Inspiration
Last year the Supreme Court overturned a law that previously banned sports betting. Slowly but surely, states are legalizing sports betting and the mobile market is getting a large portion of all bets placed in these legalized states. In New Jersey alone $400 million dollars was wagered in the month of January. This is a huge market and it's only growing. The downside is that sports betting is a losing proposition for people, over time you will always lose your money due to the houses advantage. People bet on sports for the entertainment but have to stop after they continually lose their money. We wanted to create a way to allow people to keep betting on sports, without losing the money. To break even in today's world you need to win about 53% of your bets, hypothetically if each bet had a 50/50 shot you would slowly lose your money. With Juiceless as long as you win 50% of your bets, you break even and keep doing what entertains you.
What it does
In sports betting there are always two opposing sides to every bet, we match up the money bet on each side to eliminate the 10% fee that casinos typical take.
How I built it
We built an iOS application with Swift and used Java/Kotlin for our server side code. We used Firebase for Authentication and our Database.
Challenges I ran into
Creating an efficient matching algorithm to maximize the amount of bets matched in a fair manner is pretty difficult and there are many different ways to attack it. Customer validation would be needed to see what the best way would be.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
Being able to convince someone who knew nothing about sports betting to join the team.
What I learned
There are a tons of things to think about when creating any application, and so many solutions to each problem, many of which you won't know what the best solution is until getting some validation. It's better to not waste time trying to come up with what you think is the best solution when you won't know what the best solution is till you get user feedback.
What's next for Juiceless
Setting up a prelaunch waiting list similar to how Robinhood came out with a waiting list and was able to capture nearly one million emails prior to even having an app built and no regulatory approval.
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