The sports betting app that is expected to revolutionize betting is coming to Brazil, called Wanna. Created by Carson Coffman and Jim Bob Morris, the application aims to connect people and offer an interactive betting mode, where the player bets having fun with friends.
The combination of sport and interactivity combines with the Brazilian and the Brazilian’s style of being, which already makes the product born with immense potential in Brazilian soil.
Founder Carson Coffman spoke exclusively with the iGaming Brazil team and explained to the audience that the app wants to achieve, the company’s goals and plans for the Brazilian market.
Read Carson Coffman’s Interview Below
iGaming Brazil: I would like you to introduce Wanna to the Brazilian audience.
Carson Coffman: Wanna is a sports betting platform that promotes community and gives the player the power to test their sports knowledge in a competitive environment, while having a fun and safe experience. Wanna offers a platform for sports fans to interact with each other, have fun and resolve their differences through a friendly bet. We want to connect real people and share real experiences and eliminate stigma around the sports betting industry.
Wanna is the future of sports betting. Imagine being on Facebook but everyone is there to talk about sports betting and challenge each other. At the end of the day, the action of “betting” is simply to have an opinion on something and prove that you know more than someone else. Doesn’t that sound like having conversations on social media? Wanna is a tool that offers, in an easy way, an opportunity for people to prove they are right, as they say “put their money where they are sure” (put their money where they mouth is). For example, if you say that Flamengo will beat Corinthians, then I will say: “let’s bet!”
The concept of Wanna is not new, but instead of casually betting at the bar table against your friends who never really pay you, we connect you with players from all over the world and guarantee that you will get your money when you win your bet.
iGaming Brazil: How was the idea of creating a betting site, different from the traditional one? Carson Coffman: I love sports, betting and competition. However, as a sports bettor, I felt that there should be a different way of betting on sports. Gradually, I realized that in no way would I be able to beat the houses and betting sites available on the market. I was just an ordinary person, with limited knowledge about sports and was betting against companies with a huge amount of money, resources and information. My role was to beat them and their role was to win and take my money. With this scenario, coupled with the fact that they were the ones creating the bets, it is very easy to conclude that it was not an unfair situation for the bettor.
So I decided to create a fairer and more egalitarian system and include aspects of sports betting that I like and that I think make the experience much more enriching. This way, at Wanna, we don’t want you to lose. We do not earn or lose money according to its performance, whether positive or negative. On the contrary, if we see that a user is losing with a certain frequency, we will contact you and give you tips on how to improve.
We want you to be the best sports bettor you can be at Wanna. They are ordinary people playing against ordinary people. There is no advantage for either side, it is a very fair system where the one who has more skill in reading the sport and the games will be the winner.
We also realized that, in the current sports betting market, the activity ended up being very lonely. You usually played alone, without interacting, or talking to people as passionate about the sport as you are. What I love about sports and betting is sharing the experience with other people. One of my best memories in sports betting was when I met with my friends and we all bet on the outcome of a particular game. Or when I bet against a friend who supported the opposing team and prove to him that my team was better.
I believe that everything in life is best experienced when we are in community and interacting with other people. Sports betting, however, has taken a path of isolation, becoming a solitary activity. And we want to solve this, connecting people, giving them the opportunity to interact, exchange experiences, talk about sports, among others.
iGaming Brazil: What are your plans for the Brazilian market? Carson Coffman: Now, we want to present to the Brazilian market the best option in sports betting ever. We want you to have the Wanna experience and see a new way of placing sports betting. Get to know a pro-user model that puts you face to face to test skills in a safe and fair environment that supports and promotes your victory.
Although created to be global, we see enormous potential in the Brazilian market. Wanna is very passionate about sports, community and competition. Brazil is a country of people who share these same passions. The Brazilian cheers fervently, celebrates and competes with friends, family and fans of other teams. The culture of Brazil, the people and this love for sport are all that Wanna represents. We want to bring that passion to Wanna, connecting sport lovers in a unique way and revolutionizing the market we know today.
iGaming Brazil: Many bookmakers land in Brazil targeting football, football teams and former players as brand ambassadors. What is Wanna’s marketing strategy for Brazil?
Carson Coffman: The sports betting market in Brazil today is made up of hundreds of companies that, in practice, have the same business model and spend huge amounts of money on Marketing to try to differentiate themselves. They never spend that money trying to improve their platforms. Some of these companies have had the same website and platforms for decades and do not want to invest to improve the consumer experience, let alone listen to them to understand their needs. They just look for ways to spend more than others on Marketing, sponsoring teams, uniforms, for example.
We at Wanna feel that if we give the user a better experience, we will eventually be recognized as the best option for the sports bettor. We don’t want to get into this fight for those who spend more or better their resources on Marketing. We want to use them to improve the consumer experience, as we have been doing since the beginning.
We believe that Wanna is the best option on the market, but we are always looking for ways to further improve the user experience, constantly listening to them and adopting their insights and needs to the platform. This year alone, for example, we should release 3 new versions of the app, with new changes and tools that emerged after user feedbacks. At the end of the day, we are sports bettors, we understand the market and we want to give them the best experience possible.
We believe that, from the point of view of Marketing, word-of-mouth will be our greatest ally, because Wanna is so unique and so focused on the user experience, that we will win them over with the innovative model we created. We also seek to ally ourselves with people who share the same vision and market values as we do, such as professional gamblers Nettuno and Danilo Martins.
iGaming Brazil: Does the fact that we have no regulations interfere with anything in your process?
Carson Coffman: First of all, I would like to make it clear that we are not a traditional casino or bookmaker. We offer a platform to help users interact and test their knowledge of sports among themselves, providing all the tools for the user to create their own game. We do not know how new regulations can affect our business, since the model we implement is very different from the one usually seen in the market.
However, we at Wanna are in favor of the regulation of the sports betting market, because, as mentioned earlier, we have a vision totally focused on the user and their experience, we are sports bettors ourselves, we know the pains of the market, on the dark side and frustrating, and we want the regulation to bring a solution that protects everyone. Finally, we also believe that inserting a tax system would be very beneficial to the country.
