Will Martin: 0:00

And it's given us kind of outside results. The 600,000 traders have used their filters. Wow, 750 million views, tens of thousands of signups organically and, as Gary Vee says, organic breach measures relevance.

Joeri Billast: 0:15

Hello everyone and welcome to the Web3 CMO Stories podcast. My name is Joeri Billast and I'm your podcast host, and today I am at SBC Summit and my guest is Will. Hey, will, how are you? Thanks for having me on the interview. Guys, if you don't know Will Martin, he has an amazing company, LiveDuel, and we will talk about this a little bit later. But Will, tell me a bit first about your background and actually, guys, we will walk around here at SBC Summit. Actually, it's the area where also Web Summit takes place. It's huge, so we'll, yeah, walk around, okay, wilf, yeah, yeah, just tell me a bit about your background. You can start where you want to start what, and then later on we'll talk about what brought you here to SBC Summit. But, yeah, where do you come from and how did you start your business?

Will Martin: 1:09

Yeah, I guess it's a bit of a long journey of being collecting pieces of the puzzle kind of throughout my life and college career, working career. So I did economics and computer science in university. So from a Web3 perspective it's kind of like the perfect combination of business, economics and then technology. So I learned about arbitrage and financial markets in first year university and I decided to do my project on applying arbitrage principles to sports betting. So that was kind of my first introduction to the industry. Learned a lot, made a bit of money and then entered the financial world. So I worked as a futures and options trader for a while. Didn't love the industry as much as I thought I was going to. So I went back, did a master's, studied in Barcelona, taiwan and San Francisco three sister universities. Ended up in San Francisco for a few years, primarily working on the product marketing team at Monster Cable, who are the designers and manufacturers of Leads by Dre products.

Will Martin: 2:05

So I learned a lot about taking a commoditized product, how to make it the go-to the product that everybody wants. Tapping into cultural stars, musicians, sports stars, getting Michael Phelps wearing them during the Olympics, neymar during the World Cup. So yeah, I guess those of the pieces of the puzzle that I've kind of collected. So technology, finance, and then the marketing side. Okay, um, so it wasn't called influencer marketing back then. Um, but the power of culture and the content and not being so forceful with a marketing message but just making it a desired product, is something I've been really, really passionate about. Distribution is destiny, so kind of finding and navigating ways to be part of the conversation, be part of the trends, is something that we're doing at LightJule.

Joeri Billast: 2:57

And now I meet you here today, here at SBC Summit. So what brought you here?

Will Martin: 3:03

Yeah, obviously building a prediction market for sports. So there's probably no greater show than SBC coming to Lisbon in a nice time of the year. But we also got nominated for the top five startups for their pitch competition. So it's always good to have a microphone and a stage and a platform to tell people about what we're doing, because I think we're in a very interesting period. We're in interesting products in terms of technology, web3 adoption is growing massively and then with some of the clever things we've done on marketing, it's kind of helped us kind of promote ourselves. So I was going to take an opportunity to come with new people that work and learn new things as well.

Joeri Billast: 3:45

So it's exciting. So, when we are now recording a podcast, you're pitching later today.

Will Martin: 3:49

Later today? Yeah, in about three hours time. Okay, this is good practice?

Joeri Billast: 3:53

Yes, and when will you get the result? Will they announce the winner later today?

Will Martin: 3:56

Yeah, I think they will take a bit of time after the five pitches are kind of done and then maybe 10, 15 minutes later.

Joeri Billast: 4:02

later a winner will be crowned so this is exciting, guys, when you are listening to this podcast. When it will be published?

Will Martin: 4:09

yeah, we might have it up there too.

Joeri Billast: 4:10

You will see the results in the show notes, so check them out to see what happened with real speech. Of course, this is the Web3 CMO Stories podcast, so talk a bit about the Web3 part in what you're building and your solution.

Will Martin: 4:26

Yeah, absolutely so. I guess it kind of goes back to my initial experience in financial markets Very high liquid markets, very efficient whereas sports betting is not the most efficient. They have thousands of operators all selling the same assets but could be at very different prices. So I think there's huge opportunity for decentralized finance technology to bridge the gap over into the world of sports. Obviously, we've seen prediction markets like Calci and Polymarket do really good things on prediction market side of things.

Will Martin: 4:59

So we're taking a lot of what's happening in DeFi, so smart contracts, automatic market makers, liquidity pools and applying them to sports. But how a sports asset trades compared to a crypto asset is very, very different. Crypto is an infinite game. Markets are open 24-7, 365. The asset that you bought, like Ethereum, five years ago, it's still the same asset. Price might be very different, but it's still the fundamental same asset, whereas with a sports contract or sports market, the game that happened last night will never happen again. So that asset is either going to be worth one or zero.

Will Martin: 5:35

Yeah, so we've had to build our own and innovate on the automatic market maker piece, which we're really, really excited about. So it's more of an Oracle-aware automatic market maker, so we take in pricing feeds from the rest of the market so we're aware of where everybody else is in terms of pricing. Then we use machine learning to help us find the best price so we can deliver a better product to the end users. So the liquidity bull side as well is super interesting. As I mentioned, there's thousands of operators out there right now All with their own individual liquidity pool. So it's inefficient when you have 5,000 liquidity pools doing the same thing. So using a Web3 kind of structure, we can accept money from more places around the world to participate in that liquidity pool. So to explain how the pool works, users stake into the liquidity pool. So say, a thousand people here stake a thousand euros each. That's now a liquidity pool or a bankroll of a million.

Will Martin: 6:34

And we use that to facilitate trades. So everybody has a nice, seamless, instant experience. We charge a transaction fee, then we redistribute that between ourselves, the people staking into the liquidity pool, and then if there's a creator driving traffic, they'll also pick up a portion of those transaction fees.

Joeri Billast: 6:51

Yeah, you work with creators. You do some things with TikTok also yeah.

Will Martin: 6:56

TikTok filters.

Joeri Billast: 6:57

Because I'm all into storytelling, creating content. So, yes, I'm curious to see what you're doing.

Will Martin: 7:04

Yeah, yeah so, um, content is obviously king, curation is queen, but engagement is also pretty, pretty high up there. It's pretty godly, um. So we wanted to come up with new ways to engage our audience, which is very much millennial, gen z and obviously platforms like tiktok have seen explosive growth, um, so filters are a huge part of that community driving trends. Once a new filter launches, it might pick up initial traction and then other people jump on the experience.

Will Martin: 7:32

So we made prediction filters so users can come on and make a video using our filter around big tournaments from the quarterfinals onwards. So to explain how it works, we load it with the real world fixtures for big tournaments. Country flag or team logo would appear over the user's heads. If they move their head left or right, that makes their pick and then at the bottom of the video it kind of shows the progression of their custom semifinal, custom final and then ultimately they pick a winner. So very easy and very straightforward. People can do it in whatever language that they're comfortable in, but when you get people to make predictions on video, it drives a lot of engagement.

Will Martin: 8:11

So when people say Team A is going to win, all fans of Team A are celebrating Team B fans are upset and they're also in the comment section and that kind of feeds the algorithm with what it was, which is engagement, liking, sharing, back and forth in there. So that's been hugely interesting for us to kind of understand how that works and it's given us kind of outside results. So 600,000 creators have used our filters, whoa, 750 million views. Tens of thousands have signed up organically and, as Gary Vee says, organic reach measures, relevance. So we're inserting ourselves into the conversation in a very relevant way.

Joeri Billast: 8:50

Absolutely, yeah. Like I said just before we hit the recording button, I met Gary Vee yesterday. He was indeed talking about, you know, about video, about blockchain, about AI, how the world is changing, and that content is organic. Content is king, right, yeah, absolutely. He also speaks about creating content and having the best content, promoting that content, but in your case, it's other creators who are creating the content.

Will Martin: 9:16

Yeah, the creators are the best in the business that do it because they have the authentic passion around whatever sport or topic or team or country they're from or support. So we just want to empower creators to make better sports content faster. So we want to become part of their workflow. If they need to make a video, let's go check, see what LiveJewel has for a live streaming tool or a filter to help them put their own color on it, then on top.

Joeri Billast: 9:40

That's exciting, and what is? Yeah, of course, the World Cup Football League.

Will Martin: 9:44

Cup. Yeah, the World Cup football is the greatest show in town, so that's definitely a guiding light for us.

Joeri Billast: 9:50

And, yeah, platform like TikTok, which has, like, the virality and engagement factor, and you combine this with sports and then with betting and something that people are, I think that's maybe the best of three worlds. I would say Exactly yeah yeah, and how are you actually talking about the Web3 crypto aspect with your users or not? Because it's not everyone is.

Will Martin: 10:15

Yeah, yeah, we've definitely taken a more softly softly approach because it might turn off some users as well and obviously sports is a very big market with lots of fans that aren't used to Web3 technologies. So we spent a lot of time on kind of abstracting away some of the complications from a UX perspective, but also using things like signing up with your social accounts or your emails to get a wallet created for people in a very seamless way. When we first tested getting people to sign up for a decentralized wallet, writing seed phrases and installing browser extensions, that was a huge friction point before they've even entered our ecosystem. So we wanted to kind of streamline that as much as possible. But of course, if you're bringing your own MetaMask or want to learn more, we'll have all that information available for people.

Joeri Billast: 11:00

Yeah, but the world is going into that direction anyway. Yeah, exactly what is actually the typical user or the typical audience that you have in terms of age, in terms of, maybe, geography? That's interesting to know too.

Will Martin: 11:15

Yeah. So it's probably 80-20 split male-female, and then the bulk would be 23 to kind of 33-34. And it's very, very kind of global. So LATAM, africa, southeast Asia, some Europe and America as well, of course, but it's really where people are most passionate about football. So LATAM has seen lots of really strong numbers for us because they live and breathe football.

Joeri Billast: 11:43

It's not just a hobby or a pastime, it's a passion. It's seen lots of really strong numbers for us because they live and breathe football.

Will Martin: 11:44

It's not just a hobby or a pastime. It's a passion, it's a religion, it's something that they're really energized and focused on.

Joeri Billast: 11:51

What is your favorite sport yourself? Yeah.

Will Martin: 11:53

I'm a big football fan.

Joeri Billast: 11:55

I wish Ireland was better, that we had a chance to go into the World Cup.

Will Martin: 11:58

But yeah, I'm a big fan of lots of different sports from NFL Formula One rugby as well. Ireland are pretty good at that, so that's always nice to have one that we're good at Absolutely. But yeah lots of sports. Play a bit of golf, but not very well.

Joeri Billast: 12:14

so Okay, nice, yeah, I actually. You know, I have Belgium, so the Belgium football team. I hope they will do a jersey.

Will Martin: 12:21

Yeah, yeah I think you'll get there anyway, which is a good start.

Joeri Billast: 12:24

Yeah, but yeah, there is a lot of, I would say, passion, emotion involved with those things. Are there any, I would say, challenges or regulations or things that you need to take care of for your business to grow?

Will Martin: 12:39

Yeah, absolutely Like crypto and betting are regulated industries. They're in the process of being regulated because it's often hard for regulators to stay up with everything that's happening because both industries move pretty quickly, as you may well know. So I guess there's a legal distinction from what we're doing from the two sides of our business. You betting on Belgium or predicting Belgium are going to win the World Cup Betting activity. You staking into our liquidity pool crypto activity so it kind of falls more under decentralized finance regulation. So that kind of gives us more scope to target more geolocations where we might not be able to accept money from players who are going to make predictions on the outcomes of games.

Joeri Billast: 13:19

And people talk a lot about. The AI is everywhere these days. How do you use AI? Are we busy with it or is it somewhere embedded in your solution? The AI?

Will Martin: 13:32

Yeah, it would be foolish to not explore the opportunity of using AI.

Will Martin: 13:37

But we haven't been too focused on it because we don't need to shoehorn it into every little part of what we're doing, because it might not be the best results for the product, for ourselves, for our users, results for the product, for ourselves, for our users.

Will Martin: 13:52

So we're probably more passionate about machine learning and using the power of data to help us improve our price over time.

Will Martin: 13:59

So to kind of explain where we might be using machine learning, we take in lots of pricing data from all the other operators there's thousands of them but we kind of select the most important ones, from prediction markets to betting exchanges, to betting platforms. So they're essentially giving us what their prediction data is for the upcoming game. Then we get the results. So then we can compare everyone's all the company's prediction data with the actual results to figure out who's got the best price or the more accurate price for a certain game, a certain league, a certain sport, and one company might be best in American football, another might be best in football soccer, I should say. So using machine learning to kind of tweak how that AMM model actually works and evolves over the course of time, because it's not static, it's not going to stay. This is what it's going to be forever. It actually kind of changes dynamically with more information, which, yeah, we have an abundance of data and information.

Joeri Billast: 14:57

A question I always like to ask, because you're definitely very passionate about what you're doing, but what are you now the most excited about at this moment?

Will Martin: 15:06

It's kind of hard to say not the World Cup.

Joeri Billast: 15:08

The World Cup is just on the horizon.

Will Martin: 15:10

I've probably never been looking forward to it more this far out. Usually it's like all right, champions League and yeah, yeah, yeah, like they kind of take the highlights. But this is going to be a very unique World Cup 2018's for the first time ever, and I'm hoping Ireland can scrape in there. But from a technology perspective, it's getting our product into more people's hands, because building something without users using it is very different to when you see it in action and seeing transactions come in and see where activity is and where people are looking and focusing on that.

Will Martin: 15:45

That's really exciting. We've all got a backlog of creator tools as well that we've been sitting on of waiting to launch. So we're trying to do it in a strategic way so we don't go too early with big ones, so we'll be saving some of the really really special ones for that world.

Joeri Billast: 16:03

How do you find those creators, or do these creators apply to you, or how does it work? Yeah?

Will Martin: 16:09

very much bootstrapped to begin with, kind of destroyed my algorithm to find all the content creators of Note. So it was just kind of the cold outreach kind of strategy hey, we're doing interesting things, we might be able to help you with graphics and tools and bringing people together. So I've kind of reached out to some of them. Some of them said, yeah, absolutely so. We added them to a WhatsApp group and then every time we had something new to kind of share, we kind of distributed it to them. But the engagement between them in that WhatsApp group was really incredible to see as well. Hey, I just got flagged for this TikTok video. What should I do?

Will Martin: 16:44

And other people were able to kind of share thoughts and ideas of how to help each other, because they might have had the same experience. So we're looking to see if we can formalize it with kind of an application. And what we discovered is a lot of content creators are individual guys and girls doing a part-time with a job or college, so they don't have all the tools and resources. So what can we kind of do for them to help support them? Is that editing or creating graphics or distributing TikTok filters or other tools like a live streaming tool that we're working on? So, yeah, looking to formalize that because I think there's huge power in bringing people together, but also helping support them Absolutely.

Joeri Billast: 17:26

Yeah, live streaming that sounds, because that's Gary Vee also speaks about that.

Will Martin: 17:30

Why do you?

Joeri Billast: 17:30

need to go live. Actually, fun fact, I was one of the first people in Europe to get access to LinkedIn Live. Oh, wow, that was actually 2019 when I met Gary for the first time Okay, nice, and he was speaking. He was in New York and he was speaking about all that. And then, you know, I was there and I said I want to have this access, and it's very dark, so that was really fun, and I just forgot what I wanted to ask next. Yes, I remember so what I wanted to ask, because these creators, they are alone. So actually, you're kind of building a community, right, yeah, for these people.

Will Martin: 18:09

Yeah, community is kind of fundamental to what we're doing kind of across the board, because community doesn't really exist in other kind of prediction markets or betting platforms, because in the betting landscape it's end users versus the house.

Will Martin: 18:23

So building a community with that kind of adversarial relationship is a bit kind of weird.

Will Martin: 18:27

Yeah, so you know, gen Z millennials really care about community being part of the conversation and not just being one of many users.

Will Martin: 18:36

It's actually being an active part of the conversation and being able to engage with people who have children. So there's community on the end user side, but also on the creator side, because it's super important to be around people that can challenge your views, get shared views that you can have fun with, that help and support each other. And that's very relevant for content creators, because many aspire to be full-time content creators but it's a difficult journey because a lot of people want to do that. So, yeah, there's kind of power in numbers and that kind of code or inspirational code of surround yourself with people on the same journey as you is really kind of relevant for content creators in the sports space, because just because you're a sports content creator and I'm a sports content creator doesn't mean we can't work to each other. You might have opinions on a certain team or a certain player, I might have the same or opposing views, and all is welcome and might add to collaborations that we could potentially do. So having that kind of melting pot is a strategy of ours.

Will Martin: 19:33

It makes it interesting, of course, that instead of you know they're not competing, they can, you know, engage with each other and grow like that, and that's what the power of the filter was Content creators tend to follow each other because everyone wants to see what everyone else is saying and thinking.

Will Martin: 19:47

They have a new trend that they discovered through that. But when they see that I can use the filter straight away because I'm not going to pick the same predictions as you and I can add my own flavor, I can do it in my own language. So something that was really interesting that we discovered is we got to push it out to English speaking content creators first, and then there was some creators who spoke English and another language, so English and Spanish.

Will Martin: 20:13

So they saw it in English and then brought it over and started the trend then in that language and then I kind of filtered it through there. So it's really interesting, like sports is a unifying language, I think.

Joeri Billast: 20:23

Absolutely. People have opinions in sports, exactly.

Will Martin: 20:28

No shortage of opinions.

Joeri Billast: 20:29

And just you know, before a game, after a game, you know how it is.

Will Martin: 20:34

And that's what we're really kind of focused on as well. That we don't think the industry does enough of is looking at the full timeline there's before the game, during the game, after the game, and companies in this industry just tend to care about getting the transaction done, but there's like a whole experience Absolutely Waiting for the team news. You think this team should start.

Will Martin: 20:52

I think we should play with this team and this formation so like there's lots of interactions that real sports fans have before the game, before, like the transaction becomes like the main event. But then afterwards people will relive highlights, you know, turn their sorrows if something went wrong and say where did we go wrong? So it's all about kind of that full timeline of a fan and then once the game is over and we've rehashed everything, then we're on to the next game which is a beautiful thing as well so tiktok is most, most important, yeah, most popular for us.

Will Martin: 21:22

We kind of made that decision because the power of it is so extreme, yeah, but yeah, we'll have strategies for, um, short videos. So TikTok, instagram, snapchat, et cetera, youtube Shorts and then live streaming as well is kind of our next kind of evolution of that, because sports is obviously a very live product, absolutely yeah.

Will Martin: 21:41

Lots of people do live watch-alongs and we've seen now that podcasts and live streamers are getting access to rights to show the game on their stream, which is really interesting. So there's two in the UK, the Overlap, which is kind of former Premier League players like Gary Neville, roy Keane and others. They now show at Bundesliga every couple of weeks it's not every game, obviously. And then there's another YouTuber, Mark Goldbridge, kind of an OG in the YouTuber football space. He can now show Bundesliga matches as well in the UK and Ireland for free.

Will Martin: 22:12

So it brings in a new audience that people now get to watch it in a new way and people of millennial Gen, z kind of generation kind of want that kind of engagement that they can chat with the content creator that could be read out and just start a talking point and get someone else's opinion or be part of the conversation when you're watching on TV, like you have to go to Twitter, which is a distinct world, but it's interesting that you are not focusing or put your ex not in one basket, because we don't know what will happen with TikTok or with other platforms, but TikTok is actually where a lot of attention is.

Joeri Billast: 22:50

I'm also curious because you know the World Cup is there, but what is your ambition or what is the bright future looking like for you?

Will Martin: 23:00

Yeah, we're bringing close attention to what's happening in the US. Obviously, crypto is becoming more accepted there in terms of regulations and kind of actually defining what the rules may be. Obviously, the stablecoin bill during the summer gave a lot of clarity of probably the first big legislation for cryptocurrencies. There's a big kind of roundtable next week in the US between the CFTC and SEC in terms of how they're going to regulate prediction markets. So that'd be really interesting and we're kind of eagerly waiting to see what the outcomes of that will be. So we can see what the rules, what we can and can't do, so we can potentially go to the US. I thought it would be many years before that would happen, but it's accelerated massively in 2025. So that would be the big ambition. So being in as many markets as possible, us probably being the biggest single market out there, and it's really about growing the liquidity pool. So being a global interconnected experience, because right now it's very patchwork between certain countries or jurisdictions that kind of all act independently, but we know how the world is.

Joeri Billast: 24:08

It's one world, it is. The world is getting smaller and smaller. Well, Will I think I feel your excitement? You still need to pitch, guys.

Will Martin: 24:21

It's a great practice, though I've got some talking points.

Joeri Billast: 24:25

As I said, you will find out what happens with Will's pitch in the show notes, but for now, if people want to follow you, they want to connect with you, they want to know more about LiveDuel. Where would you like me to send them? Yeah?

Will Martin: 24:38

LiveDuel and we're at LiveDuel on pretty much every social platform, and then, for myself, will P Martin on pretty much every LinkedIn and every other social. I've been very conscious of the branding, of having everything the same across everything. So livejewelcom at livejewel, will P Martin on all socials.

Joeri Billast: 24:58

Amazing. So thank you so much for being a guest on my show and good luck with the pitch. Perfect, thank you very much, and thank you for having me, yuri. Guys, what an amazing episode. We stayed outside here of the huge building where SBC Summit is taking place. I hope you felt a bit of the atmosphere that is here and the story is really inspiring. So be sure to follow the podcast if you aren't doing this already. If you think that Will's story is inspiring for people around you entrepreneurs, creators, people into crypto be sure to share this episode with them. If you are not following my show, I just mentioned it, but if you haven't given me a review yet, it would be really good if you give me at least five stars, because then my reach grows even further and, of course, I would like to see you back next time. Take care.