Bet Caddy CEO Tony Ryan on building the “ultimate sports remote”

Sports fans today face a frustrating reality: the games they want to watch are scattered across dozens of platforms, making it harder than ever to follow the action that matters most. “There were 37 different streaming services channels needed to watch the 302 games that happened over a Friday, Saturday, and Sunday across the five major leagues,” Bet Caddy CEO and Co-founder Tony Ryan said on The BettingStartups Podcast. “And that’s unacceptable.”

His company is taking aim at that problem by giving fans “that NFL Red Zone style viewing experience, but every other day of the year.”

Bet Caddy works by tying into users’ existing subscriptions and layering in real-time data. A core innovation is its notification system, which takes advantage of broadcast latency to alert users ahead of moments that matter to them. A user betting on an Aaron Judge home run prop will get a notification that takes them to the corresponding game stream right as he walks up to the plate, Ryan shared as an example.

It wasn’t always that way. The first version of Bet Caddy, launched around March Madness, didn’t include notifications, and the experience wasn’t strong enough to pull fans away from the apps they were already using. That shortfall revealed the bigger challenge: to succeed, Bet Caddy has to break the habit.

“I was an Action Network user for 10 plus years. Like my friends, they use TheScore… there’s a million places you could check scores… What I think about it is we have to break that habit and we have to be better, whether it’s in one area or every area.”

Ryan has leaned heavily on content as a top-of-funnel growth engine. Without the budgets for paid ads, he built an audience of 20,000 in six months through comedic, highly shareable skits. Videos like his “historical bad bets” series—where he photoshopped bet slips where the last parlay leg are for David to beat Goliath, or the Wright Brothers to get airborne in a plane—earned millions of organic impressions and reposts from major betting accounts. “I think using comedy as an ability to facilitate right attention, but ultimately at the end, pay it off with some sort of product dynamic, is what we’re going for.”

Today, Bet Caddy is free to use, but the upstart is thinking through a range of monetization strategies—from affiliate partnerships with sportsbooks and streaming services to premium app features. While the vision for a paid offering isn’t clear yet, Ryan is operating under the assumption that if Bet Caddy can find a way to give value to your customers, “money comes secondary.”

Building the app as non-technical founders has been a grind, but Ryan sees an upside. “It just adds a layer of where you have those struggles, you get so much better in other areas.” Without the ability to code, he and his co-founder were forced to become scrappy—teaching themselves design tools, learning how APIs work, and iterating on user flows through trial and error. 

The process wasn’t efficient, but it sharpened their focus on what mattered most: the user experience. They couldn’t afford to release something just “okay.” Every iteration had to zero in on the moments that would make fans say ‘this is better than what I already use.’ That constraint, Ryan believes, is what ultimately pushed Bet Caddy to prioritize the notification system and build toward a product that feels indispensable rather than incremental.

Looking ahead, Ryan is aiming big. “My goal is that people only have to hit one button when they wanna watch sports at night. It’s the power button.”

Bet Caddy is now live on iOS, with NFL and college football support on the way, positioning itself as the “ultimate sports remote” for fans who want to watch what matters most, when it matters most.

Listen to the full podcast on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.