Gambling gamers

Landon Bass was building out a large Sharepoint distribution site for Raymond James when a colleague from work approached him with an idea. Avid gamer Justin Twohig wanted to build a fantasy league platform for e-sports, or electronic sports.

“I know nothing about video games. I don't know the lingo. I know software architecture,” Bass says. But after hearing Twohig's pitch and visiting a gamers' meet-up, he decided to join Twohig and another Raymond James colleague, Eric Huang, to start building Nerdbet in April.

Just like fantasy football, the trio hopes Nerdbet can become an information platform, with data covering e-sport statistics to answer questions such as: “What's so and so's record? How's so and so doing? Who are the top three gamers in the U.S.?” Bass says.

Although NerdBet is focused on betting, the company isn't looking to take money from anyone. Participants bet coins, which can be exchanged for prizes such as Papa Johns gift cards; gaming technology such as keyboards and mice; and game money, or currency that can be used to buy better weapons or character upgrades in video games.

The idea is to find sponsors that will gain advertising space by sponsoring the site and donating products. “Right now we're an ad-driven model,” Bass says.

According to Twohig, the site could tap into a community of millions of online game watchers worldwide. Last year a League of Legends gaming competition filled the Staples Center and attracted 20 million online viewers. Advertisers invest a lot of money in sponsoring professional gamers, who can earn six-figure salaries and are featured on regular television programming in Korea, Twohig says.

The trio is a bit of a “motley crew,” according to Bass: “We are all three very different. We don't dress alike, we don't listen to the same music, but we also don't step on each others' toes.” Twohig is the market expert, according to Bass. “He knows what people want and he knows where people go.” Huang is good at asking “why,” and keeping Bass on track with the technical aspects, Bass says.

With full-time jobs outside of Nerdbet, all three dedicate 15 to 20 hours a week to the startup. Recently they applied for Tampa Bay WaVE's Accelerator Program, a resource they think will help them better determine scalability.

At the end of September, the team decided to release a minimum viable product as a beta test to garner feedback from the community. In the first few weeks, they had more than 3,000 unique page views and 750 new members from around the world. Considering their only advertising was posting a few blurbs on a game-watch community subpage within Reddit, the response was larger than expected, Bass admits. Users provided feedback from Germany, Korea, South America and Western Europe.

Right now, “everything is very cheap for us,” Bass says. “Our time is our only bottleneck.” The three have spent just $300 on incorporating and $80 on a domain, in addition to their time on the project.

The biggest challenge will be building a team to complete data entry and finish development on the site, Twohig says. They plan to wait on pursuing financing until they can prove to investors that, with the official release in December, Nerdbet is capable of tens of thousands of unique page views.