Show #66 – Are You Ready for the Sports Scoop With Hayden Frederick?

By Ryan Knuppel

Posted on January 10, 2020

On this episode of the Knup Sports Show, founder of The Sports Scoop, Hayden Frederick joins us! We talk about his betting email newsletter, where he got started, and Hayden gives us a prediction on when his home state of Texas will legalize sports betting.

Show notes from The Sports Scoop Interview

Ryan Knuppel: Today we talk with the founder of The Sports Scoop, Hayden Frederick. He talks about his betting email newsletter, where he got started and gives us a little prediction on when the home state of Texas will legalize sports betting.

Ryan Knuppel: Everywhere you turn it’s the same old sports talk, the same headlines, the same news and the same boring information. This podcast is here to change all of that. We bring you hot sports takes, winning sports betting strategy and picks, reliable gaming industry news and breaking interviews with some of the biggest names in sports business. My name is Ryan Knuppel and welcome to the Knup Sports Show. All right, welcome back to another episode of the Knup Sports Show. So excited you’re here today. Thanks so much for listening and tuning in each and every week or almost each and every day now it seems like we’re getting another interview and another a new story out for you here at the Knup Sports Show. My name is Ryan Knuppel. I’m the host here today. I’m joined by another special guest, Hayden Frederick. Hayden, are you with me?

Hayden: I am. Thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure to be on.

Ryan Knuppel: Hey man, thanks so much for being here. Appreciate it. We connected just the other day. Actually, it’s a funny story. Maybe back two, three weeks ago I started seeing this newsletter pop up in my email, or I don’t know if it’s Facebook. Somewhere I started seeing the sports betting newsletter and you’ll talk a little more about it, but I subscribed. I’m like, “Oh, it’s the best daily sports betting newsletter.” I’m saying, “That’s me. I’m going to subscribe.” And sure enough, man, I’ve been digesting your content and your newsletter for the last few weeks. And then just the other day we connected on LinkedIn and I thought nothing better than to talk to you. Understand a little bit more about what you’re doing in the business. So thank you for being here. Appreciate it.

Hayden: Yeah, it’s crazy how that stuff happens. The power of LinkedIn, right.

Ryan Knuppel: Right, right. Power of social media. So The Sports Scoop email newsletter. First of all, tell us a little bit about what that is, where it came about and, and so forth.

Ryan Knuppel: Yeah, so The Sports Scoop, I’ll get right into it. It’s the simplest way to receive the days sports betting info worth knowing. So how we do that is it’s one email delivered daily for free. It kind of previews the day’s top events, recaps what went down yesterday, what happened last night, and then provides some other entertaining news along the ways. Some crazy prop bet somebody hit, what’s going on in the legal side of things. Try to keep it in a very conversational tone, about less than five minutes of your morning. So that’s what The Sports Scoop is.

Ryan Knuppel: That’s amazing. So where did it come about? Have you always been in the sports betting industry? What’s the background? What’s the history of this? Where did you come up with this idea?

Hayden: Yeah, so a little brief background about myself. I grew up playing every sport, all sports, then I went on and played golf in college. So as we all know, golf and gambling go hand in hand. So I’ve always been watching sports my whole life and I feel like whether you gamble on sports or not, sports, gambling is a part of sports, because why do you want to watch a game whenever it’s pick a more one point spread, because you know it’s going to be a good game whether you have money on it or not. So that’s how I got introduced to the sports gambling world.

Hayden: The way The Sports Scoop was created was one of my buddies referred me to, it’s called The Morning Brew. It’s a daily newsletter that gives you the top news. I was like, “Wow, that’s a great idea.” Rather than skimming through all these articles, reading article after article, webpage after webpage, I can get everything I need to know in five minutes. I was like… And then taking it and running with that in the sports betting industry, I feel like that’s something that was needed. So just seeing where we can grow it right now.

Ryan Knuppel: There you go. That’s amazing. So tell me, are you a one man shop? Do you have a team that’s helping you put this thing together? Because I know more than anyone, content is a grind. Every day it doesn’t stop. And so I’m curious, are you putting this thing together each and every evening or each and every morning or do you have a team helping you?

Hayden: Yeah, so right now it’s a one man show.

Ryan Knuppel: Impressive.

Hayden: I, yeah, the way I typically try to build out a template around lunchtime, what I’m going to be talking about for the next day, games I might want to highlight. And then each evening, each night while I’m watching the games, it’s where I’ll write the next day’s preview and then the morning before it goes out is whenever I do the previous day’s recap.

Ryan Knuppel: Nice. Nice. So for those of you listening, it’s thesportsscoop.com, thesportsscoop.com and it looks like an easy way to sign up here. Email, just simple email opt in. He’s not sending out any spam or anything like that. It’s just that every day we’re getting a nice newsletter to our inbox that shows a recap of what’s going on, just like Hayden just said there. Another question more on the business side of things. I guess Hayden, we’re all starting things for a reason. I know you want to help the community. This is a great idea, but tell us a little bit about, I don’t know, the monetization of something like this. Are you looking to bring on advertisers? Are you, what’s the plan here? Are you, I’m curious.

Hayden: No, of course. Like you said, as we all know, it’s great to give out content, but we do have a goal in mind with that. So you hit it. It’s advertising and then it’s through affiliate marketing. So a lot of it has to do with, it’s great to have a huge subscriber list, but then it comes down to who’s actually opening it each day. You can sit here and say, “Oh, we have a million,” but if 1% of those are opening the email, it doesn’t look that great. So we focus highly on our unique open percentage and then eventually that’ll drive us into that native advertising where people are reading the daily newsletter and it doesn’t feel as if you’re reading it, an advertisement just stands out at you in a banner or anything. It’s uniquely written.

Ryan Knuppel: Sure, sure. It sounds like you’ve got a little bit of an internet marketing background in you from what I’m hearing with email marketing and talking some of that language that I deeply love.

Hayden: Learning as I go.

Ryan Knuppel: Yeah. Yeah, but that’s how we do it these days. That’s age we live in. It’s digest the information and learn it as we need to and then act on it right away. So I love what you’re doing with all of that. Pretty amazing. So advertise, let’s expand on the advertising thing, because listeners of this show are probably a lot of igaming, business people, sports betting, maybe potential business people, things of that nature. So if someone was interested, you have, what does it just contact you or do you have a page or something that they can go to if they were interested in being a part of the newsletter?

Hayden: Yeah, so right now it’s just the easiest way. Contact me. We’ll set up a quick phone call, do a little introduction. On each email there’s a link at the bottom where it says advertising. You can just click on that, email us directly, or my email is Hayden@thesportsscoop.com. That’s the easiest way to do it. I enjoy just jumping on the phone, chatting and learning more about these other growing companies and introducing myself.

Ryan Knuppel: Nice. Nice. All right, good. Let’s get the business out of the way. Let’s have some fun. All right, so LSU, Clemson, who we got?

Hayden: I like LSU.

Ryan Knuppel: I do too, man. I think…

Hayden: The stars are aligned. I…

Ryan Knuppel: They’re having a great year. Clemson has a history a little bit, but LSU, I don’t know if anybody can touch them this year and we’ve seen the odds and betting trends and patterns leading towards LSU as well, which is always a big sign.

Hayden: Yeah. Down in new Orleans, that would be an awesome game to go to.

Ryan Knuppel: Oh man. Wouldn’t that be. Where are you located?

Hayden: So I’m in Texas. Dallas, Fort Worth area, Cowboys fan, Mike McCarthy, feeling pretty good about that.

Ryan Knuppel: Yeah, I think that will be a good hire for them.

Hayden: Yeah. We’ve got the Mavs looking young and we got Luca, so new Rangers stadium coming up next season. So it’s a pretty exciting time to be in Dallas.

Ryan Knuppel: That’s cool. Some exciting times there. That’s awesome. I’m down in Florida, not really exciting times in sports here ever in Orlando. I mean we’ve got the Magic, I guess the Magic, I’m forced into it. I’m actually a Chicago Bulls fan at heart. I’m a Midwest guy, lived in most of my life in Illinois. Backstory, got to play. I played college basketball and got the experience to play with Michael Jordan. He hosted his camp at my college and so he came in.

Hayden: I saw that.

Ryan Knuppel: Unbelievable. Unbelievable man.

Hayden: Yeah. I saw your little bullet point in there that you played basketball with Michael Jordan.

Ryan Knuppel: Yeah. Nobody can ever take that bullet point away from me.

Hayden: No, I wish I had the same.

Ryan Knuppel: So I’ll hold onto that one.

Hayden: I’m just trying to meet Tiger Woods since I’ve jumped off the call.

Ryan Knuppel: There you go. Well you need to get down to Florida more. He’s probably always down this way, but, well that’s awesome. So yeah, that big game, I don’t know when this is going to get published, hopefully in the next couple of days, but big college football coming up, NBA in full swing NFL, we’re in the playoffs. You have a, not a favorite team, but do you have a favorite to win the Super Bowl at this point? And we saw some crazy stuff happened last weekend with the Patriots and the Saints and all the above. Give us The Sports Scoop on who’s going to win the Super Bowl now.

Hayden: Man, put me on the spot like that.

Ryan Knuppel: I know you’re not a prediction machine. I’m just, just give me your thoughts.

Hayden: That is, yeah, as you can see, we kind of try to stay away from that.

Ryan Knuppel: Sure. You’re news, you’re information.

Hayden: There’s thousands of there out there on Instagram, social media, but I think everybody wants to say Baltimore. It’s tough to go against that. I don’t know. I think the 49ers look good.

Ryan Knuppel: Yeah, there’s quite a bit of parody, man. It’s crazy to see it and I think we saw that with the Patriots and the Saints getting knocked off. It was really little that separates all of these teams when it really comes down to it.

Hayden: Right, it’s crazy. You see the spreads of nine and a half more than touchdown favorites. It’s like, “We’re in the playoffs, right?”

Ryan Knuppel: Yeah. That’s always the, it’s always juicy to see that. You’re like, “Oh,” and then you’re like, “Wait, there’s a reason that line is nine or 10,” so then you’ve got to step back and use your betting brain to think, “Okay, why is it this way?” Let’s look at the trends. Let’s look at the, they know something we don’t know. Right. It’s, that’s betting for you. So awesome. What’s the future of The Sports Scoop? Is it this, is this the end goal here? Which if it is, I’m not poo-pooing that. This is great. I’m just curious, do you have bigger goals in mind for The Sports Scoop or is it this forever?

Hayden: Yeah, no it’s interesting and it’s, it is very early on so I think there’s a few different avenues we can take. One of them, just being a sports betting newsletter we try to keep it very niche, because as you know there’s tons of sports betting media companies out there, social media accounts, everything, which is, that’s all great, but at the same time your typical sports better, once it becomes more legal across the nation, they don’t have time to skim, go through article after article. So we try to do that work for them and give it to them the simplest way possible. Where that’s going in the future, I would love to grow our subscribers, see where we can take off with that. But then there’s also the way where you have these sports betting startups where we, I feel like we have something that they need. They don’t know the power of what a newsletter can bring. So I think there’s, we’re talking to some pretty cool companies that I think we’ll start seeing more of here in the next year or two that we could create a co-branded newsletter.

Ryan Knuppel: Yeah, I love that idea. That’s a, that’s definitely something I think a lot in the industry… If you’re listening and you don’t have any kind of an email list or a newsletter, but you do have a business and you have a product or a service, email, there’s still power in email. You may think it’s, you may think it’s kind of like, “Oh, that’s so 2000s” or so old school, but I’m telling you, there’s still power in it. We send out a daily newsletter at Knup Sports as well, but it’s nothing as cool as this. It’s a free pick and that’s about it. But like you said to your point earlier, you get data from that, from seeing who opens it and seeing how much interest there is in it. And then you get feedback, you get the replies and so it’s just all part of learning the industry and gauging where things are going. So I commend you, but I do, to your point there, anyone listening that doesn’t have one, I would recommend reaching out to Hayden and seeing if there’s some sort of an opportunity for a co-branded email newsletter there.

Hayden: Yeah, for sure.

Ryan Knuppel: Cool man. Well good. Well good. Well, I won’t keep you too long. Anything else? Any… Actually I’m going to put you on the spot one more time. So when is Texas becoming legal for sports betting? Give me your prediction on that, because I know nobody knows, right? We don’t know. But what is your thoughts? Is it going to happen in 2020, is it going to be 2025 or you think we fall in Texas?

Hayden: You guys know, Texas, we’re like our own country down here, so you never know.

Ryan Knuppel: I know.

Hayden: But I guess it’s looking like 2021 is when things might start getting passed more.

Ryan Knuppel: Okay. So that’s your kind of unofficial prediction, is we’re going to maybe get a little closer this year and then hopefully hammer something out in 2021.

Hayden: And what’s interesting where I am, is we have the, it’s called Texas Live!. I know there’s a few across the nation. They obviously different names, but it’s right next to the Cowboys stadium, the new Rangers ballpark. So I see that in the future being the place where everybody will be placing their bets here.

Ryan Knuppel: Tell you what, it just seems like such, it’s such a sports state, right? I just sound, seems like Texas will be huge. Texas is going to be a great market. Every time I think about it, it just blows me away that states are not coming on faster after they see what’s going on in New Jersey. They see the success happening in Indiana and Iowa. All these states are having so much success. The handle is so large. I’m sure they’re bringing in tax dollars. Maybe they’re just trying to learn first, or maybe there’s pushback, right? Probably push back in the political side or from Indian tribes. Things of that nature… Still just blows me away. It’s like, “Come on guys, this isn’t so difficult.” It’s sports. It’s not like we’re killing people here. We’re enjoying sports. I don’t know.

Hayden: Exactly, you’re always going to have your backlash, but I think it’s win-win all around. More people watch the games. It’s for the people. They…

Ryan Knuppel: For the people. That’s right. I one hundred percent agree with that one. That should be the Texas slogan, oh man.

Hayden: I’ll see what I can do.

Ryan Knuppel: There you go. Well good. Hayden, I appreciate you being on here, won’t keep you much longer. Tell them once again, it’s thesportsscoop.com. I recommend everyone that’s listening, everyone that sees comments here, please go out. Just subscribe. Very simple subscription. You just get an email a day. Easy. Hayden, you said email. Why don’t you tell us one more time where they can get ahold of you if they need to.

Hayden: Yep. So thesportsscoop.com just like Ryan said, super simple to sign up. You can always reply to that email that I send out each day or reach me at hayden@thesportsscoop.com and then we’re on social media @sportsscoopbet. So that’s the easiest way, always open to learn more about what you guys are doing and talk about what we’re doing at The Sports Scoop.

Ryan Knuppel: Great, Hayden. Well, I’m hopeful in a year that I’ll have you back on and you’ll have a million people on your email list and you can say, “Man, this really is boosted up over the years,” so we can continue keeping in touch. I appreciate it and if you ever need anything, don’t hesitate to holler.

Hayden: Yeah, well thanks again for having me on. It’s great talking to you.

Ryan Knuppel: No problem. And thanks everybody for listening. Appreciate it. Tune in whenever you can for interviews just like this where we talk to up and coming or people already in the industry. Hayden, you have a great day. We’ll talk to you all soon.

Hayden: All right, go Cowboys.

Ryan Knuppel: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Knup Sports Show. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider subscribing to our iTunes channel today. Plus, visit us at knupsports.com for more pics, previews, strategy, and news. That’s K-N-U-Psports.com.

Relevant Sports Scoop Links

Sign up for the daily Sports Scoop email newsletter here: https://www.thesportsscoop.com/
Email Hayden at hayden@thesportsscoop.com
Follow The Sports Scoop on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sportsscoopbet
Give The Sports Scoop a like on Twitter: https://twitter.com/sportsscoopbet