⚾️ A WILD MLB Run And DraftKings Bet Tax Fallout

Last week, I had a legit tirade about DraftKings’ efforts to launch an additional surcharge on winning bets in “high tax” states which a few of you were kind enough to give positive feedback on, which is appreciated.

This week? DraftKings is still a scumbag company but it does seem like they’ve walked back their initial “up to 20%” surcharge messaging to a 5-9% one to attempt to stop their stock crumbling (DKNG is down 17% this month now after being down 11% last week, though that could be market-related as much as anything). Either way, it seems like now you’ll only have to win 65-70% of the time on DraftKings to be profitable. Neat.

I’ve got nothing I’m nearly as passionate to rant about this week — well, maybe other than pointing out there’s a decent edge in preseason football, whether it be market data like ours or even quality data/team intent research — so I’ll cap this intro with a hope that all you guys are saying safe and with minimal home damage if dealing with the hurricane/tropical storm that’s hitting all over the US.

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Today, we’re back with a run through the day’s MLB bets and some company/product updates, including an update on the neverending struggle of our Bet Now button and what’s up next. It’s your Probly Email for August 9th, 2024! - @ChrisSpags

• ⚾️ MLB Best Bets

• 🔓 Probly Updates: Still Working On Everything

Last week ended up being tidy with a 4-1 on the Top 5 plus our email exclusive Most Profitable bet on Kutter Crawford’s strikeouts over hitting. This whole week has been great too, including three 4-1 days on our Top 5 and a +10u day yesterday.

Of course, now that I’ve promoted that to you all, I am sure we will instantly find the flip side of the coin. But let’s dare to keep the heater alive with today’s MLB Bets Today video:

We’ve got a little two-week streak for the email exclusive bets going so let’s add one more shrimp onto the barbie:

Of course our best bets, probabilities, and PROBLY Scores are always updated all night and day so get more for yourself at Probly.com or on the App Store. Find the best bets on YOUR preferred sportsbook and win more in sports betting now!

New to Probly? Learn more about optimal settings for Probly, expected value/market-based betting, or see a product demo from me!

Gotta tell you guys: We thought integrating sportsbook deep links would be A LOT easier than this.

Last week, I talked about how we have to create some sort of geotargeting to make the links work for some sportsbooks, specifically BetMGM and Caesars.

This week, we ran into another issue that relates to our tech stack and has ramifications on our ability to do deeplinks right.

Basically, Probly is a Progressive Web App — or PWA. Being a PWA allows us to ensure the same experience on desktop, mobile web, and app. We can push updates without having to push new versions to download — while also, long-term, increasing our international flexibility.

PWAs work great once you get them setup right but there are some issues, specifically in how they interact with things other iOS native apps may do.

One of those things is linking. We can link to the live sportsbook URLs within the app on the web but, as a PWA, we can’t currently send you directly to a deeplink on the app that populates the bet because Apple doesn’t naturally allow it.

So we’re now attempting to find a workaround there, likely one that will allow you to place bets directly via our in-app web browser.

We’re also hoping to get this cleared out so we can focus on our next project. It’s something I don’t want to spoil in here yet (just because we know competitors read these emails weekly) but we want to have it live as close to NFL Week 1 is possible.

What I will spoil about that is this:

-It is something that currently does not exist from anyone online
-It uses ALL of our data in a way that we know some of you guys have asked us for

It’s a very logical product iteration that I believe would also give us, once again, something to give to the public for free to add value to the betting ecosystem — without diluting what makes our product premium, i.e. what we dealt with with people abusing free trials.

On the company side, we had a few productive calls this week on the investor front but I remain reluctant to count any chickens prior to hatching . We are in the heart of everything right now in terms of what we need to have in place to get into NFL season and through the rest of 2024 so it’s a stressful time until something is signed and funds are transferred.

We’ve gone just shy of a year doing this full-time (and almost two and a half years in total) at a huge cost to me personally as well as time expense to me and my CTO. We’re very proud of the work we’ve done and the lessons we’ve learned that inform what Probly can be as a product, force for good, and revenue-generating company.

That said, we’re not where we need to be yet. We’re growing incrementally at a logical rate for this being all organic growth. But we’re not yet making enough to pay for our data feeds and server costs, let alone to pay salaries. Even with the lessons learned and steady rate of growth, it’s hard for it to feel like the work is “paying off” in the most literal sense of the word.

So it means a lot to feel like we’re potentially on the cusp of something breaking through that allows us to see things through. The ability to compete even on a fractionally more level playing ground with our very well-funded, domain-expertise lacking competitors would be great. As would the ability to build and test things with some resources behind it.

Fingers crossed, pray for us if that’s your jam, etc etc. We’re hopeful to find a solution that carries us through end of year, gets us stable, and enables us to get some new products out — with a lot less stress than constantly rubbing two nickels together to make it work. Dare to dream!

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. This week’s email was a little breezier than last week’s impassioned call to action against DraftKings. Who knows what next week holds?

It’s a great time to learn more about Probly and kick off a membership at Probly.com! Get your head around the product in time for NFL season and get some MLB/Olympics/etc bets in the meantime!

Have a good weekend all, see you soon!