while or something like this, or you just do Twitter spaces out there, we’re starting to kind of mobilize this and we’re building what’s actually calling out WagerWire broadcast network, uh, and we’re gonna be having spaces going everyday, uh, different people doing different things from kind of a brand ambassador standpoint, so I do encourage people to DM us on Twitter if you’re interested, or if you have a little bit of a network or an audience of your own, uh, and we would love to hear from you and kind of collaborate on what we could do together.
RYAN KNUPPEL
Yeah, I love that, I mean the power of social media and people with audiences, and bringing that all together seems to be the, uh, the wave of the future here, and the way things are really gonna move forward is tapping into kinda, “You’ve got a great product, I’ve got an audience, let’s figure out how to work together”, right? I think that’s a, I love that mindset.
ZACH DOCTOR
Yeah, no that’s definitely what we’re trying to do here, and we’re doing it from the grass roots, right? You do see, you know, we are gonna be pulling in some celebrities and athletes and things like that, but we really wanna get to know the people, you know, the sports bettors, the sports fans, cuz you don’t even have to be a bettor. You can follow us on Twitter, and sometimes we’re just posting about, you know, who do you think is gonna win this Sunday, sometimes it’s just about a line or something, but a lot of times it’s not even betting related, so definitely encourage people just to like, you know, for a good hang out there, and through this football season, basically. Uh, and we’re trying to build out, you know, our own, uh, little community, like you said, so that’s what we’re going for.
RYAN KNUPPEL
Awesome, Zach. Well I’ll make sure to put links to WagerWire.com and how to get a hold of you out in the show notes. Before I let you off the hook, one last question. Are you Rams, Chargers, are you Raiders? Who’s your team out there out west? Do you have a team out there?
ZACH DOCTOR
So I live in LA, but I grew up in the Bay, so I’m 9ers all the way myself, personally.
RYAN KNUPPEL
Ah, 9ers, I didn’t even, ahhh. [Laughs].
ZACH DOCTOR
Yeah, I’m excited to see Trey Lance this year. I think we’ve got a pretty solid team around him, actually, so we’ll see what he can do. Uh, and then I am curious to see how, uh, how the Rams do this year, since I’m living here. And we got a good game kicking off on Thursday with the Bills in town.
RYAN KNUPPEL
Can’t get much better, can’t get much better. That’s gonna be a fun one. Well, Zach, I really appreciate your time here. Thanks for giving us all of the insight on WagerWire. I encourage everyone to check it out, get on that pre-list so you can get it once it’s launched, I’ll make sure to do that as well. Zach, thanks for your time, really appreciate it.
ZACH DOCTOR
Awesome, thanks for having me on. This has been fun.
RYAN KNUPPEL
Alright, take care man, we’ll talk soon.
ZACH DOCTOR
Thanks.
RYAN KNUPPEL
Alright, that was Zach Doctor, the CEO/co-founder of WagerWire. Super excited to have him on and talk about his product, his upcoming product, it’s uh, gonna maybe change the way you think about how you make bets, right? It’s now a portfolio of assets that you can manage and you can buy and sell and do different things with. Uh, really, uh, really opens your eyes to how you make bets and how you can manage that. So I’m excited to try it out once it comes and go from there. Thank you guys all for listening, really appreciate it. If you have questions for Zach or myself, you can go out in the show notes of this, we’ll have links to everything. I’m Ryan Knuppel, you can find me on any LinkedIn or any of the social media platforms out there as well. Until next time, take care, enjoy football this weekend, I hope you really enjoy it. Make some bets, win some bets, and hopefully your team succeeds. So, take care, we’ll talk to you soon. Ryan Knuppel checking out for today. Bye-bye.
Relevant Links
Learn more about WagerWire on their website.
You can connect with Zach Doctor on LinkedIn.
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Contact Ryan Knuppel
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