btrbet.app

Welcome to July — Here in Ohio, it's hot and rainy, hockey season is over, my farmer's tan from mowing is coming along nicely, I'm waiting for NBA Summer League to start, and looking forward to celebrating the 4th by eating my weight in smoked pork butt. If the MLB All-Star game still meant something, I'd be looking forward to that, but as it is, I guess I'll get my baseball fix that week with my kids' Little League games.

Over the last few weeks, we’ve pushed out some pretty exciting updates to BtrBet that I want to gush about.

The least exciting update is that you can now add images and GIFs to shared bets. Everybody loves a relevant gif, but this update also means that you can now share a custom graphic along with your bet — maybe something like a player's stats for the season or your latest MS Paint masterpiece.

More exciting than GIFs or MS Paint masterpieces, you can now share a line directly from the BtrBet Markets search page. Find a great price on a player prop? Want advice from the BtrBet community or your X/Discord/FaceBook/Tumblr about which side of pick 'em to take? Now, you can share that line directly and give people a one-click way to check out that market and give their opinions.
We've also made some styling updates to Recaps, and tweaked some of the comment auto-moderation filters. Maybe these were the least exciting updates since I almost forgot about them until I went back through our code commits.

I'm already looking forward to August's update email to y'all because what we're working on now is more exciting to me than when I first got data syncing from linked accounts to work properly. If you have your own ideas on what we should be working on, such as a rough edge you've found or something that just doesn't work as you expect, let me know and we'll get it sorted.

If you'd like a walkthrough of everything that btrbet can do for you, or help getting you set up for success using our tools, I'm happy to do so. You can schedule that chat at your convenience at https://calendly.com/btrbet-zach/making-the-most-of-btrbet.

The idea for btrbet came to me when I was thinking about ways to minimize the tax obligations of my sports betting. From the experience of manually tracking and analyzing my bets in Excel, I knew that I wanted something that could do all of that automatically for me. When doing customer discovery work, it became apparent that there was also a need for an easier way to share bets and picks where the person sharing had actually “put their money where there mouth is.” Then when considering these three pieces all together, it became obvious that the only piece missing from btrbet being a one-stop shop for finding, placing, sharing, and analyzing bets was a market search tool.

Until the MVP had all of the pieces, it was very difficult for me to feel comfortable selling btrbet to people. I knew that any one of the pieces by itself was worth the $35/month subscription, but I struggled with starting and having those conversations when I knew that in a few weeks, the product could provide even more value and thus those conversations would become even easier.

Once the MVP was ready, I started engaging with Reddit posts where it felt appropriate to do so. I of course ran afoul of a subreddit’s rules around self promotion, and garnered a ban. I was able to get unbanned, and have had to adjust my Reddit strategy accordingly. Nevertheless, we’ve got many users from Reddit who have provided excellent feedback on how btrbet could be better.

Getting that feedback, addressing it with product changes, and then seeing the enthusiasm with which those updates are received by users has greatly increased my confidence in starting and having sales conversations. I now know definitively that there are people other than me who find btrbet’s product offering compelling and my doubts about whether I was building for an audience of one (myself) or an audience of others have almost completely disappeared.

It seems obvious that getting user feedback would make selling the product easier, but I never knew just how much easier it would become with even a modest amount of feedback.

If you do any sports betting, btrbet can help you bet better. From easier line shopping, to analyzing your performance by sport, league, market, and bet type in aggregate and by odds range, across all of your linked sportsbooks over a variety of time ranges, you can find where your edges are the strongest and where you aren’t performing profitably over the long term, despite short term success.

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 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!

On January 1, 2023 sports betting became legal in Ohio. Since then, I’ve won over $150K from an initial bankroll of $2421.69 using math from 1956.

By January 3, I had already withdrawn more winnings than my initial bankroll, and in total I’ve successfully lived as a professional gambler for 7 weeks generating $14.5k in free cash flow as funds for my family to live on.

The problem

This kind of income has interesting US federal income tax implications. Professional gamblers, those who are engaged in “the trade or business of gambling”, use Schedule C to report their gambling income and losses as any other small business owner can do. This affords professional gamblers the ability to carry a net gambling loss to other income on their 1040 return. Professional gamblers can also deduct business expenses related to their gambling business. Hobby gamblers on the other hand, must use Schedule A to deduct gambling losses and cannot carry a net gambling loss through to other 1040 income, nor can they deduct any business expenses related to their non-existent gambling business. There are obvious tax advantages to being considered a professional gambler.

One of the major requirements of being a professional gambler is keeping track of your gambling wins and losses in a “gambling diary” that includes certain information on each bet. In order to support my foray into living as a professional gambler, I built a spreadsheet to serve as my gambling diary. One tab of this spreadsheet is simply a log of bets I’ve placed. Another tab contains some bet sizing and statistical tools I use to evaluate a wagering opportunity, and a final tab contains a financial analysis of sorts of my gambling business.

This spreadsheet is perfectly sufficient for my needs, as my record thus far demonstrates (although the true test of my spreadsheet gambling diary will come when I file my 2023 taxes). It seems clear to me that a bookkeeping tool specifically made for professional gamblers is a niche that is underserved and that I have a vested interest working in.

The solution

I set a goal for myself to launch a web-based tool that can do everything in my spreadsheet does by the end of February.

60% through February, I now have a early version of a gambling diary and gambling toolset available at https://btrbet.app.

The next immediate steps are to build out the financial analysis toolset and to build a web extension to automatically sync bets from the major online sportsbooks. An iOS app seems a clear fast-follow, but that is a decision to make later.

Progress

For the last week, I’ve been using btrbet.app for my gambling business and double checking against my spreadsheet. I’ve got quite the friction log to work through, but I think I’ve sufficiently proven to myself that if nothing else, btrbet.app will have at least one long-term user.