Social skills: Dabble's efforts to disrupt the DFS+ space

Having enjoyed success with its social betting product on its home turf of Australia, Dabble next turned its attention to the US where the Darwin-headquartered operator launched a DFS+ product, Dabble Fantasy, back in October 2023, on day one of the NBA season.

Now available in 26 US states plus DC, more than 100,000 users take part in daily tournaments via Dabble Fantasy across competitions including the four major US pro leagues and sports events around the world such as soccer, tennis, and Australian rules football.

The Dabble pick’em competitions offer players the chance to win up to 1,000x their stake and boost their payout by choosing the Rocket Boost crash game feature when entering their selections.

Capitalizing on the popularity of the social features in its Australian sports betting app, Dabble ported elements across to the US product. Customers can use ‘copy entry’ to mirror the bets of fellow players, chat with the Dabble community via the ‘banter’ feature, and use ‘entry description’ to share insights and expertise with fellow users.

Going head-to-head with the largest DFS operators, Dabble proudly boasts on its home page that its US app was ranked second in the fantasy category in January in the Apple App Store, above DraftKings, FanDuel, and Underdog. Here, Tom Rundle, Dabble’s chief executive, reveals how the company’s social-first approach has been received stateside and why its product stands out.

EGR North America: Why did Dabble decide to launch a DFS product in the US?

Tom Rundle (TR): We’d always had international ambitions. We’d seen our Australian business as a bit of a test case for how we could take on the world. Australia is a big market. It’s highly regulated, tough to crack, and it’s got some big players with deep pockets. So, we felt if we could differentiate and get some traction in Australia, then there would be global opportunities. Originally, we were looking at OSB [online sports betting], so similar to Australia. One of our founders and chief strategy officer at the time, Jon [Robin], spent a bit of time in Canada and the US. He went to a lot of conferences and just reviewed the market for close to a year.

He then suggested we change tack a little bit because DFS was a good fit for a more social experience and it was more in line with Dabble’s brand and values, which is a low-entry value, wagering-for-fun-type environment. It also had a much lower barrier to entry and there was no need to get a license. All you needed was to have a product that customers liked, and we’d spent two years refining our product in Australia. We had all these features, an orchestration platform for payments, and a social and a community part of the app where people could chat. All we needed to do was actually build the DFS product itself.

Whereas startups would try to build the core first and then realize they needed all this other stuff, we’d already built all the other stuff and just had to build the core. It took six months, working a little bit off to the side. Then we launched, and the rest is history.

EGR NA: What were the factors behind Dabble Fantasy’s rapid initial success?

TR: We weren’t really coming from a challenger perspective, where somebody else had hundreds of features. We needed to make a decision between parity with those features and doing something a little bit different. The core product itself is pretty straightforward and, once you’ve got that, there’s really not much more to do. However, all the operators in the market do different things. Some have cool promos, some have different things in their profile, or ways of talking to their communities. There’s actually lots of competitors that are a little bit different, which is quite unlike the sports betting market where everyone’s pretty much the same.

In DFS, we’ve found that a lot of customers have multiple accounts with different providers, and if they’re clunky and hard to use, they’ll quit. But they’ll be happy to try something different and new. We’d built this app from all the experience of our tech and product team in an Australian market that has a really deep product innovation history. For example, same game multi [developed by Flutter’s Sportsbet] came out of Australia; it’s a place where a lot of features have been innovated. Stats tracker has been a big part of the market’s improved engagement. The mindset that led to all of this was a pretty clean, easy-to-use product in Australia that translated nicely to the US market, and so the customers who were happy to trial us became a lot stickier than with other competitors.

EGR NA: How has Dabble built brand recognition and a community in the US?

TR: In Australia, we’re probably spending a little bit more on direct digital advertising, but in the US, most of the growth has been pretty organic and through referral. I think there’s a real appetite to just try out new apps, especially from young people who talk to each other. We have a refer-a-friend program, like a lot of other operators in the space do, and that’s encouraged a lot of new customers to trial our product. Obviously, you’re not going to refer your mate unless you’ve got a product you think they’ll like. We have affiliates, some direct digital relationships, and we’re increasingly using influencers to promote some of our messages. But more than half of our sign-ups come through referrals from other customers, which is fantastic. In Australia, it’s a bit harder to measure because there’s no specific refer-a-friend program, as that’s not allowed under the current regulations in the country. We have carried out surveys, and close to 30%-40% of Australian sign-ups say they were referred by somebody, while in the US the figure is over 50%.

EGR NA: What is your USP?

TR: Firstly, it’s the community features like ‘copy entry’ — following other users on the app when they put a description for their entry and it will send the customer a push notification. That can all be done on the platform. Other operators have similar things but usually in offline social media or app groups, rather than on the app. Dabble Fantasy is more like a social media app than a DFS app in a lot of ways. We have the ‘banter’ section, which is pretty unique, where there’s various groups talking to each other while games are going on, or before, talking about their tips.

The second part is more transactional. We’ve got 1,000x [your stake], which we released about 12 months ago, and that’s quite popular. We’re pretty happy to offer all the way through from two to 12 picks in an entry. Others have followed a little bit but mostly they get to 1,000x through boosted picks, whereas we can put 12 50/50 lines in there and a customer pick can end up at 1,000x pretty easily. We’ve also got another product called Rocket Boost, which is quite popular in Australia, that we’re trialing in the US at the moment. It’s like a game within a game. Instead of just boosting your price, you boost your payout, but the rocket keeps going up, and then you have to stop it before it crashes, like a crash game.

EGR NA: When did live streaming launch in the US app and how has it helped build a community?

TR: In February we had the ‘Supper Bowl’ — because you’re not allowed to call anything the ‘Super Bowl’— during the week of the game, and that went down really well because it was Twitch-style engagement with the audience. We are still playing and experimenting with it, trying to work out how many hosts we need etc. We’ve run three streams now, including for ‘Mars Madness’ (aka March Madness) and they’re going pretty well.

EGR NA: Is the DFS user experience rivaling that of sports betting in the US?

TR: You go to a sportsbook app and they’re pretty much all the same. They say, “Win $100, get your money back, bet now, here’s the next thing coming up, some table tennis, the next NBA game.” And it’s just all in your face and very overwhelming. In the past, that was probably just a way of monetizing people, to get some urgency, to try and get them to click and have a bet. There’s an element of ease in finding what you want to bet on because you’ve basically come there to do that. But if you turn up to an app like Dabble, it shows you the kinds of picks other people are making. Maybe you can chat with them, maybe you can have a look around, and take your time seeing what the community is up to. Maybe you’ll place a wager or maybe not.

For us, the real measure of success is engagement with our app. We know there are some people who come to our app regularly, have a chat, and rarely put an entry in. But they will occasionally, and maybe they’ll tell their friends. We’re more interested in creating a sticky community of people who like using our app. We’ve got improvements coming. We want to create a better in-app experience for once the game starts. At the moment, it’s a pretty good app for pre-match.

I think the traditional sportsbook is probably a little bit more ‘yelly.’ For instance, “Here’s what you should do. You should get this value.” And it’s driven by value rather than by fun. Depending on your personality or what you’re interested in, if you’re a relatively low-stakes customer who wants to have a bit of fun, Dabble, or DFS apps generally, has a much better fun vibe than the value vibe sold by traditional sportsbooks in the US.

EGR NA: Are there any plans to add new sports or features to the existing DFS product?

TR: We’re looking at that all the time. We’ve probably added most of the major sports we want to add but the actual products within them can definitely do with an improvement. We increased the number of markets we offer in baseball since the launch of the new MLB season. We’ve got boosted picks and more home run markets. 

We launched esports halfway through 2024, which we’ve recently improved by changing some of our logic so we can have more picks in an entry. We’re definitely going to expand our cricket offering as that seems to be quite popular with certain parts of the community. There’s definitely some sports outside of the major ones that are of interest.

We’ve added Australian basketball, the NBL, which is a very strong league. We’ve put Australian rules football and rugby league in our US app and in the Australian app, because we offer pick’em in the Australian app as well. And that’s quite popular. Rocket Boost, that I mentioned earlier,  I think that could be really successful.

EGR NA: Are there plans for a Dabble sportsbook launch in the US?

TR: Not at this stage. We’re not saying no. We’ve definitely looked at it and there are a few options. I think eventually we’d like to be in as many states as we can and as many jurisdictions as we can, and that includes OSB in the US. But I think there are a lot of operators that have gone into certain states in the US, into that licensed market, and they’ve really struggled to make an impact. It’s drained a lot of their resources. With a logical, targeted approach in the right places at the right time, it’s definitely something we’d be interested in doing. We’re certainly looking at our software to make sure we’d be compliant with any regulations. If that opportunity does come up, then we’d be ready to move pretty quickly because it’s definitely a big opportunity.

EGR NA: What’s next for Dabble Fantasy in terms of growth, innovation, and expansion?

TR: We’re still growing. We’re tech- and product-led, which is one of the reasons why we’ve been successful. As someone who likes to have a friendly wager myself, the most frustrating thing is buggy, clunky, hard-to-use betslips and things like that. So, we really focus on those core elements of the app to make sure everything’s as it should be, and then adding a layer on top with our socials and community has been where we’ve gained a lot of attention.