Edition 20: The Origin Story Of The Handle
How an entrepreneurial endeavor led to this beautiful newsletter
Hey all, Spencer from The Handle here. In a very special Edition 20 of The Handle, David and I are going to tell the story behind this newsletter’s ideation and give an inside look to our background, process, and future goals.
David and I are close friends from high school and have always been interested in the business of sports, and more so the sports betting industry in particular. Growing up in NJ, our nation’s true sports betting capital, we graduated high school in 2018 a month after PASPA was repealed. Of course, we were still too young to bet, but not too young to get excited about the industry.
Back in December of 2020, we were going back and forth about business ideas and agreed that the offerings for odds comparison tools were a bit clunky and not as user friendly as they could be. We knew what we were doing and could still barely stand to look at an odds screen. As the market matured, better education would become a more prevalent part of the sports betting ecosystem and the importance of line shopping would trickle down to even the most novice bettors. With the mass exodus of bettors shifting from retail to mobile betting, our theory was that digital tools would need to elevate to match consumer demand with intuitive, simple, and ready-to-act technology provided by us. We wanted to create the “Honey of Sports Betting”, representing our price comparison tool through a Google Chrome plug-in bettors could install for free and easily shop lines with little friction.
With that, hmmrBet was born.
hmmrBet
We hit the ground running, with David writing scripts to scrape line data from legal sportsbooks in New Jersey while I handled the brunt of the business side of our operation. We worked well together with a balance of skills and passion as we became enamored with the gaming industry.
Over the course of the Spring 2020 Semester, we worked with USC and Yale’s venture ecosystems to enter into 3 pitch competitions, recruited a CTO to help build our plug-in, and ended up with a fully functional MVP. Here’s our demo video below:
hmmrBet was fully bootstrapped, we were working as full-time students and managed to get it up and running. To this day, I still use those scripts for my line shopping if I’m at my computer. I’m still proud of that, even if there is significantly better software out there today than when we started on hmmrBet for lineshopping. We have been thrilled to see all the product innovation in the space, even if we didn’t manage to launch it to the broader public successfully.
Unfortunately, Google’s terms of service didn’t end up allowing us to launch our product, but we were able to use the MVP locally and overall learned so much about being entrepreneurs in the sports betting world.
Google has taken a country-by-country approach to advertising rules and plug-in capabilities, and at the moment our prototype’s functionality was denied by Google. With responsible gambling in mind, we hope that Google opens up and allows for more tools to help sports bettors elevate their education level and bet responsibility and intelligently, like hmmrBet would have done.
Nonetheless, we were hooked, and our interest in developing deeper roots in the business led to the birth of The Handle.
The Handle
With hmmrBet stalled and both of us gearing up to start our respective summer internships, David and I turned to content. Over the course of our Spring entrepreneurial endeavor, we found a huge gap in the market for high quality content that attracted people like us: younger people interested in insightful and educational content. We wanted to consume high signal news and information and were extremely turned off by people shilling picks on games on Sunday morning just for clicks. Moreover, the industry was quickly becoming a behemoth in the American media landscape, with no easy way to intelligently access and analyze the latest developments.
And listen, we get the current state of the industry. Affiliate revenue is a huge part of the business, and sportsbooks will pay loads of money to drive and activate bettors on their sites. But as our industry matures and grows, the content needs to elevate to attract a younger audience both as bettors and industry talent.
We wanted to remain connected to the industry but weren’t exactly sure how. After a few weeks of discussion, our progression in thinking was to fill that gap and provide high-level content on emerging tech, M&A, legal matters, and any and all things sports betting.
The Handle is meant to be a letter where someone who is hungry to learn how the gaming industry works can spend five or ten minutes on a Monday and feel caught up. On rare occasions, it’s meant to elicit some laughs. Sometimes, we throw out wild ideas that only exist in the minds of ambitious young people who don’t know anybody.
This tweet sums it up perfectly. We’ve been fortunate to build an audience and network of ~140 weekly subscribers in 5 months, with a portfolio of the way we think, breathe, and live sports betting available to the public. We’ve been fortunate to develop relationships and use this newsletter as our sounding board and platform to learn, evolve, and immerse ourselves deeper into the space while it's exploding in terms of growth and innovation.
To us, the best part of The Handle is all the fun we have had along the way. We got to publish an article complaining that there is no amazing waterfront sports bar in Hoboken (still waiting on that), an article where we got our hands on over $1 million in handle data from a PPH book, and many more deep dives on interesting new tech and companies pushing the endless possibilities of improving the sports betting landscape. We secured an affiliate partnership with Underdog Fantasy (sign up with promo code “HANDLE”), have some more distribution news in the works, and are excited to continue to develop our knowledge base and connections in the space. It’s been an amazing experience, so thanks for coming along for the ride.
Here’s to the next 20 Editions being even better than the last and learning something along the way 🍻.
Miscellaneous Content Consumption
Press
Brad Allen penned a piece for Legal Sports Report on Fanatics chances to become a top-5 sportsbook operator. Read more here.
DraftKings dropped their $22.4 billion Entain bid on Tuesday. Matt Rybaltowski from Sports Handle with more here.
38% of mobile sports wagers in Connecticut since the state’s soft launch were tracked by GeoComply near the NY border. Bennett Conlin with more here.
Sports betting operators invested $13.8 million in broadcast radio in the first 5 months of 2021, led by DraftKings with 84.7% of the spending. Inside Radio with more on gambling becoming one of Radio’s Top Ad Categories here.
PointsBet hired former Facebook, Netflix, and National Geographic executive Kyle Christiensen as their new Chief Marketing Officer. Yahoo with more here.
Twitter
Pods
Episode 123 of the Legal Sports Report Podcast features a discussion on the DraftKings-Entain deal, Tennessee's hold rule, and the proposed NYS operator tax dilemma. Listen below:
BetStamp COO Rob Pizzola is back on Season 5 of Bet The Process, check it out below: