The Journey

As I'm writing this it's crazy looking back to see what I've accomplished in five months. It was a roller coaster of a ride that took me through several bridges I had to cross. I'm a college student trying to balance a social life, become an entrepreneur, excel academically, and be in the best physical shape I can be.

How it Began

This startup journey all started in November of 2023 when I thought of the idea for my first business. I've had ideas in the past but none ever made me commit like this one. I was trying to think of what people complain about the most. One of the first things that came to my head was how much my friends complain about losing a sports bet. I then proceeded to research if there was any way to "exploit" the sports gambling market. This is when I stumbled upon sports arbitrage betting. Similar to how quant traders use stock arbitrage, sports arbitrage betting involves betting on both sides of the bet.

For example, let's say Fanduel is offering +150 odds for the Bears to beat the Chiefs and DraftKings is offering -100 for the Chiefs to beat the Bears. If I throw $80 on Fanduel and $100 on DraftKings I will make $20 guaranteed. This is because one bet will win no matter the outcome because I bet on both sides. Each bet pays out $200 on each side but I'm only staking $180 total, resulting in a profit of $20.

Diving Deeper

Now you might be thinking well why wouldn't everybody do it if it's guaranteed money? Well first of all it's frowned upon by casinos and the gambling community, similar to counting cards in blackjack, because it takes the fun and purpose out of gambling. Casinos will kick players off if they discover that they are sports arbitrage betting. Another problem is that arbitrage opportunities are extremely rare and usually only last seconds to the minute. This makes it almost impossible for anyone to perform sports arbitrage betting without the help of software.

What is the solution?

Thinking to myself I know that a computer can solve the problem of making arbitrage bets more accessible. At the time this seemed like one of the only issues I had to solve to make my business idea profitable, but later I learned that this is far from the truth. Moving on to building the software, the idea was to scrape the data of various books in the United States and then create an algorithm to determine where the arbitrages were.

Building out the MVP

Typically when it comes to data scraping it's best to use a simple/modular language like Python. I wanted to build an MVP as fast as possible so I took the shorter route by using a public API called OddsAPI. This allowed me to easily grab the data of thousands of games and their wagers with their scores, odds, books, etc.

Phase 1: Scraping the Data

Luckily, once I had the data, writing the algorithm was fairly easy. There were a ton of examples online that had similar logic to what I was looking for, which made it incredibly easy to adjust to my data. Before moving on to building out the website and database I needed to make sure it worked, this is the backbone of the entire business.

Phase 2: Testing the software

This was my first major mistake. I'm not older than 21 which means I can't test my own product. I outputted the data to an excel sheet then compared my discovered arbitrages to the actual bets and verified that they existed. Although this verifies the algorithm works as expected, this didn't test the most significant factor of the business - applicability.

Phase 3: A **** TON OF LEARNING

Before this point I was using my years of experience in Python to build this software. Come December the algorithm is finished and it's time to build the website and database. The only website I ever built was a super basic html site in high school. This ended up being the perfect time to learn because I had a month off from school due to winter break. After doing a lot of research the tech stack I ended up using was NextJS, TailwindCSS, Supabase, and Vercel.

NextJS is a fast and relatively simple programming language based on the popular web development language React. To make the whole process even easier I used TailwindCSS, which made styling elements a walk in the park. Supabase was great because it was a database cloud provider that not only had an extreme amount of documentation and public packages but could also help handle authentication and legal! Vercel was used as my hosting provider because it's easy to set up and was free for what I was working with.

The main goal is to build out the MVP as fast as possible, saving a couple of dollars here and there was not worth the time. Time is one of the biggest enemies when it comes to building a startup. I was spending 8-9 hours a day on building this MVP, but I loved it.

Phase 4: Round One of Testing

Near the end of December, I had a product that could be used for user testing. I grabbed four helpful friends to test the product for two weeks. Getting feedback was the best thing for the business. Throughout January I was making a lot of changes to the features and UI in hopes of solving the issues discovered by my testing team. However, even with making the site faster, data more reliable, and building a smoother process my testing team was still having trouble making a profit.

Phase 5: Real-time updates

There were moments of hope but it was not going how I planned it. At the start, I knew I wanted to work on real-time updates but I didn't realize how important it was. My original plan was to build an app that would provide notifications to the users about arbitrage bets allowing them to have preferences. For 2-3 weeks I attempted to build an app using the Swift framework but it is HARD. Eventually, I gave up because I realized it would take incredibly long to finish the app and I was unsure if real-time updates would solve my issue.

As a workaround, I made a private discord that contained a Discord bot I made to send the arbitrage notifications to a discord channel. After completing this I thought that I would finally start seeing success, but I was wrong once again...

Phase 6: Final Round of Testing

The site is looking good and the real-time updates are up so I thought I'd do another round of testing with more people. This round I had over 25 people signed up for my site and was ready to see proof that all the work I had put in was worth it. One of the issues I wanted to address was the lack of engagement in my last round. To fix this I hosted a competition that lasted 3 weeks where the person who made the most amount of money by the end would receive $100 from me. Furthermore, to increase motivation I displayed the results of people's bets on an Excel sheet for everyone to see.

Phase 7: Realization

At this point, I realized that the business wasn't going to work. A couple of people made a few bucks, but most either didn't engage in the competition or attempted to participate but couldn't land a bet. There are four main issues with the business:

• Sports Arbitrage bets are gone FAST
• A decent amount of capital is needed to make any real profit
• People don't trust smaller sports betting sites
• There's a steep learning curve

Even with finding the best arbitrages, making the site easy to use and fast, and providing real-time updates, I still couldn't fix the biggest issue: placing the bet in time before the odds were gone.

Most people will be dissatisfied if they don't see results quickly, especially in this day and age. Additionally, the market for people who have a high capital to place on these betting sites is incredibly small. To make the market even smaller most people didn't trust the smaller sports betting sites!

Phase 8: Resolve

Nearing the end of February I was weighing my options on what to do. I was running out of money to run the software, the realized value was not great, and the market was incredibly small. I saw no other choice but to discontinue the business. It was hard letting it go after spending hundreds of hours on it but I had a great time nonetheless.

Landing page of Wager Weaver - Check it out here

What now?

With my junior year at Purdue ending it's nearing the stage where I'll have to decide whether corporate or startup life will be for me. I've never been great at making huge decisions but I'm positive I'll figure it out. I've taken a break from startups and the indie hacker community for about a month and a half now but I'm ready to come back. I have a new idea that is even better than the last so stay tuned!

I wouldn't take back anything I did up to this point. I think one of the best teachings from doing this is learning how to fail. I couldn't tell you how many times I spent digging through my code to find the tiniest of bugs, the late nights when I had to finish a feature to roll out to my testers, or the hundreds of hours I spent rewatching videos on Swift code logic - NEVER AGAIN.

Anyone that has the slightest interest in being an entrepreneur just do it! I would rather fail a hundred times than not try at all. I know that each time I fail I'll only be coming back stronger and better than ever. What a ride it's been, thanks for stopping by and hearing my story!