The concept is ambitious: creating a platform that connects the social and communal aspects of fandom to the sports betting experience. It’s a task that would challenge the most seasoned of developers.
Let alone four full-time college students.
But a quartet from Dartmouth College beat the odds. Carson Hubbard (CEO), Bella DiGiovanni (Chief Marketing Officer), Liam Tassiello (Chief Operating Officer) and Edwin Onyango (Chief Technology Officer) worked for a year developing Rebet, a new free-to-play sportsbook app that has raised over $1 million dollars in funding and partnered withSportRadar.
Rebet launches today in the US.
Bet Against Your Friends
“We were driven by our shared love for sports and a realization that there was this huge void in the current sports betting experience,” says Hubbard.
The students met through a start-up incubator program at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business. They fashioned their idea into a feasible business model and raised funds from private investors in the summer of 2023.
“All four of the founders are people who love to bet on sports, we do it consistently,” Hubbard says. “And what we found is there was this inherent disconnect between the sports betting experience and the social elements of the sports betting experience that are inherently part of it. We were constantly screenshotting pictures of bets and then taking those screenshots and sending them into group shots with our friends and family.”
Rebet provides a place for users to compare bets, share experiences and even trash talk.
Sweepstakes Model
The site provides two currencies for free-to-play wagering and real-time data on more 60 professional sports leagues:
- Rebet Coins allow users to climb social leaderboards and earn status within the site’s community with friends and are used to accumulate prizes within the platform. They cannot be redeemed for external prizes or transferred outside the app.
- Rebet Cash provides funds for promotional sweepstakes. When won through gameplay, Rebet cash can be used to enter more competitions offered through the platform, or redeemed for real-money awards at a one-to-one conversion rate.
Both Rebet currencies are available to users for free once per day.
“We’ve designed Rebet in this way because we wanted to create a platform that anybody can use to engage with their community at any time regardless of their financial ability,” Hubbard says.
Rebet prides itself on being a welcoming app, notably to women. DiGiovanni says the group’s research indicated that sports betting does tend to skew 80 percent male/20 percent female.
Simplified Betting Lines
But through her own research, DiGiovanni discovered a slight disconnect in those figures.
“I’ve asked a lot of questions of questions about women’s enthusiasm for the sports betting experience and I found that women are equally as enthusiastic about (it) and the industry in general,” DiGiovanni says. “But the industry doesn’t really reflect that enthusiasm. So, we saw that there’s this really big barrier to entry for beginning bettors, and within that demographic, there’s a large female market. And they don’t understand the terminology and odds of sports betting, and it’s hard for a female to enter into that male-dominated space without that prior knowledge. That kind of fostered the creation of our easy-to-read mode. … We really believe there’s an untapped market.
Rebet features include social feeds, which maximize interactions between friends; a patent-pending Rebet button that allows players to duplicate the bets of others; and peer-to-peer betting, enabling friends to challenge each other in head-to-head competitions.
Hubbard says the founders decided to make the platform free-to-play to avoid the pressures that some users find on traditional sports betting apps. Revenue will be raised through the sale of additional Rebet coins, and any advertising the site attracts.
Rebet, while not a training device for people who want to explore sports betting, does make it easy for newcomers to understand the experience.
“No matter if you’re a beginner or if you’re a veteran, Rebet is going to provide our users with the best possible experience between social sports and traditional sports books,” Hubbard says. “It’s built for anybody — people who are used to sports betting, or people who have been sports betting for five days.”
To find out more about Rebet, visit https://rebet.app.
