Golden State Warrior guards Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson will always hold the Splash Brothers mantle. But the dynamic duo of Splash Inc. cofounders, Joel Milton and TJ Ross, may get permission to borrow it….at least off the hard court…and in the arena of peer-to-peer and real money gaming.
They have been making serious waves in the space since acquiring RunYourPool and OfficeFootballPool.com in 2021, updating the sites with new sports and functionalities in 2022, and then this Fall, introducing a skill based real-money gaming platform to the mix in Splash Sports.
Before corralling a roster of big-league angel investors, including New England Patriots president Jonathan Kraft, former Chicago Cubs president Theo Epstein, U.S. National Team striker Alex Morgan and venture firms Accomplice, Acies Investments, Elysian Park Ventures, Velvet Sea Ventures and Boston Seed Capital to get onboard with their vision, ‘rostering’ for them often entailed vacillating between picking Colin Morikawa or Max Homa for the next PGA Tour tournament.
Milton and Ross avidly played in golf pools for a decade before getting into the gaming space. The format that captivated them the most was the one-and-done style run over the course of a season. Every week pool participants select a single golfer from the tournament field and are not allowed to choose the same golfer twice. Points match the check tally the player earns for their finish, so if you had Sam Bennett who missed the cut in the recent Sanderson Farms Championship that’s a goose egg but if you had Sam Ryder who finished T51 that week, you’d match his dollars won and earn 19,828 points.
“What’s really fun about it is there is a lot of strategy involved because the majors have larger purses and the elevated events also have larger purses so you want to save your Jon Rahm’s and Scottie Scheffler’s for those big tournaments,” explains Milton.
That golf contest turned TJ and Joel from casual fans, who caught golf fever a few times a year when the big tournaments rolled around into ardent fans who tune in each and every week. They’d start to glance at more arcane stats like approach shot accuracy from 200-225 yards and strokes gained putting and factor everything from “who plays better on more narrow courses” and “who putts well on courses with larger greens” into their decision-making process.
Seeing firsthand how engaging and sticky the product was for golf fans like themselves, the pair transitioned from being players to becoming owners. They raised an ‘eight-figure sum’ from the aforementioned investors to purchase legacy players OfficeFootballPool.com and RunYourPool and introduce Splash Sports.
“RunYourPool and OfficeFootballPool.com felt a little bit limiting. While most of the games that we do are peer-to-peer contests we felt it went beyond the pool space: tier-based games, daily fantasy contests, March Madness Brackets and survivor contests,” Milton explained.
When launching Splash, they realized they had a number of commissioners who had organically built their network over time. However, it soon became clear that there was a significant prospective customer group comprised of Twitch Streamers, Podcasters, and YouTubers, along with more traditional content creators looking for a fresh way to engage their audience.
“As we look at the content creator space, we look at the Mr. Beast’s of the world. YouTube shares their revenue with him and he in turn takes that money to make better videos and more content which brings in more audience and more revenue that YouTube shares with him. It’s this really nice virtuous cycle and we really wanted to do the same thing,” Milton said.
To court this cohort, they created a $2 million rewards program for commissioners to port over their pools to their new platform Splash Sports. According to the sites payout calculator even a single contest with a $25 entry fee pool and 50 players would net the organizer up to $275. They’ve had very popular users earn as much as $10,000 to $20,000 for a single contest and content creators can earn bonuses for total number of users they bring onto the platform
along with unlocking tiers as they achieve milestones in terms of dollars wagered on the platform.
Early adopters who have enjoyed a measure of success on the platform include Fantasy Golf personality Rick ‘RickRunGood’ Gehman who leveraged his audience to host contests around the Scottish Open, The Open, and the 3M Open.
“If we can incentivize and reward our commissioners and contest creators for running and building these contests, they will do more of them and continue to grow their audience and by extension our audience and that’s really our secret for acquiring customers,” Milton said.
“If you look at the gaming space, you have the big players that can afford national t.v. slots and be the official sponsor of the NFL and run commercials during every single game and then the other guys that are targeting people one at a time with promos and $100 deposit matches. For us our unique approach was having those commissioners, those content creators be our customer acquisition channel and creating this commissioner economy for them to do so,” he added.
They discovered that commissioners also didn’t have to be influencers and the concept could be a fit for brands and businesses as well as TaylorMade came onboard to sponsor their major contests this past year on their RunYourPool site giving participants a chance to win equipment.
“TaylorMade liked it because it was a great way to engage our golf fans who are very passionate and are prospective TaylorMade customers. When you think of brands you can only send so many emails: ‘try our new X’, ‘10% off Y.’ At some point it feels a little stale. But inviting your fans to compete against each other in a Masters contest sponsored by the brand for a chance to win one of the brand’s new products—that’s a really fun, authentic, and organic way to engage and is something we are leaning into more as well” he added.
Dialing into Golf
Right now Splash’s golf contests are all tier-based pick’ ems, but the goal is to add all the other popular formats including one-and-done contests into the fray by the time Football season wraps up. In the peer-to-peer and golf pool space there tends to be a lot of pick-up around the WM Phoenix Open and that’s when a lot of the season long contests tend to start.
Currently Splash Sports, only a month old, offers solely PGA Tour and NFL contests and a flood of new contests, game types and sports added in the coming months with a college football coming online in time for bowl season and NBA and college basketball products also launching soon.
“Our goal is to just continue to roll out new contest types, new formats as well as new sports on Splash and make it a place you can use year-round to compete, earn and win money,” Milton said.
Across all three of their platforms combined, they currently have just under 2.5 million active players—comparable to publicly traded Draft Kings which had 2.1 monthly unique payers as of their last quarterly report .
They see a lot of runway overall, and will continue to prioritize the fantasy golf vertical, which they feel lends itself to a lot of rooting interest and provides extra bang for your buck because in most contest there are four days of competition for one weekly entry.
“We love golf. It was one of the reasons we got into this space and it we think it has some of the most fun formats to play,” Milton said.
Read the full article here