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A long time ago a friend an I created a website to help people organize pool bets between them, for a sport event. We charged $1 / person in the pool. Made abou
by throwAway9234LL 6y ago
A long time ago a friend an I created a website to help people organize pool bets between them, for a sport event. We charged $1 / person in the pool. Made about $1,500 in total for the event.
- I paid about $400 in ads to Google: they have a much better business model than us ;)
- I competed against free offerings, and I still had clients, because I could afford ads, they could not.
- It was a very strange, happy feeling when the first customer paid us. They decided to give actual money to us, some complete strangers??? To a website that looked totally amateurish, with no design whatsoever? Felt weird.
- I would have made way more money by working at McDonalds for the same amount of time. But that was not the point.
- It did not make sense to continue after the event, not enough $$ to be made.
Overall a very, very positive experience. I helped with my programming skills, and gave me confidence that people would buy something that works, even if ugly and unknown people.
- freewilly1040 6y agoWhy didn't it make sense to continue after the event ended? Most sports events happen on a recurring basis. I wonder if this idea got legs if you would get in trouble with regulators of some kind..
- jbjbjbjb 6y agoSome countries would allow it. The idea sounds a bit like BetFair (they set up an exchange, you name your odds and see if someone takes the other side) but for smaller pools.
- throwAway9234LL 6y agoI think we were on the right side of the law since we sere not taking any side of the bets. Just charging for the service. The pool participants probably were having their own bets between each other, but we would not take any cut of those. We stopped because there was a lot of competition, we saw a short term gap in soccer in the US market. But fairly quickly we would have been crushed. Spending a lot of time on something that would not have brought in much money was not that interesting, since it was not fun enough beyond the novelty of the experience.
- TACIXAT 6y agoWhat did you use as a payment processor? Really hard to process cards for gambling.
- throwAway9234LL 6y agoPaypal. We were not doing gambling. Just charging $1 per person per pool for the service: registering the bets in time, give them points when they win, rankings, etc. We did not see any of the money of their possible side-bets.