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Hey, what is up?
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Welcome to this episode of the Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.
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As always, I'm your host, brian Lofermento, and we have got an awesome entrepreneur here in today's episode.
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This is someone who is at the forefront of an industry that it feels like every single week it's changing.
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We hear about it on TV, we hear about it on the news, and today's entrepreneur is coming up with solutions that are setting people up for success within the world of sports betting.
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Not just success when it comes to betting, but also understanding the legalities, understanding the considerations and, of course, the data that lies beneath all of it.
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So I'm excited to introduce you to today's guest.
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His name is jared lee.
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Jared is a sports betting and fantasy sports industry educator and the founder of letmebetcom.
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He has been involved in software engineering and web development for almost 15 years.
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He studied mechanical and computer engineering at the University of Maryland and he then started his career as a systems engineer, working in the corporate world, and he's always had a passion for hardcore software engineering.
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Growing up in Buffalo, jared has also been a diehard Bills fan all of his life, which, of course, is his introduction and his love for all things sports.
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He's also been an avid fan of poker since he was young and is generally a fan of all types of card games.
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So this is something that is so cool to me, because I love businesses that are born out of passions and Jared, when he combines those passions with his very tangible skills of building things, it results in an amazing business.
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So I'm excited to interview him here today.
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I'm excited for all of us to learn from his entrepreneurial spirit, his own mindset.
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He's got awesome energy.
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I'm excited about this one.
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Let's dive straight into my interview with Jared Lee.
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All right, jared, I am so very excited to have you here with us today.
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First things first, welcome to the show.
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Thank you for having me.
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Heck, yes, I think it's so cool what you're up to.
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I'm slightly envious of your skills.
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Anyone who can build things the way that you can.
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I think it's such a cool entrepreneurial story.
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So take us beyond the bio.
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Who's Jared?
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How'd you start doing all these cool things?
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Yeah, I've always been a fan of building things specifically with computers.
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I think I picked up my first HTML for Dummies book when I was in middle school and ever since then my interest in computers has sort of exploded.
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But funny enough, my main focus in college was mechanical engineering, with a minor in computer engineering.
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I didn't actually focus on the computer side of things In hindsight I probably should have.
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But you know, you live and you learn.
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And then I started out in the corporate world after graduating, working as a systems engineer, like you said.
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And it wasn't until, you know, two or three years in that I sort of realized that this isn't for me.
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Having an employer is not for me.
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And I was very naive when I was young, in the sense that I didn't know anything about entrepreneurship or the concept of starting your own company, what that would look like, how rewarding that could be.
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I just wasn't really exposed to that.
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So I feel like I got a late start, um, I just wasn't really exposed to that.
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So I feel like I got a late start, um.
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But you know, in my twenties I started to really understand that, uh, you can sort of build your own company and it's not.
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It's not that hard.
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I'm not saying it's easy, but it's not impossible.
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Um, it's not.
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It's definitely not a pipe dream.
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People do it all the time.
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Um, and even if you're not successful and success can mean a lot of different things but even if you're not successful and success can mean a lot of different things but even if you're not financially successful or you have to close it down one day, it could still be rewarding and it could be worth it because of the wisdom that you gain.
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And that's one of those things where I really realized that you shouldn't be afraid of failing.
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You shouldn't be afraid of trying to start a company and eventually failing, because you can take that wisdom and experience and go start something new.
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And I would argue that most successful people that you come across that are entrepreneurs.
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They started something that actually failed and you never really hear about, and they probably won't even tell you about it, but they wouldn't have done it any other way because they got so much experience and wisdom out of it that ended up being practical for their future ventures.
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So I really started to try and tell myself not to be afraid and actually seek out doing things on my own, and that's sort of when I got hooked on just the concept of going on my own, being an entrepreneur, potentially starting my own company, potentially one day.
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So fast forward I'm still working in corporate America, but fast forward a few years and I actually started with a web design company that also did SEO, and the revenue from their web design was fine, you know, it was okay, but we actually found that the SEO work was actually our most profitable because it was actually a monthly subscription model as opposed to a one-time payment model.
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So after we got good at SEO and it was cash flowing, I started to realize that we actually have we're actually really good at this and that this cash flowing I started to realize that we actually have, we're actually really good at this and that this could be our edge.
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And having that SEO mindset is actually how I conceived of letmebetcom.
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As you said, I'm a big football fan.
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Football was my first love and, as an extension of that, fantasy football.
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So.
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But then I realized that I really can't neglect the sports betting industry either, because it's just exploding right now.
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Ever since you know the 2018 decision to strike down that federal ban on sports betting, that's when it sort of exploded.
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So, combining fantasy football, sports betting and my edge, which is, you know, at the time it was SEO and web development.
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I decided to create letmebetcom, and the North Star has always been to build it as a product that I would want to use, because that's exactly what it is.
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It has tools and educational resources that I wish I had when I started out in not just sports betting but fantasy football.
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So that's where we are today.
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Yeah, I love that overview, Jared, for so many reasons, especially because you called out something that we're trying to solve that gap in the marketplace.
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Too few people are introduced to entrepreneurship and they don't know where to start, and that's why I'm so appreciative of stories like yours, jared, because you did take that initiative and you said I actually want to build something, I want to create something brand new, and I love hearing that insight into how you started.
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Let me, betcom, take us there, though, because, jared, I would argue that a lot of people have ideas and they talk to their friends and their family and they're like this business should exist.
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I wonder if it exists.
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And obviously, you examine the landscape, which is easier for you because it's something you're personally interested in.
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I love that barometer of success of I want this to be something that I would use.
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You didn't just have the idea, though.
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You've gone ahead and built it.
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What did that decision point look like?
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What did that transition look like?
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I want to hear more about that.
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I will argue until the cows come home that ideas are worthless, and I'm not the first person to say that.
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A lot of people will agree with me.
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Ideas themselves are worth nothing.
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It's all about execution.
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Whatever allegedly unique idea that you might have come up with, I'm willing to bet money that somebody else thought of it somewhere else in the world.
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So really it's all about execution.
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It's about follow through.
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The hard part is not conceiving the idea.
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It's actually making sacrifices in life, putting in the work, getting your hands dirty and even when it feels like something might be failing, six or 12 months in, it's not going anywhere.
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Having that drive to keep going that is what makes an entrepreneur successful, in my opinion.
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Yeah, for sure.
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And Jared, I would say that your industry is more complex than most.
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You've already mentioned that it is changing very fast.
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Obviously, it's a hot industry right now.
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You chose to have your business be in that industry.
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What's it like to stay on top of all the things that?
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I would imagine?
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Probably weekly it's changing.
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Yeah, because it's such a nascent industry sports betting is.
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It feels like I can be more impactful as opposed to getting into an industry that's, you know, well-developed for decades, even centuries, right.
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So that's why I felt like when I started LetMeBetcom, it was early enough in the industry where I felt like I could make a dent.
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I mean, just look at it right now, every year, there's still states where sports betting is illegal, but there's a lot of proponents within the state that are trying to legalize it.
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People are passing or proposing bills all the time, hoping that they get passed.
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There's a lot of hot states currently where a lot of people in the state are clamoring and hoping for the legalization of sports betting so they don't have to keep crossing state lines or signing up for a VPN to bet on their phones.
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So just keeping track of all that, it's hard to find good resources out there.
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So I felt like I could build something that tracks the legal status of sports betting.
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Daily fantasy, sports, pick'em betting, which you know, those are all things where really, depending on who you ask, it, can be considered sports betting or not, and each state has its own regulations and they identify different activities as either sports betting or not, which is why there's distinctions between daily fantasy sports and sports betting, depending on the state that you're in Keeping track of all that, coming up with blog posts that are educational, just explaining the absolute basics of sports betting.
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When I started sports betting, I didn't know what a money line was or a point spread was.
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I didn't know what it meant if a team was minus one or plus one.
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These are very common questions and don't take my word for it, these are all SEO keywords that are very commonly searched for, so I felt like I could be a resource for that because, you know, when I did the legwork to educate myself, I realized that I could actually just encapsulate what you know, what I found, and just put it in writing or come up with tools.
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We have a lot of good tools on lemmebetcom Things like Moneyline calculators, parlay calculators, odds converters, things that you know, require a little math.
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The math itself is decently straightforward.
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Anyone can do it, but it's nothing that you want to do in your head in the moment.
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So we have a lot of convenient tools that I think you know provide a lot of benefit to anyone, you know, not just novice sports bettors, but even experienced ones.
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Yeah, Jared, it's fun to ask you this question because I love the fact that you've already called out your SEO background and how much you think through those terms, but also, of course, your engineering background.
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You're introducing us to some of the tools that you have on letmebetcom.
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How do you view your company?
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Is it a content-based business?
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Obviously, you've got your state tracker and comprehensive guides.
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Is it a tech company, with the various tools that you're rolling out?
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Is content the bridge through which you get traffic?
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I'd love to hear the way you talk about your company.
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The one word answer is startup, because it's to be determined what the exact model is going to look like.
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Right now.
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We're hyper focused on growth.
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I would say you mentioned content.
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That is probably the most accurate way to describe it.
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It's a content website and, you know, with an SEO play, strategically speaking in terms of growth, and we have a good amount of traffic right now.
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You know we could decide to switch on advertising right now if we wanted to, but it's one of those things where it's not, you know, worth pitching, holing ourselves into.
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You know one type of model just yet.
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It's like that quote from the movie Social Network.
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You know it's like model just yet.
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It's like that quote from the movie Social Network.
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You know it's like you're throwing the greatest party in the world but you're telling people they have to leave by 1030.
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So we want to avoid, you know, really coming up with a rigid model with this early on.
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I think in the meantime, we're just going to keep creating content that people actually find useful, creating tools that people actually find useful, not just in sports betting, but in fantasy sports, and then I think, yeah, we're just in the growth phase, so we'll have to.
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We'll have to see what it turns into.
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Yeah, I'll tell you as someone who my first ever business was a soccer blog.
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Just like you, I was driven by passion and my first love for sure was soccer.
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My second love was writing.
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So I loved writing about soccer as a business.
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The one lesson that I learned really early on and, Jared, I'm sure that you've already given this a lot more thought I had no idea what I was doing when I started out, but I didn't realize the difference between a consumer and a customer, and so obviously that's so important for all of us to figure out in our businesses.
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And I know that listeners are probably thinking, especially when they see your website, they're going to think this is such a cool business.
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You are at the forefront of it.
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You obviously build beautiful and useful things that scratch your own itch and the itch of so many others.
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How have you fleshed out the strategic side of it about customer versus consumer?
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Where do you see LetMeBetcom fitting into that marketplace?
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I don't know that I really make a hard distinction between the two just yet.
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You know, working behind the scenes, when I'm building LetMeBetcom, I'm so focused on growth in the SEO sense I'm just kind of monitoring our rankings on search engines and watching the traffic, how it's ebbing and flowing each day.
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You know, if we, if we make this one change, did it's ebbing and flowing each day?
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You know, if we, if we make this one change, did it benefit us and by how much was it really worth our time?
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You know, did I just spend two months building this really complicated tool for, you know, just marginal differences in traffic, or was this actually?
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Is this something that's gonna, you know, you know, be a huge source of traffic?
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Just kind of?
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We're kind of figuring it out as we go.
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We do know that pumping out content on a on a steady basis is a major, major part of it.
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We definitely want to keep that going and I think I think we just see anybody that visits the website as a customer and the sense that they're a customer will probably change once we start, you know, monetizing in a specific way.
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But for right now, I don't know that I really make a hard distinction between the two.
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Yeah, I love getting into that entrepreneurial mind though, because that is such a fun phase to be at.
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What I'm really hearing and probably a lot of it is thanks to the fact that you have the skillset that you have is you have the luxury of trying things, of building new things, launching them into the marketplace and seeing what that adoption is, letting the market guide that, and so my question to you I always love asking people with your type of skillset is is it a blessing and a curse that you can act so quickly and build new things?
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How do you figure out?
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Here are the experiments that we want to run and that we want to deploy, versus having that strategic focus.
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It's definitely a blessing and a curse.
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It's a blessing because, you know, if I come up with an idea or I decide that, you know coming up with a new feature is a good idea, we can act on it pretty quickly and do it ourselves.
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But that's also a curse because it's time consuming, right?
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You know I mentioned earlier about making sacrifices and I think a lot of entrepreneurs that are listening to me will know exactly what I'm talking about.
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You have to make sacrifices.
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You probably can't, you know, go out as often as you want to, or, you know, see people you love as often as you want, do things that you know brought you joy in the past as often as you did.
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But it's, it's worth it, and you know I know there are people out there who are listening to me that know what I mean, but you know when I say that it's worth it.
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Yeah, a hundred percent.
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It's actually Jared.
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Years ago, I did an episode basically talking about the juice is worth the squeeze.
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It doesn't mean that it's easy, but a hundred% it's worth it.
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Talk to me about that growth map.
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Knowing that growth roadmap, knowing that you are so growth focused, what's that time horizon that you focus on?
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Is it days, is it weeks, is it months, is it years?
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I'm a big fan of quarters.
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I believe that 90 days we can transform most things in our life, whether it's business, love, health, fitness, whatever it may be.
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I always love hearing what other entrepreneurs think, though, when it comes to timeframes.
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I used to be very impatient.
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I used to think in days or weeks and thinking in years was, you know, unheard of for me.
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That was too long for me.
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But I started to realize as I grew older that you really have to think in years, months to years.
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You know you can stop and reevaluate things on the order of weeks, but any major decisions are done on the scale of months to years and you really want to focus on things that compound, as opposed to aiming for short, short-term gains but sacrificing long-term compounding games gains.
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So, uh, it took a while for me to understand that, but uh, right now, uh, you know, as I've matured, uh, I've learned to play the long game for sure.
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Yeah, I love that.
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I always remind listeners that maturity when it comes to entrepreneurship is not measured by age is it is measured by experience, and I think that that's something that we all navigate.
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We never stop navigating it.
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Jared, I'm on year 17 of my entrepreneurial journey and just now I'm like okay, now I'm starting to think like a business owner, as opposed to someone who's just putting out fires and someone who's having all these different things that I want to experiment with.
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So I really appreciate those insights and when I look at your landscape and obviously you are very technically astute I think about how disruptive of a force not just your industry is of sports betting, but AI, of course.
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How's AI playing into all the different things that you're doing, either internally or baking it into the roadmap of what it is that you want letmebetcom to progress into?
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So the extent at which I use AI is not that interesting.
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It's the same thing that a lot of people are already doing.
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I really only use it to help me come out with outlines for things that I write.
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It's just a very quick and easy way to organize my thoughts, maybe structure them, have AI structured for me in a way that I, you know, didn't think to.
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But really beyond that, you know, after I have like the skeleton of, you know, like a blog post or something that I want to write.
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That's where I, you know, go from there and take it on my own.
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I will say, though, actually recently I've been using a lot of AI for auto filling.
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When I'm coding, it's just sometimes, you know, when you start writing code that you know goes over 1000 lines, it's hard to keep track of.
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You know all the variables and the constants that you're writing, and there's some really good auto complete features out there where it just it's like it's finishing your sentence If you're speaking in code.
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It's not, you know, coming up with the algorithm, algorithms for you or structuring it in a way.
00:19:15.963 --> 00:19:23.385
You know that you don't know how to, but it's just, you know it, just it's if something's on the tip of my tongue in terms of code.
00:19:23.385 --> 00:19:26.301
It just kind of finishes it for me and I found that to be very convenient.
00:19:27.075 --> 00:19:40.336
Yeah, that's very cool, jared, I'm totally going to put you on the spot here, because I believe that everything is a microcosm of life and therefore we can apply it to business and literally everything else, and I love the fact that you've had the passion for poker from a very young age.
00:19:40.336 --> 00:19:41.698
That's something that I've never gotten into.
00:19:41.698 --> 00:19:48.548
I don't even know how to play poker, but I also know that there's a lot of life lessons, and therefore business lessons, hidden within the world of poker.
00:19:48.548 --> 00:19:57.964
What are some of those things that you've picked up from that passion and hobby of yours that when you started your business, you realized holy cow, I can directly apply that to the way I grow my business.
00:20:00.596 --> 00:20:07.847
Some lessons I learned from poker is so I actually was a semi-professional player in my early 20s.
00:20:07.847 --> 00:20:15.875
Um, I was juggling my day job and then, you know, going to poker rooms to try and do professionally for a little bit.
00:20:15.875 --> 00:20:20.405
Uh, one thing I learned that is that I don't have the endurance for that.
00:20:20.405 --> 00:20:25.683
It takes so much stamina, um, and anybody that knows nolan and texas hold him.
00:20:25.683 --> 00:20:31.623
All it takes is one mistake or one uh bad beat and your entire stack is gone right.
00:20:31.623 --> 00:20:41.378
So you could, you could have played perfectly for seven hours, but if you make a mistake in the last 15 minutes or get unlucky in the 15 minutes, last 15 minutes, the whole thing, could you know, be taken from you.
00:20:41.378 --> 00:20:48.067
Um, and that it the swings, the emotional swings and the mental stamina it took.
00:20:48.067 --> 00:20:50.431
I realized that I didn't have it.
00:20:52.236 --> 00:21:00.508
The other thing that I learned from poker is it desensitized me to making big bets.
00:21:00.508 --> 00:21:07.784
You know, monetarily speaking, I used to be a little more conservative with my money.
00:21:07.784 --> 00:21:23.920
You know, I used to set rules with myself that I would not, you know, spend X amount or not call a hand for more than X dollar amount, but it, you know, that actually probably increases your odds that you're going to end up being a loser than than not.
00:21:23.920 --> 00:21:38.426
So, um, it really helped to desensitize me to make bigger bets, not just in poker but in life, and I think I like to think that, at least subconsciously, it helped me and encouraged me on my entrepreneurial journey, for sure.
00:21:39.394 --> 00:21:41.180
Yeah, I love that risk tolerance.
00:21:41.180 --> 00:21:49.165
It's something that we all navigate and continue to navigate, and it's really cool hearing the influence that poker had on that component of your entrepreneurial thinking.
00:21:49.165 --> 00:21:59.432
I want to switch gears and talk about blog posts, because obviously you've mentioned it a few times in our conversation today and it's so core to the way that you are attracting people to your website, jared.
00:21:59.432 --> 00:22:01.258
I feel like it's a little bit of a lost art.
00:22:01.258 --> 00:22:10.503
Everyone wants to focus on social media and paid ads, but blogging is such a beautiful medium through which we can obviously end up on the search engines, be found by more people.
00:22:10.503 --> 00:22:25.663
Talk to us about that approach, because obviously you have the patience and the skills that go into SEO, but I'd love for you to offer some of those insights to our listeners, who probably don't view it or haven't taken advantage of it as a traffic opportunity for their businesses.
00:22:32.714 --> 00:22:45.228
Yeah, when I started blogging, one of the biggest mistakes I made was I was writing in not my own style, but the style that I came across most often on the internet a very corporate, manufactured style I don't know how else to describe it, but it just didn't seem authentic.
00:22:45.228 --> 00:22:50.903
But because that's what I saw all the time, that's what I thought that you had to do.
00:22:50.903 --> 00:23:04.805
And then I realized that really to have an edge, you have to differentiate yourself, and the only way to do that is to be genuine and have a subjective take on things.
00:23:04.805 --> 00:23:11.923
And it's even better if you can draw a past experience, you know, to support your subjective take.
00:23:11.923 --> 00:23:21.056
Uh, so that's when I started to realize that I really have to just be myself and let my own voice flow through my writing, uh, when it comes to blog posts.
00:23:21.056 --> 00:23:27.181
And then you know, lo and behold, I started to see a lot more success, um, in terms of traffic with, with blogging.
00:23:27.914 --> 00:23:32.366
Yeah, I love that, especially again right on the back of the section where you and I talked about AI.
00:23:32.366 --> 00:23:49.009
I feel like there's a lot of not so great content out there, which listeners you're seeing, and if you go to Jared's website which we're going to drop that link in just a few minutes but if you want to be one of the ones that injects your own voice, your own style, your own personality into it, the good news is there's a huge opportunity area.
00:23:49.009 --> 00:23:53.446
That's what I love about AI is when everybody starts using it and has the same type of content.
00:23:53.446 --> 00:23:57.665
You can actually stand out in the AI world by being yourself.
00:23:57.665 --> 00:24:02.882
So, jared, I really appreciate those insights On that topic of being yourself.
00:24:02.882 --> 00:24:05.556
What are some of those things that I know that you love?
00:24:05.556 --> 00:24:07.281
Spending time with your family and friends.
00:24:07.281 --> 00:24:12.778
You've got an active dog that you and I talked about even before we hit record together living in Los Angeles.
00:24:12.778 --> 00:24:18.903
What are some of those things that you've done to maintain your sanity as an entrepreneur and balance all of the things that you want to do?
00:24:19.945 --> 00:24:21.215
Yeah, the key word is balance.
