BullRush CEO on the opportunity between trading, betting, and fantasy

Trent Hoerr has spent most of his career straddling two worlds—first as a futures trader in Chicago, and now as founder and CEO of BullRush, a platform that puts trading and sports picks into a peer-to-peer competition format.

BullRush users enter contests with a virtual bankroll and compete for cash prizes. The wagers themselves aren’t real money, but the competition is. “We’ve blended fantasy sports and sports betting into what I call fantasy betting,” Hoerr said on The BettingStartups Podcast . “It’s a full-on gamified approach to sports picking and trading.”

That gamification goes beyond results, and more largely serves as an anchor of the product, Hoerr said. BullRush awards badges, certificates, and experience points designed to keep players engaged even when they don’t win. 

Beyond gamification, Hoerr says the company has learned to be selective about which voices it listens to. Early surveys skewed toward free users with no intent to pay, a mistake he says other startups fall into, and one that sent the product in the wrong direction. “We don’t want the free people that have no intention of ever putting money in the system giving us feedback… We want all the paid users, which is the target demographic you actually want in the product,” he said.

Underpinning BullRush is Hoerr’s belief that the social and competitive layers of sports betting have been stripped away. He says the startup is trying to bring the “social element” back to sports picking and trading, adding that the shift online has made betting an isolating activity. “More importantly than the money aspect, I think it’s just about proving that you’re good at something and competing against other people.”

BullRush also reflects a larger industry trend we’ve watched unfold over the past year: the blurring of lines between trading and betting markets. Hoerr reinforced the belief that his product and others like it, which straddle the line of betting and trading, are games of skill—arguing that research and analysis in either space drive desired outcomes. 

“In sports betting, you go and you figure out which odds are the most favorable for you… In trading you look at the market analysis.” Hoerr says the “parallels” between the two audiences are “pretty significant,” and help explain why “most traders also gamble or do sports betting or do crypto trading.”

That overlap matters strategically. By emphasizing the skill involved in both trading and sports picks, BullRush was able to position itself under daily fantasy sports rules rather than as gambling—a crucial step in getting to market.

BullRush today counts more than 150,000 users across both trading and sports competitions, and Hoerr says the pivot toward sports has been possible precisely because the business hasn’t taken outside capital. “When we first launched, the core focus was trading and we’ve gradually started pivoting into more sports… had we had outside investors, that probably wouldn’t have been possible.”

For now, the company’s focus is firmly on the football season and a $100,000 NFL survivor contest that will mark its first full season in market. Beyond that, Hoerr sees the peer-to-peer model only growing stronger as more users seek social, competitive ways to play. “I think BullRush is going to be at the core of that,” he said.

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