Betting on Education: How Jared Lee Created a Free Platform for Smarter Sports Betting

The sports betting landscape can be overwhelming, which is why in today's Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur Spotlight we're excited to feature Jared Lee, the innovative mind behind LetMeBet.com. Jared has created a platform that bridges the knowledge gap for both newcomers and experienced bettors through educational resources and analytical tools. His journey from corporate employee to entrepreneur showcases the power of hustle, as he initially built his business during nights and weekends around his day job. With a strong belief in democratizing information, Jared is revolutionizing how people approach sports betting and fantasy sports.

Hi, Jared! Thanks for joining us today. Tell us about your business. Who do you serve, how do you serve them, and what's the impact that your business and work makes?

LetMeBet.com serves both newcomers and experienced participants in the sports betting and fantasy sports space through a combination of educational resources and practical tools. For those new to sports betting, we provide detailed educational content that breaks down fundamental concepts and strategies. For more experienced users, we offer sophisticated analytical tools including odds comparison across major sportsbooks, parlay calculators, and fantasy sports draft tools.

Our platform makes a meaningful impact by helping users make more informed decisions through data and education. Rather than simply telling people what bets to make, we focus on providing the knowledge and tools they need to analyze opportunities themselves. This includes maintaining up-to-date information on state-by-state gaming regulations, offering real-time odds comparison features, and providing specialized calculators for both traditional sports betting and fantasy sports.

What sets us apart is our commitment to combining practical tools with educational content, all developed by a team with both technical expertise and domain knowledge in sports betting and fantasy sports. This approach helps create more knowledgeable and analytical participants in these growing industries, whether they're managing their fantasy football team or comparing odds across different sportsbooks.

Tell us about the moment you finally felt like you went from wantrepreneur to entrepreneur.

When I first started my own business, I still kept my corporate day job as a way to bootstrap my new venture. When I started making sacrifices and looked forward to working on my own business any chance I could around my day job, I started to feel like a real entrepreneur. The commitment I maintained to hustle until my business income supplanted my income as an employee is what I believe set me apart from my old self.

Describe the moment or period in your life/career that motivated you to make the entrepreneurial leap.

I think beginning my career in my early 20s after graduating from college was the wakeup call I needed to truly consider starting my own business. Before I started my corporate career, I thought getting a full-time job was the ultimate goal. Little did I know just how much autonomy I was capable of creating for myself in life. It was only a few years into my career that something switched inside of me to pursue something bigger than working for someone.

Describe a tool, service, or software that has been a game-changer for your business. How does it contribute to your success?

This doesn't apply to everyone, but for my role as a coder building tools for LetMeBet.com, the autocomplete features of LLMs have been a huge time saver. These features aren't smart enough to outright replace software developers yet (in my opinion), but they are still outrageously helpful in saving time and energy. To me, they are like language calculators (or in this case, coding calculators). Not having them is like if you had to do a large math problem by hand with pen and paper instead of using a calculator.

We know that success is very often a non-linear path. Tell us about a failure, pivot point, or lesson that changed your course or direction and helped to get you where you are today.

This is something that happens constantly as one of our main strategies for growth is SEO. SEO is such a dynamic landscape that we constantly have to reevaluate if a recent change or feature gave us the results we wanted. We alternate between link-building and content creation, and the type of content we create is often determined by the most recent SEO analysis we performed on ourselves.

What unconventional strategy did you employ that significantly impacted your business?

We maintain that providing all of our content and tools for free provides greater compounding returns in the long run. Rather than charging for some of our tools (i.e. pursuing a SaaS model), which we very well could, we felt that attracting as many users as possible by offering our amazing tools for free is what will allow us to grow to the level that we aspire to.

What’s something you wish you knew sooner that you’d give as advice for aspiring or newer entrepreneurs?

To quote Steve Jobs (paraphrasing), this thing that we call life was defined by people no smarter than you or I. They try to tell us that we should go to college, we should buy a house, get married by a certain age and have kids, save a little money, but that is a very rigid way to live your life and based on someone else's vision. You can pursue these things if you want, but you don't have to! You actually have the power to make a bigger impact on the world than you think you can, and all you have to do is want it more and to develop the skills that will enable you to act on your ambitions. There are few things more fulfilling than doing work that you want to do and getting paid for it. It's hard to get that when you have an employer who decides for you what you'll work on.

Want to dive deeper into Jared's work? Find more in the links below:

• Visit LetMeBet.com
• Follow Jared on X @CommishJared