I’m writing today’s letter poolside in AZ. Poor me.
Lately in the world of sports:
🥇 We’re officially less than 100 days out from the summer olympics! The USA Men’s Basketball team’s roster was finalized this week. The star-studded roster includes Lebron James, Jayson Tatum and Kevin Durant.
🏀 The WNBA Draft took place on Monday. As expected, Caitlin Clark (Iowa) was the number one pick by the Indiana Fever. Cameron Brink (Stanford) was picked second by Los Angeles Sparks and Kamilla Cardoso (South Carolina) was the third overall pick by Chicago Sky. The WNBA regular season starts May 14th.
👟 Sources say Caitlin Clark is nearing a $20M+ contract with Nike to create a signature shoe. Nike recently re-signed a deal with New York Liberty guard Sabrina Ionescu for a reported $24 million.
Key Matchups this Weekend:
Chicago Bulls (#9) vs. Miami Heat (#8): The Heat are favored to win by only a small margin. Their star player, Jimmy Butler, is out with a sprianed MCL. – Friday, April 19th @ 7 p.m. ET (win or go home!)
Sacramento Kings (#9) vs. New Orleans Pelicans (#7): The Kings are favored to win by a small margin. The Pelicans will also be playing without their star, Zion Williamson, who is out with strained hamstring. – Friday, April 19th @ 9:30 p.m. ET (win or go home!)
Phoenix Suns (#6) vs. Minnesota Timberwolves (#3): I’m rooting hard for my hometown Wolves in this series! While the Suns are a lower seed, my PHX-based sister is worried they could go on a run and knock the Wolves out of the playoffs. The sportsbooks are predicting this could happen too... BetMGM currently has the Suns favored to win the series. Ugh!
NHL Playoffs Begin Saturday! The Assoicated Press says, “It’s arguably the most wide open the postseason has been in years, if not decades. Nearly everyone who qualified has a chance to win it all, with no prohibitive favorite as the first round begins on Saturday.”
Sign up HERE to join the Partake Sports beta. We’ll send you an email to create an account soon ✨
Behind the Curtain with Partake Sports:
We are launching our beta for next week! I could not be more excited/nervous/relieved.
Two years ago, I was in Arizona for my sister Georgi’s birthday. She’s a former D1 basketball player and a big sports fan. She watches ESPN’s First Take every morning and knows a little bit about a lot of different leagues.
For her birthday, we planned to go to a sports bar to watch the Timberwolves Play-In game. Before the game started, my dad Venmoed Georgi money and told her to make some birthday bets on the game. We had five minutes until tip-off, so I offered to place the bets on my phone because I already had a couple of accounts with sportsbooks.
I opened one of the sportsbooks and turned to Georgi and asked, “What do you want to bet on?”
She looked at me and said, “I don’t know. What can I bet on?”
I proceeded to read off the bets.
“Are the Timberwolves going to win the game?”
She immediately responds, “Yes.”
I read through a few more bets she could make and asked her, “Is Karl-Anthony Towns going to score more than three three-pointers?”
Without hesitation, she responds, “No, he’s going to choke.”
We got a couple of bets in before tip-off and at the end of the game, she walked away a winner. She hit all her bets. This got me thinking. How is it that somebody who can pick the correct game outcomes doesn’t know the types of bets she can make? Doesn’t know what the Spread is… doesn’t know what a Moneyline is… This became the catalyst for creating Partake.
When I got back to New York, I worked on recreating the experience we had on Georgi’s birthday. I wanted to give sports fans a way to predict game outcomes and have “skin in the game” without paying to place a sports bet.
I created an account on Typeform and built a questionnaire with five game-related questions, replicating the question-and-answer experience Georgi had on her birthday. I wanted people going through the questions to have a bit of background knowledge before answering, just as Georgi did, so I added an insight for each question that would either help the user make a more educated guess or make them think twice about their gut reaction to the question.
I was able to put my idea to the test right away. I met up with friends in Brooklyn to watch the Nets/Celtics series and I created a game quiz so I could show them what I was working on. While giving my friends the pitch, a couple of the tables around us overheard me and wanted to check it out too.
Before tip-off, we had all made our picks. One of the questions was “Which team is going to score 10 points first?” Little did I know this simple question would become the validation I needed to keep pushing ahead with this project.
The game started and I have never seen people care more about the first five minutes of basketball. Watching these strangers come together and cheer for the first few possessions of the game is when I knew I was on to something. I didn’t know exactly what I was building, but I could see the experiences I wanted to recreate for people enjoying sports with their friends.
Thanks to my friend who is a brilliant developer (and now my co-founder), my Typeform game quizzes were soon upgraded to a mobile browser site, and I was able to spend last year at sports bars across NYC putting our minimal viable product (MVP) in front of people to get feedback on the concept. I was only told by one bar's manager that I had to stop harassing their patrons 😉
We received a lot of great feedback in that time which we incorporated into our latest phase of development. The launch of our closed beta this month will be the first introduction of this newer concept and designs. I love the early stages of building and I’m excited to start getting feedback on these new designs!
If you are watching the NBA playoffs this season, we’d love for you to join our closed beta and check out Partake. You can sign up here.
Hope to see you there!
xx, Danielle
Co-founder of Partake Sports
It’s happening!
Can’t wait to see all of yours and Marwan’s hard work come to fruition ✨