Case Study: Even the Odds by Justin Schnell

Even the Odds was launched in September 2021, around the time sports betting laws were starting to change. New York legalized sports betting in January of this year, prior to that, enthusiasts would drive across the George Washington Bridge to place a bet in NJ, and then U-turn back across the bridge. According to Justin Schnell, who launched and wrote Even the Odds before expanding enough to bring in freelance writers, those who go to such lengths to place bets are not the target audience for this newsletter. Even the Odds is not trying to imitate a Sports Center or DraftKings. They don’t have a tech team building an algorithm that will collect mass amounts of betting data. Instead, a daily edition will offer brief summaries and in depth previews of 1-2 games a day, along with some insights about betting for the sports fan who has only ever placed a handful of bets (or none at all).

Even the Odds is a product of Overtime, a sports publisher and influencer focused on deep dives into players and cultivating a community of millennial/gen-z sports fans. In the overcrowded arena of sports media, Overtime has carved out a specific lane by establishing Even the Odds as a digestible guide to upcoming games and an entryway into sports betting. We spoke with Justin Schnell, a longtime sports buff who started with Overtime in the early days of the company. We discussed how Even the Odds grew to over 10K subscribers in the first year, using segmentation to further engage with quality subscribers, and how beehiv’s built-in functionality ended Justin’s quixotic search for growth-supporting plugins to enhance the newsletter’s previous platform, Substack.

The Newsletter: Even the Odds 

The Team:

Justin Schnell: Senior Manager, Editorial Operations at Overtime

Top posts to check out

Is This the Most Confusing Playoffs Ever?: May 23rd, 2022

The Hurricanes are Undefeated at Home in the Playoffs: May 20, 2022

2022 Goals

Double our subscriber number and build out ambassador programs, specifically on college campuses. Growing the Even The Odds brand by connecting it internally to other Overtime initiatives and on other social platforms. In-person activations around the major sporting events are also on the horizon.

Advice for other writers

Continue to test different methods of growth. Growing your newsletter is a long game, and you won’t know where your consumers are unless you try and fail multiple times. Also, make sure to listen to your readers and constantly build your content to match what they like and don’t like

Favorite beehiiv feature

The customer service has been great, Tyler and team has been very responsive to questions and suggestions that myself and my team have had over the past few months. We are looking forward to growing the relationship between beehiiv and Overtime.

Advice for anyone considering a switch to beehiiv

A built in referral system is probably the best thing you can have. We wasted a lot of time searching for a third party that plugs into our platform. If your platform doesn’t offer built in growth, I’d definitely consider how much time and energy you’re putting in to make it work. I spoke with five third-party newsletter growth companies and none of them worked with Substack. We ended up trying two to see if we could hack around it and make it work but it was a lot of effort and not at all worth it. With beehiiv, the referral program is there already, it’s a consistent method of growth that you don’t have to think about.

Tell me about Even the Odds

Even The Odds previews 1-2 sports games a day, from an “intro to betting” perspective. We give easy to digest updates on the league to set the scene, then dive into each team and their players. It’s all tied together by providing our readers with easy to understand betting lines

The sports betting space is extremely crowded right now; there’s so many companies pushing algorithms, recapping betting trends and using social media to stay relevant at all times of the day. We’re trying to carve out a different lane of giving you one quick, easy to digest sports read, with betting information lightly tied in. Hopefully it differentiates us over time and helps all levels of sports fans stay in the loop

Why a newsletter?

The newsletter space is really interesting. There’s so many of them, but at the same time they are basically relevant for 12+ hours every day. Platforms like Twitter and Instagram are hard to build a brand on because content is only relevant for a few hours or even minutes, but a newsletter allows brands the ability to communicate with their audience for an extended period of time on a daily basis.

At Overtime we pride ourselves on the ability to storytell around sports, and for years we’ve done so primarily through video content. ETO is our first attempt at producing daily, engaging editorial content around the emerging vertical of sports betting.

Why beehiiv?

The referral program! We’ve been planning for an ambassador program where we reward someone for getting others to sign up, like college students spreading the word on campus. It’s super easy to track this through the referral system in beehiiv, it would be arduous to do the same thing with Substack. Less work for more results.

It’s also what’s coming down the pipeline. We’re excited about the capability for readers to share a specific section and only that section and, beehiiv has indicated that it’s planning to build that in. Imagine if you could tweet something, a specific paragraph that you’ve read. We’re psyched for new features like that. Added ways to share your newsletter is always a plus. We know what it’s like to be start-up and want to do a ton of things, so it may not be done all at once but we like working with beehiiv b/c we can make a suggestions and be heard. With a Substack or Mailchimp, I don’t even know how we would make a request.

What sports are covered?

We cover all sports, the core is football and basketball. We built our team of freelancers so that we have writers who are specialists in the sport(s) they cover and we’ll continue to do that. We’ll be going a little rogue starting in July when sports slow down, we’ll focus on soccer, tennis, and baseball. There’s not anything we won’t cover. We’ve covered golf and we will do it again. We haven’t done NASCAR but we would. It’s more important to have the internal capacity, we want writers who know the lingo and betting framework. Our goal is to make all newsletters interesting, how do you turn an average sporting event into the most exciting thing in the world? We’ve picked the two worst teams playing and figured out how to make it feel relevant. On the flip side, when it’s really busy, we rely on our instincts and the fact that we have a pulse on the sports world to steer our coverage to the most relevant games to cover.

What have you found to be most impactful in scaling Even the Odds?

We’ve been testing multiple channels, such as podcast ad-reads, Facebook ads, Twitter promotions and collaborations with other newsletters. The email capture ads have definitely been our most consistent method of growth, but the biggest bumps in subscribers have come from promotions with larger brands

Can you tell us about some Even the Odds’ promotions?

We connected with a network of college bookstores because we have been looking to bump up our college audience. The bookstore has a distribution list of 500,000 emails from campuses across the country. We had about 5,000 subscribers sign up with a 46% open rate and only 650 unsubscribes. The beehiv segmentation feature is really helpful in this scenario, we can measure the quality of subscribers. It allows for better engagement, we can target those who have opened a hundred newsletters and reach out and thank them. It lets us know whether what we’re doing is working. We just launched another big promotion in partnership with the Just Women’s Sports newsletter, in conjunction with an our dedicated WNBA post. They have a list of 60,000, of the new subscribers; a day after the part 1 of the promotion, we’ve received 100 new subscribers with a 65% open rate. Part 2 will be more conversion oriented.