When I’ve previously written about CrowdPicks, a wisdom of crowds-based sports picking website, it doesn’t take me long to wonder how their users picked the biggest sporting event of the year, the Super Bowl.
A few weeks ago, I sat down with CrowdPick’s co-founders, Jeff Murnane and Cassius Almeida, to learn more about their company, and I made sure to ask.
“The score prediction that we ended up with, with our top pickers, was only one point off from [last year’s] actual Super Bowl score,” Jeff answered. “It was surprising even to us, and we’ve been looking at this stuff forever. But then we see examples of that all the time. These guys, when they put their minds to it, are really good at picking sports […] and then when you put them together, it’s even more accurate. It’s scary accurate.”
The idea behind their site, to aggregate the score predictions of its users to come up with one prediction, began while they were working for one of Omaha’s most successful dot-coms, TD Ameritrade. In fact, the official name of their company, WSC Group pays homage to their former employer’s industry. WSC stands for Wall Street Cred, and it was the first wisdom of crowd-based site they had plans to create.
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Instead, they choose sports. From the National Football League to the English Premier League, users log on to CrowdPicks.com to not only pick who they think will win, but the final score, as well. With this data, Jeff and Cassius are able to get in-depth predictions.
With successes like last year’s Super Bowl, they’re excited to take their site to what Jeff calls the final step of their vision. They’ve built their community and they’ve proved their community’s data is valuable. “Now we need to make money,” Jeff said. “The site’s been running for free for two years, now we’re going to take what we’ve learned and we’re going to sell it.”
On Monday, they’ll be launching the alpha version of their subscription, a tool that allows users to go into the site’s data and crunch the numbers any way they want. “You can put member filters on it, you can put game filters on it, you can put pick filters on it. It’s endless, the criteria that you can use,” Jeff explained. “For example, you can go in and say, ‘Only show me people that are 55 percent against the spread the last three weeks and picking the New York Jets.’”
Jeff admits their system of picking a winner might not be the best, but with subscriptions they’re giving users the power to create their own, possibly a better one. This falls right in line with CrowdPicks other features that give power and prestige to its users. Stars are added to users’ avatars and trophies to users’ trophy rooms for accomplishments, and if a user does exceptionally well, they may share in the site’s revenue.
Check out my interview with Jeff and Cassius to hear more about their subscription release, their relationship with the Scott Technology Center, where they’re been headquartered, and their thoughts on Omaha’s startup scene.
Also, here’s a sneak peak at the redesign of their landing page:
