💸 MASSIVE ROI With Probly's Advanced Filters — And An NBA Bet Challenge

It’s been a great week for our new advanced filters on Probly, with these as the results solely from bets I’ve placed from our content:

Even including my iffy Parlay Saturday results (where I sometimes place impossible longshots for fun for myself, not content), I’m up 12.1 units with our new advanced filters on bets with a PROBLY Score above 4. That’s good for an ROI of 26.8%, which is even above the backtested 12-20% ROI per sport we had for bets with a PROBLY Score above 2. So it’s a product tweak that’s making a real difference so far. If you want to see some other optimal settings we recommend for things like PrizePicks or conservative bettors, check out last week’s post.

If you read this email every week and you haven’t given this latest iteration of Probly a shot, DO IT! It will change your life in betting. Get 50% off your first month or year now — under $10 for your first month or under $100 for A YEAR — with promo code FIRST. Or get a seven-day free trial on the App Store version! Your support goes a long way and there are a LOT of you whom I know read this regularly without trying the paid product yet.

Today, we’ll hit on the NBA Top 10 bets (along with some fresh bonus ones updated recently) along with our usual run through products and business. Here’s your Probly Email for March 8th, 2024! - @ChrisSpags

• 🏀 The NBA’s Top 10 bets (with some new bonus ones just for the Probly Email)

• 🔓 Probly Updates: Fundraising, AWS, and Our Latest Updates

I’ve likely done enough self-fellating in the intro for our data but, in short, it’s been a good run! So let’s keep it rolling with the CURRENT Most Profitable bet that I could find in the NBA as of RIGHT NOW before sending this email:

Anthony Edwards under 2.5 made threes - 51% probability and 6.3 PROBLY Score at +108 odds.

I’ll make a deal with you guys just in this email. If you tail this bet and it hits, you sign up for a month of Probly.

If this bet doesn’t hit and you tailed it, send me a screenshot of the bet and I’ll give a free month to anyone wants to redeem it via emailing me at [email protected].

Be a man or woman of your word!

Otherwise, here’s the rest of the Top 10 bets for today, from a video done this morning:

And here they are in text from our bet tracking sheet:

Of course our best bets are always updated all night and day so get more for yourself at Probly.com or on the App Store (leave a review with your Probly username and get a free month of Probly+)!

We’ve got some stress coming up because Amazon Web Services’ automatic processes have started to send threatening emails about some older invoices we owe — basically, we were racking up high bills during development before we got our paid products out because of storing too much data as we tried to build our fairly elaborate data processes and product. We only figured that out and optimized aggressively after having to really preserve runway when my Football Outsiders salary ran out and there was no obvious funding on the horizon.

We agreed to a payment plan that was suppose to come to a head at the end of this month where we caught up with more current, more reasonably priced invoices post-optimization in the interim — mostly to try to buy us time to find some funding to cover this $10k bill we owe — and then had to find a way to pay the past due amounts from that costly development period. But now, following this automatic email, I haven’t heard from our reps a few days after emailing and asking what’s going on.

if we run into an issue, we have a route to (somewhat) quickly spin up an alternative solution. But it is currently something we want to be open about since it can result in downtime if they don’t help us correct this (and obviously I will email you all about if it becomes an actual issue since, even if AWS bones us, we’re not throwing in the towel on the product with how well it’s working right now).

Candidly, as it always is here — working with AWS has been a really stressful experience. Their DynamoDB product and integration with other AWS services has allowed us a lot of product execution that would have been challenging without them, specifically ones related to our constant updating and pinging with new data. At the same time, the No-SQL solution has limited our ability to fully surface and display data in the ways we want wiith the speed we want.

More than that, the way they handle startups is very frustrating. If you are with a select few high level VCs or accelerators, they provide you $100,000 in credits to develop your product and then launch it. If you’re a regular person, funded or bootstrapping, they’ll give you $1,000 in credits as part of their Activate program. If you finesse other programs that give credits — like creating your company through Stripe or a program for startup founders called Founders Pass — you can get $4,000 more in credits.

We got those $5,000 in credits and it covered, basically, one month of development. Everything besides that was something I’ve paid out of pocket — or submarined a credit card for when dealing with the Football Outsiders issues — to the tune of more than $25,000. We’ve done everything our reps advised, asked for support and credits or visibility into ways to help cut our costs. When we ran into issues paying the huge invoices, we communicated immediately and did everything asked. We worked out a payment plan. And yet we’re at danger to lose work and mental health because a billion dollar company with a startups program doesn’t actually care about real startups.

In an industry where there’s a lot of people who point out in the inequities of everything from how race and gender affect investor funding to how “warm intros” — intros from a person who knows the person you want to speak to — are nepotism adjacent, it’s kind of insane that no one talks about this. When you pair it with the fact that Amazon can basically hold your data and code hostage until you pay them — or, if it takes long enough, delete it entirely — it is a very frustrating tightrope to walk.

We’re optimistic it’ll be something that we can solve and mostly an issue of the left hand not talking to the right hand, particularly with automations. But it’s a painful lesson learned about building as cheaply as possible as early as possible.

It’s also a lesson I spell out to vent as much as I do to warn other people out there who might end up trying to build something of their own. Much like in sports betting, the deck is stacked against you. And much like in sports betting, we’ll do everything we can to not let you down amidst that.

Besides that, we made some minor approvements to the Subscribe flow on the Apple version of Probly and are working on the same for the website version of Probly. We also will launch our first escapable interstitial soon on both versions; a call-to-action to subscribe to get +EV bets by subscribing. A lot of our focus is on tightening up conversion funnels while we continue to try to make some backend improvements that we hope will help Search and the overall speed.

We’re also actively looking for fundraising since — despite all the headaches of managing costs and old invoices — we’ve actually started to rack up some nice successes in terms of subscriber growth and traffic growth. We have a few key meetings coming up in the next few weeks but if you or someone you know is in the game to cut a check for equity (even if it’s just a $10k one to cover those annoying AWS bills), reply to the email.

If you want to bet your way to investing that $10,000 (jk), get a 7-day free trial through the App Store OR save 50% with promo code FIRST on any monthly OR yearly package at Probly.com/subscribe.

I also will literally give YOU a free month of Probly+ if you leave us five stars AND a review on the App Store. Just leave your Probly username in there so I know it’s you and I will reach out and give you a free month on your account. It’s that easy to get a $19.99 value for $0 to show our love for you supporting us.

If you guys encounter any issues not covered here or want to provide feedback, you can email me [email protected].

As always, thanks to all of you who read all the way down here. I’m going to get back to overarching betting advice/takes based content soon. I mostly let the email/week take me wherever it goes in terms of our content and this AWS thing is one that, frankly, has been chafing me for a while. We just want to build Probly and are willing to take a loss right now to do it. But the idea of having to take a step backwards and lose 22 months of development (including 14 months of paying for the privilege) because a multibillion dollar company needs less than $10k from us right now is really kind of ridiculous. We’ll see what happens.

In short: A great time to get your free seven-day trial of Probly+ on the App Store or use promo code FIRST to get 50% off at Probly.com/subscribe (under $100 for a first year or under $10 for a first month) and I’ll see you guys next week!