🔓 Your Probly App Preview HAS ARRIVED

It’s Labor Day afternoon and, after a slight delay to cross our T’s and dot our I’s on the Probly waitlist release: IT IS HERE!

Today we’ll eschew trying to time out bets or talk too much about the probability landscape and will provide you the VERY SPECIAL VIP LINK — that we ask you NOT share at this time since we’ll launch Probly.com for everyone on Thursday. You’re a VIP for being on the waitlist! Here’s your Probly email for September 4th, 2023! - @ChrisSpags

• 👑 The Probly MVP link EXCLUSIVELY for our waitlist

• 🔓 Probly Breakdown: How to use it, known bugs, what’s to come, etc

I think you’ll want to read the below items before you hop in. But if you just want to see the link we’ve promised since starting this waitlist journey last fall, you can access our Probly MVP/Beta here or at http://bti-dev.probly.com!

The current plan is to roll out the site to the public on the primary Probly.com domain on Thursday before Lions-Chiefs kicks off. We will also begin adding content to our YouTube page @ProblyApp and more on the socials which are also @ProblyApp on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. I need to figure out a process for all of that amidst my work/Splash Play workload but I’ll attempt to formalize that ASAP.

The hope is that this product is intuitive and tactile when you experience it. But here’s a primer on Probly things to know:

• This is a MOBILE-forward product. It works fine on desktop but it was designed to bring the power and function of bigger desktop sites to something you can use at a game or on a toilet. We believe it’s best experienced on your phone, ideally with you already logged into whichever sportsbook apps that you have money in.

• What you will see on our test domain is what subscribers to the $49.99/month (or $499/year) tier will see: All sports, live in-game markets, all the available pages with Probly scores for every sport. The Profitability sort option is still being fine-tuned but the experience scrolling through our Markets page is pretty much it.
  
  Shortly after the product goes live publicly, we will push people into $9.99/month single sport, $19.99/month all sports, and $49.99/month packages all-access (live in-game plus all available tools) packages. Each one will provide PROBLY Score data for the items within its group.
  
  Free users will still be able to scroll through to view probabilities, comment, vote Probly Yes or Probly No, and see the best available bet for every market (they just wouldn’t know the PROBLY Score for it).

• The best way to use Probly is to scroll with filtering on one sport (you can also filter to a singular league via the Leagues filter underneath the sports icons). Entering a sport or league filter will allow you to endless scroll through all markets within a sport or league — scrolling just through “All” will end after our most recently updated batch of markets.

• You’ll want to click the Probability percentage (top right corner) on the Markets to bring up a modal that will display everything you need to know about the top available bet in a market. The odds here tell you the best available bet across all legal sportsbooks we receive through our data partners at OddsJam, which should be every single on in the US.
  
  The goal is to not force you to bet on a BetRivers or Betway if you don’t want to but to give you our market probability, the PROBLY Score expected value calculation for the best currently available odds, and the odds you should seek on ANY sportsbook to secure the same expected value for your bet.

• Our APIs and databases provide updates every 15 minutes; this is a time marker currently in effect to give the product the best available opportunity while not causing us to absolutely hemmorhage money without funding or revenue. As more people sign up — particularly for the $49.99/month all-access package — we will be able to update every market in the world roughly every minute.
  
  Right now, we’ve found 15 minutes was the best possible timing to find a market signifier top bet that allows users to likely find the same or a better odds opportunity at their own book (as I’ve mentioned, I’ve pretty much only bet on DraftKings Sportsbook and FanDuel to capture a real user experience despite our “top of market” odds often starting with an inefficient line at a Betway-tier book). But as we hopefully start to make back our costs, we want to make the product as optimal as possible.

• Our explore page is another powerful tool. You can search “White Sox” and it will open the event with the ability to expand to see every available bet in Tile form. These will function the same way as the modal on the Markets page where you can click the probability to get the bet data and PROBLY Score on a modal experience.

• You can also filter by league or sport on this page and the Most Popular Events will filter undeneath those items.

• If you click a tile somewhere that’s not the Probability percentage, it will take you to a shareable link version of the bet on our Markets page.

• View All Bets also offers a quicker look than the Markets page with the same suggestions about filtering on sport or league levels.
  
  The search functionality on View All Bets is one we hope can be a killer app (i.e. you search “Philadelphia” and get EVERY bet related to Philadelphia, be it Phillies or Eagles or all the props therein). But it’s not all the way there and only captures a search for items already populated on the page. It’s better used as a browse function currently while we hopefully figure out a more viable solution to get the desired results.

• Here’s perhaps the most important one: Don’t be shocked if you see a lot of negative PROBLY Scores. When you account for the vig (profit) each sportsbook bakes into their odds, a market comparison using top of market probabilities from the most liquid sportsbooks will show a lot of bets will lose you money over time.
  
  That is why our higher PROBLY Score bets — which are “mathematically profitable” by comparing how much money you win when a bet wins minus how much money you lose, vig included against these top of market probabilities — are the bets you want to take. And even then, it’s only “mathematical profitability” when you accrue a large enough sample size. There is no sports betting panacea but our tool is designed to help you get in good bets as simply as possible; please remember to bet responsibly.

I think that covers the use cases. So here’s some known bugs:

• Our previous “Swipe Right to bet for”/”Swipe Left to bet against” experience is still in this version. By Thursday’s public launch, we hope to kill the placeholder URL transition and exit screen with just a modal for the top option in favor of a bet on a Swipe Right and a modalforn the top option against the bet in the Swipe Left.
  
  This can also be a bit annoying when you scroll through the Markets page if you click the Probability to find out the top bet details on the modal. Just flagging it so you know.

• Some events will show “0 Bet Opportunities” due to how our event and probability processing works. It should be infrequent and is a bug we hope to fix by Thursday.

• Same thing for sport or league filtering where it will show the sport icon having “99+ bets” but it actually has zero.

• You don’t have to register a profile at this time unless you want to test out our comment functionality. I wouldn’t try to grab a really cool @ handle or anything because we will likely reset the database come launch since there are known issues with saving a username update right now.
  
  The registration and login process should work overall, though. We do not keep a password for you; instead we use your email address to provide a login code. It works fast and as it should. The main reasons to register currently would be to comment and track your Probly Yes or Probly No picks on your profile. You can also Save bets to your profile from the Markets page.

It’s all a work in progress and one that we will continue to try to improve as we go — particularly in terms of the data latency as soon as there is any whiff of money. I don’t mean to turn this into a crowdfunding exercise but if we saw, let’s say 1,000 signups at the $49.99/month tier, we can further speed up and improve a lot of items in our infrastructure (and obviously will try to do the same should we pursue funding at any point).

But this is our baby Probly and we think it’s ready to see the light of day. I really hope you enjoy it and find it a useful part of any process for serious or casual bettors.

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

I’m anxious about how this will go but this is a BIG first step for us. Thank you for coming along on this ride. Thank you for your support thus far for being on this waitlist and we hope to earn more support from you to come. Thanks to my CTO and one of my best friends since high school Edgar (who’s also my son Luka’s godfather!) for helping me try to turn my vision into a reality.

We care about this stuff. We care even more about you guys as consumers and have only hoped to level the playing field in an industry that, frankly, can be pretty gross at times. The work is only beginning but here’s to the first step for Probly. I hope you guys enjoy it and, of course, good luck!