Building and Transforming Duelo: An Online Sports Betting Platform Whose Business Model Changed with the Legal Landscape

As mentioned above, when Ralph first approached Net Solutions, actual online sports betting was not yet legal on a federal level in the U.S., so Ralph commissioned them to build a platform that didn’t require users to bet real money—but still gave them the opportunity to experience the thrill of competing over the outcome of games.

The Net Solutions BA and UX teams worked alongside Ralph’s team to design a sticky, gamified, user-friendly platform that allowed users to:

• Browse upcoming sporting events for specific types of sports
• Challenge a friend (or multiple friends)
• Easily create challenges using ready-made templates designed according to the rules and parameters for different types of sports
• Grow their profile and tout their wins using a gamified system
• Engage the community to make new friends

Receiving and Updating the Sports Data

A sports betting site relies on a constant stream of data about sporting stats and game results, which must be received and interpreted by the platform to identify the winners of each challenge. The sports data—a purely static, informational feed—came from a system called Donbest. Net Solutions created a parsing engine that allowed granular control over which data to import into the platform. That, in turn, enabled users to view information about upcoming events, and the engine would determine the winner of each challenge as soon as the Donbest feed provided the results of a given match.

Gamification via User Profiles

One key component of the gamification strategy was to provide each user with a dynamic profile that displayed their successes and incentivized future engagement. Duelo’s gamification engine prompted users to complete activities to advance their profiles to higher levels, just as they would in a video game. The engine kept track of their activities and when they met all the requirements, they would advance to the next level.

Net Solutions tied this data to a Hubspot-based workflow engine to ensure those events and activities triggered emails from the platform celebrating each achievement and guiding users to engage further. It also triggered alerts reminding users when an action was required on the platform.