Bet better with btrbet

Exactly nine months ago, I wrote that my goal was to launch a web-based tool that could do everything in my gambling diary and analysis spreadsheet did by the end of February. As of earlier this week, such a web app is now live at https://btrbet.app.

It took longer than I expected to get here. My first version was built using a server-side Swift framework called Vapor. I picked that framework because it was the web framework I used most recently outside my then-day job. I planned to build the backend in Vapor Swift and then bolt on a React frontend. Shortly after the Feb 17 post, I realized that my front-end development skills had either atrophied or were about a decade outdated. The last time I built a web app (outside of my then-day job as an engineer at Stripe), BackboneJS was the framework of the day.

I knew that while I could slowly build the product, I wouldn’t have as much time for marketing efforts, so both development and marketing would suffer. This realization led me to bring two more people onto the team - someone I had worked with previously on marketing-type things and a web developer who was more knowledgeable about contemporary React and web development in general. The former joined in early April and the latter in early June.

Working with a small team has been so energizing and productive that I’m amazed I ever thought I could have done this alone. In early September, my spouse and I welcomed our fourth child. Having four kids under nine and a brand new business is a lot to juggle, and having a team (and a very supportive spouse!) to lean on has made btrbet possible.

There’s a joke in here about btrbet undergoing a nine-month gestational period, but the (anti-) punch line is that the initial version of btrbet is now live!.

After signing up for a free btrbet account, you can link your sportsbook accounts to automatically ingest the gambling activity from each book into a unified gambling diary that you can use to support your claim of being a professional gambler. In addition to exporting the diary to your tax prep professional, you can filter your diary to drill down to specific types of bets and explore your gambling data.

The gambling diary is at the core of another btrbet feature: automated analysis of your gambling that surfaces where you’re the most profitable and where you could bet at least a little better. You can view the analysis for the last week, month, quarter, year-to-date, or for all of your bets for all time. This analysis is done across sportsbooks, sports, leagues, markets, and wager types.

Some of the other tools we’re currently building provide: ways to share bets in a trustworthy manner, alerts for arbitrage opportunities, and alerts for contests that match user-provided filters. If any of those tools sound particularly useful to you, drop me a line at zach@btrbet.app , and I’ll get you into our betas!