We caught up with Declan Spiro, co-founder of 20SHOTS, to talk all things from what 20SHOTS is, to what products they offer to what they are releasing this weekend…
Tell Us About 20SHOTS
20SHOTS aims to monetise fantasy sports through sports betting. We develop in-house algorithms to accurately predict football players’ performances and combine this with innovative UI designed to simplify all our games.
We offer this as a B2B solution to sports betting operators. We have also recently released our first B2C product in the UK market.
Why Was The Business Started?
Fantasy sports’ growth over the past 10 years has been crazy – there’s over 7 million players of the English Fantasy Premier League game, over 50 million for fantasy cricket in India, and 60m+ in USA. Currently all fantasy sports games are ‘peer-to-peer’, which makes it slower, harder and uniform across all platforms. We think the only way to properly monetise fantasy sports is with real-odds, instant gratification, ‘sports betting’ games.
From my experience as a quant at the world’s leading sports betting hedge fund, combined with my co-founder’s experience having lead marketing & acquisition for a UK betting operator, we are well-placed to bring this product to market.
What Makes You Different?
We have two main products.
A sports betting product, where we take real money bets on players’ fantasy football performance. This will be the first time these markets have been offered in the industry. For example, bet on Harry Kane to score over 10.5 points this weekend, or a team of Lacazette, Salah and Van Dijk to score under 15.5 points. This is all done on a similar UI/UX that they are familiar with on their fantasy sites.
Our second product is a free to play game, called Fantasy5. Users need to select 5 players to beat their ‘expected fantasy points’ target. If all 5 players beat their target, you win a jackpot ranging from £10,000 – £50,000.
What Have You Learnt?
One thing we realised was that we had to build a free to play product alongside our sports betting solution. The sports betting product is completely different to anything else out there, and so we needed to embed some of our ideas into a simpler format which people will easily understand.
What Are Your Plans For Growth?
We’re really excited to be releasing our free-to-play game this weekend. Following that, we plan to integrate our sports betting solution into UK betting operators by the end of the year. From the start of 2021, we will be launching a basketball version of our free-to-play game, focused on the North American market.
