❓The End. Or Is It?

The first edition of the Probly Email was back in September 2022. Our goal was to share data as well as the journey we faced building a startup from the ground up.

Back then, we made our earliest version of Probly — really, a rough sketch of a product:

We had enough data and enough of a concept for what we wanted to do that I started to write this email, weekly. Mostly religiously.

Every week I’d write up the top NFL probabilities for each game from the earliest version of our market probability model along with a weekly bit that I miss — the Most Probable event in the world. It’d often be some really esoteric league, things like Eastern European women’s hoops or Middle Eastern soccer, where one team had a 99% chance to win. Sometimes it’d even be a college football team with a 96% chance to win. The kind of really niche data stuff that interests me and, seemingly, a lot of you. It was exciting to be able to do that.

I also shared my journey as a startup founder in the hopes people would relate, empathize, maybe even support the product more for it.

A lot of people read the Probly Email, shockingly about a 50% open rate throughout the entire time we’ve been doing this.

But it took us one year after starting the Probly Email to actually get a publicly accessible Probly product out. Some of the hurdles we encountered:

-We worked with a South American UX firm who gave us beautiful designs based on our requests.
-When we worked with them on turning that into code, they ended up giving us half of what we paid for and a good portion of which had to be re-done due to really bad code.
-A tree literally fell on my CTO’s house, knocking him out of comission for an extended period of time.
-Football Outsiders went under (despite me leading them to their highest traffic and revenue year in the most difficult environment imaginable), killing my ability to pay for Probly’s bills out of a day job as they, at one point, owed me $50,000 in salary.
-We dealt with an investment landscape that went from “Wow, sick idea, here’s a check” to “Wow, great designs of a product, here’s a check” to “Wow, what a cool MVP (minimum viable product), here’s a check” to, where it is now, which is “Wow, have you made $100,000 a year yet? Yes? Then maybe you can have a check.”

Aside: There was one time early in our process when a potential investor told us “I think you have a $100 million business but not a $1 billion business and we can’t invest for that reason.” Which was maybe a blow-off but holy shit does that still drive me nuts.

The difficulty was magnified since we also were really learning how to do a software company and startup like this from the ground up for the first time.

There was some initial wastefulness as a result of tech testing. As we honed our data infrastructure, we saw bills of upwards of $10,000 for one month of data usage. More caution exercised would have saved some of that money, even if some of the lessons had to be learned for the sake of creating this tech from the ground up.

I also didn’t crack the whip as hard as I should have on timing. Every month bled me dry a little bit more. But I had such faith in what we were building as well as the immense quality of it that I didn’t want to distract from the hard part of making it all work.
 
It took until September 2023 for us to launch a beta version after we were forced to do this full time. And that first version didn’t even have paid subscriptions or our Probly Score expected value calculations easily filterable.

Time and money had racked up. Below is an artist’s rendering of that process:

Some of it is just the cost of doing business — stuff like our data provider at OddsJam (who does the best job in the business with their data feeds, even if the cost is a lot for a startup like us) and Amazon Web Services (which gives us the ability do lightning fast updates).

But we started paying for these too soon — both of which a legit eight months before we even had any revenue generating product out — and we probably spent too much in a quest to make the most premium product possible.

Eventually, we got our paid product out there in November of 2023. A few of you signed up — and we’re forever appreciative of that — but a lot did not.

We had hundreds of people on this email list at that point. Seemingly, all people who were at least, at one point, interested in paying for Probly. With the release, it felt like we lost momentum with how long it took to get the product out.

Stupidly, we didn’t prioritize launching in the App Store until we got live there at the end of January 2024. We lost out on the key sales period of NFL season but made really big strides as NBA went on.

Our numbers went up substantially, people seemingly did well with the bets — including some of our earliest signups reporting 200% ROIs and monster parlay hits — and we felt better about our chances to find funding in a very difficult climate to accomplish it.

Our revenues increased 140% month over month right as the NBA regular season ended, just a few months after being in the App Store. We were stoked.

But a premium product comes with premium costs. At this point, I’ve put in just shy of $100,000 of my own money to keep it up and running with revenues not yet covering the costs of doing business. It’s been a year of full-time sweat equity getting this product off the ground.

So we got more aggressive about finding investment. I traveled around to different pitches and meetings. Some locally in the Philly area, others in a few other parts of the country. Some with my CTO, some without.

I sent countless emails, revised our deck, did Jason Calacanis’s Founder University just to take myself back to the ground up and see what I was missing from this process.

There was one ray of hope: Amidst our quest to keep growing the business (/keep it alive), we found some investors who were very interested and motivated to be our first check in.

I’ve talked around it a lot in here the last few months. But at this point, there’s no reason to be vague.

Basically, we would have had a $125,000 investment from them that would have gotten us through end of year, allowed us to get back to a somewhat less-perpetually stressed life, and build out what we’ve gathered people want the most: a real-time sports betting search engine using our data.

It’d be the first of its kind to exist due to some substantial technological hurdles. We started work on it, had a pathway to getting it done for NFL week 1, and then just as I was about to do the normal Probly email last week…

Those guys pulled out. This after we’d agreed to terms generally in the beginning of July, which included us taking on some abandoned project of theirs and getting it integrated with Probly or running on its own.

This also after getting their immense showings of interest and being assured of their “intent to do something”.

They rugpulled us at the last possible minute with a “We’re not really able to do something until early 2025”.

As a result, Probly is now under the gun. We have to pay our data provider at OddsJam as of yesterday and our AWS bill in the first week of September. And at this point, I have no way to do them both on my own or with the revenue in our accounts.

So this is where we are as of writing this email.

We’d like to keep things up and running and see through the development of our search engine product. So if you’re someone who can facilitate us accomplishing that, please get back to me [email protected].

If you’re an individual person who wants to invest (even if it’s just $5K, which would get us through the first part of NFL season) or someone who has something bigger in mind like some or all of the $125K we need to see the search engine release through to end of year, please do reach out. I’m prepared to give VERY aggressive equity away for anyone who helps us keep things aligned.

We have the budgeting already done to make the most of any capital, things with tangible ROIs like SEO improvements, App Store optimization efforts, and the tech around the search itself. Because of that, we feel strongly about the potential for the return on any investment.

It’s super humbling — and, honestly, embarassing — for me to have to put this out there. I am so prideful and it’s always been something for me where I hate asking for help, often to my own detriment.

But I love Probly and I know what it’s capable of being. I wouldn’t have leveraged my savings, gambling bankroll, and more to build it and keep it going if I didn’t.

We just want the shot to see how it does in the bright lights of NFL, maybe with some fancy new products to pair with it.

If we can’t find a way through this situation, it’s possible that even if this is the end for now, this isn’t the end.

Even if our friends at OddsJam had to shut us down for non-payment, we do have other feeds we could integrate to see this through (albeit with some time cost because of needing to re-do all our backend data processes). Same for handling AWS.

So this may be the end. Or maybe it isn’t. Or maybe 100 of you want to pay $1000 for a lifetime membership for Probly’s data???? You tell me.

I’ll keep trying to find the funding. But if this is the end for Probly — well, just know we went down swinging.

I’ll let you know via email when we get to a conclusion one way or another. And if you just want free bets, check YouTube and TikTok for today’s. I’ll keep doing them until we get a resolution or lose data access.

This has been your your Probly Email for August 23rd, 2024. - @ChrisSpags