Juice Reel Founder Takes On ‘Tout’ Industry With Performance-Based Platform

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Just about every app in the sports betting space that aims to make bettors smarter has the same pitch: “We want to be the Bloomberg Terminal for sports bettors.”

But for Ricky Gold, the founder of Juice Reel, it’s a little different.

“Think Bloomberg Terminal meets OnlyFans,” Gold said.

Don’t worry — Juice Reel isn’t “teasing” you with famous sports bettors in their birthday suits — but Gold and company are indeed trying to strip the tout business down to its undershorts (if you will).

“The market is broken,” Gold said. “Everyone is trying to sell you picks, there’s no validation to it. It’s been like this forever, well before online betting. Whoever can market the best is the best betting advice salesman, but it should be the best bettors instead. It’s outrageous that selling betting advice is a marketing game and not a performance game. It should be the complete opposite.”

Enter what Gold is currently calling “community locks,” the newest feature at Juice Reel, where users — there are over 100,000 of them currently for the one-year-old app — can set a weekly price and sell their picks to other users.

The chief difference? The other users can see your bet-by-bet performance over the lifetime of your wagers.

Which is where Juice Reel got its genesis moment.

Major gaps

When Gold set out to launch Juice Reel, he had a clear objective: solve a major gap in how bettors track their performance.

“If you asked any sports bettor how they did last football season, you’d never get a numerical answer,” he said. “It’s not because they don’t want to tell you; it’s because no one really knows.” 

In sports betting, tracking every win, loss, and bet type across platforms is difficult, and this lack of data often leaves even seasoned bettors guessing at their performance.

Gold’s insight into this problem stems from a lifetime around sports betting — his father was an avid bettor — and years of experience in data engineering. His tech background includes roles at Google and Booz Allen Hamilton, and he spent time as a tech consultant where he led teams in building data-cleansing engines for financial systems.

“Banks have tons of inbound systems that need to talk to each other,” he said, “and I thought sports betting could benefit from a similar approach.”

Basically, just as financial data is harmonized across platforms — Chase can talk to Citi which can talk to your local regional bank — Gold’s vision was to create a streamlined way for bettors to track their bets, where FanDuel could talk to DraftKings could talk to BetMGM.

In 2019, he started building Juice Reel, and took a grassroots approach by recruiting a team from his network on LinkedIn.

“I found some smart people around New York (where Gold lives), took them out for coffee, and explained my vision,” he said. “We all agreed to work nights and weekends while keeping our day jobs.”

They spent two years developing a proof-of-concept app, which launched in 2021, connecting just one offshore betting site.

“We really just wanted to see if we could build something that worked,” he said.

It worked!

In March 2023, Juice Reel officially launched with a fully functional app that allowed users to aggregate bets from multiple sportsbooks. Since then, the platform has added unique features, including a real-time betting analysis tool that shows bettors how they stack up against others in the community. 

“At its core, the app brings in all your bets from wherever you bet and gives you analytics on yourself,” Gold said.

One of the more distinctive features Juice Reel offers is the “sharp-mush” metric, which shows where the most successful (sharp) and least successful (mush) bettors are placing their bets on a given game. 

“It’s an insightful piece of information that can’t be found anywhere else,” he noted. “If all the sharp bettors are on one side and all the mush bettors on the other, it’s valuable insight.”

From there, it wasn’t a big leap to the “community locks” feature, which only recently debuted.

“Every user can set a price for their betting picks, and anyone can subscribe to them,” he said.

This feature turns every bettor into both a consumer and a potential seller of betting advice, giving transparency and credibility to an industry traditionally dominated by marketing.

“The numbers tell the story,” Gold said. “It’s not about who can market the best, it’s about who can bet the best.”

Juice Reel is a free app, though there is a $9 monthly fee for some features, including an arbitrage tracker and the ability to move the “sharp-mush” variables around.

“My goal with Juice Reel has always been to be a data layer sitting between all sportsbooks and all sports bettors,” Gold said. “We want to solve the betting advice issue that has existed forever, and I want to make users smarter. We want to add intelligence to the betting world. Still have fun, but do it smarter.”