1 million views - what do we have to show for it?
Wicky began life as "Sport Tech Daily", a podcast and a blog site in March 2020. The world was going into lockdown due to Covid. It meant that people were stuck indoors and were happy to come onto our podcast, have informal/unofficial calls and answer questionnaires which we published as interviews on our site.
One thing stood out from those conversations. There was a real opportunity in the sports analytics space - especially in Australia, and especially in Rugby League and Cricket.
In August 2021 - we had our first client! We provided content and predicted fantasy scores for Draftstars (part of Playup in Australia) for Rugby League, Cricket and NBA between 2021 and 2024.
By March 2023, our company had been around for 3 years and we had just completed an exciting stint with the Otago Volts, a professional cricket team, in addition to our existing work with Draftstars.
Our work in the Rugby League space, meanwhile, also included content based off try scorer tips (which had slowly become more popular) and the OCT - an odds comparison tool for various NRL Try Scorer markets.
The success of our NRL data tools and content early in season 2023 was headspinning. In a three month span, our Discord community went from 300 to 3,000+ users. Our site started to get close to 1,000 people on it on NRL game days. It was a whirlwind few months.
But in mid May 2023, things changed. Our success and virality broke the try scorer market. One of Australia's biggest bookies completely changed their try scorer pricing models. Our tips went behind a paywall for the first time. We created a B2C subscription service.
For the next 18 months or so, we went all in to be a content company and aiming to monetise from user subscriptions. It was a LOT of fun. But it meant essentially working day and night for 7 months straight with very little time off. We had some wins along the way. But as the edge slowly disappeared, it became clear this was not a sustainable business model.
Towards the end of 2024, we decided to pivot, and that B2B was the path forward for Wicky - time to go back to what we were always meant to be.
Our core team had all been at our company for 1-3 years and, after 12 months, we finally caught up in Delhi in February 2025. The time we spent together strategising, planning and developing our new B2B products has us very excited for the next step in Wicky's journey.
We're now focused on two things: using our learnings from engaging with punters for 2-3 years to build the best possible product to engage sports fans and showcasing our product to sports teams, broadcasters, fantasy & betting companies.
The last few weeks have been great fun. GenAI means we can develop our products so much faster. To circle back to the question of 'our site had over 1 Million views in 2023 and 2024 but what do we have to show for it?', we've built a strong presence in the Australian market and built a team that knows how to build products that will be attractive to users. We're confident we'll be able to reap the rewards of 5 years of hard work in 2025!
If you're one of the above businesses or simply want to learn more about the work we're doing at Wicky with AI, don't hesitate to get in touch with us here on LinkedIn or email us at [email protected]