Free-to-play sports prediction games without the risk, with Maksim Afanasev of Pixl.Bet

Pixl.Bet lets sports fans make predictions and play games without risking money. Maksim Afanasev, 17 years in betting, a former CPO at an operator and later on Sportradar's commercial side, explains how an AI-built World Cup experiment became Pixl.Bet, ahead of its SBC Summit startup zone debut.

In this episode

• His SBC motto is "live the thrill without the bill": every match comes with a free ticket, players can stake extra tickets on matches they know, and later stake points in player-versus-player games (0:07, 8:02, 9:05).

• Bingo is a multiplayer game: a 4 by 4 card of 16 match events that players cross out while watching a game together (10:15).

• Early data: about to cross 1,500 registrations with 25 to 30% active users, and over 3,000 reels of up to 15 seconds recorded in 3 months live (11:38, 12:33).

• He avoids buying traffic, where betting brands can outbid him per user; a referral tournament brought about 60 users in a week (13:34, 14:12).

• Monetisation today is affiliate traffic to betting and casino brands, working in partnership with Stake; a couple of small brands already advertise, and non-gambling brands are a later option (16:18, 16:40).

• Ideas used to take 6 to 12 months to ship in most companies, he says; AI coding gets a first prototype in a couple of hours. He wants the community 10 times bigger within a year (25:20, 26:32, 30:13).

Episode from the Betting Startups Podcast, published on YouTube.