Outlier’s Big Pivot: From Social Sports Talk App To Betting Analytics Powerhouse

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The late, great comedian Mitch Hedberg had a joke that went something like this: “I think Pringles’ intention was to make tennis balls, but on the day the rubber was supposed to show up, they got a load of potatoes instead. But Pringles is a laid-back company and said, ‘F–k it, cut ’em up.’”

While that’s not actually how Pringles got into the potato chip business (we assume), it does show how it pays for businesses to be nimble enough to know when opportunity knocks.

And in the gambling space, there may not be a more Hedberg/Pringles story than Outlier.

The sports betting analytics startup launched in January 2023, rising from the not-quite ashes of a completely different company.

“We founded Colorcast in 2019,” said Outlier co-founder and CEO Evan Kirkham. “A completely different product. It wasn’t in the sports betting space; it was a social sports talk app. Essentially, instead of listening to Tony Romo and Joe Buck on Monday Night Football, you could listen to your friends, or former athletes, or a comedian, or whoever wanted to call the game.”

It was an interesting idea, and by 2022 the company had over 10,000 active monthly users, a number Kirkham thought was impressive.

But it wasn’t translating to profits.

“We went out to raise a round of capital and ended up getting a term sheet from a group here in Austin [Texas], where I’m based, and everything was about to go through,” Kirkham said. “But — and this was contrarian at the time — but we thought that real businesses make money and we weren’t making any money, and we were being pressured to grow, grow, grow at all costs, but we didn’t really have a great monetization plan.”

But they did have one thing, Kirkham said:

“Existing relationships with sportsbooks.”

Pivot!

Those sportsbook relationships came about because Kirkham and the co-founding team thought it would be a cool feature on Colorcast if, when an announcer mentioned something about a player — like, “Dak Prescott leads the league in second-half touchdown passes” — a bet would surface on the Colorcast app, allowing users to one-click their way to an existing sportsbook.

This, for lack of a better metaphor, was the “potato moment.”

Kirkham and crew thought getting bettors to pay for data like the Prescott tidbit above might be a moneymaker. So they started pairing sportsbook lines with visualized data, beta-tested it, and were blown away by the response.

“And at that moment, we were like, OK, full blown pivot,” Kirkham said.

So they pivoted.

In short: Outlier partners with all the major books, pairs all the odds with relevant and visualized data, and “allows you to go from insight to analysis to execution in one seamless flow.”

And today, some 22 months later, Outlier has hundreds of thousands of paying users on its two-tiered pricing platform ($19.99 a month for “premium,” and $129.99 a month for “pro.”)

The premium level is more for bottom-up bettors, people who are looking for actionable information. Do you want to know how hard Kyle Tucker hits sinkerballs thrown out and away? You can find that information, and then, if it’s to your liking, one-click your way into the bet.

The pro level offers the same, as well as alerting users to arbitrage opportunities, +EV bets, and the like.

The app allows users to browse through insights presented in plain English, analyze detailed, contextual statistics for players and teams, and execute bets directly through partner sportsbooks.

Easy on the eye

And there’s nary a spreadsheet to be found, Virtually all the data is presented in an easily digestible, visual format. This approach solves two major pain points for bettors: finding relevant data and understanding how to use it effectively.

Outlier came to this during the pivot process, when the founders spent four months interviewing would-be users about what they were looking for in an app such as this.

“So in the interviews, the recurring theme was this: Everybody wanted to be a smarter sports bettor, but they had a really hard time defining what being a smart sports bettor was,” Kirkham said. “They were willing to spend some amount of money to hopefully win more money. But the problem was actually twofold: They either didn’t know where to find the data, but even if they did know where to find the data, they didn’t know what to do with the data. And that was actually a really acute pain point.”

Enter Outlier, making this difficult process easier.

It starts with the “Insights Page,” which provides users with plain English explanations of potentially valuable bets. From there, there’s a prop finder tool, contextual stats for would-be bets, the aforementioned visual presentation, utilizing heat maps, bar charts, and the like, and — again — the one-click bet execution that takes you right to the partner sportsbook without leaving the Outlier app.

Right now, users have access to MLB, NFL, NBA, and college basketball and football information, statistics, and research. Kirkham said Outlier’s soccer product — which will include all the major leagues around the world — should be launching by the end of the year. The company also has expansion plans, with a U.K. version set to be rolled out soon.

Outlier — which has remained lean and mean with only 10 employees — recently opened up a New Orleans office, and Kirkham sees a very bright future for the company.

“As the bettor matures, they start looking for tools and tips and better ways to research and ways to win,” Kirkham said. “So as the bettor matures — which just happens naturally — our total addressable market expands.”