Dabble Creates Social Sports Wagering App with Stream Chat and Feeds

Challenge: Dabble needed to create a unique social sports wagering experience while managing user interactions and ensuring effective moderation in a competitive market.

Strategy: By partnering with Stream, Dabble integrated real-time chat, activity feeds, and moderation tools, enhancing user engagement while minimizing development complexity. 

Result: Dabble has maintained high uptime with minimal support needed due to Stream's comprehensive documentation, while social engagement metrics such as user interaction, bet copying, and group chat participation have increased, reinforcing Dabble's unique position in the social sports wagering market.

About Dabble

Dabble is a global sports wagering and daily fantasy sports business. In Australia, they offer a comprehensive sportsbook for betting on sports and racing events. In the U.S., their primary product is Pick'em, a daily fantasy sports (DFS) platform where customers place entries on player projections.

Ryan O'Callaghan, Head of Social Product at Dabble, describes the app: "Dabble is a global sports wagering business that has products in Australia and the US at the moment. The Australian product is a traditional sportsbook that allows customers to bet on sports and racing events with fixed odds betting. The US product is more of a daily fantasy player statistics product where customers can place an entry on player projections."

Dabble's unique selling point in the crowded sports betting market is its social features. 

"The unique proposition that we offer is you can do pretty much everything you can on all the other bookies and DFS providers, but the social experience is front and center.

For example, our homepage is essentially a feed of events that other punters have placed that you can copy straight away.

Customers on the Dabble platform can communicate with other punters, see what they are placing bets or entries on, and be able to copy those entries and bets easily.

Every bet that you see on the platform has a profile name associated with it. You can view that profile, they can write up a biography about themselves and tell you why you should follow them. They can write a bet description on their bet to tell you why you should bet on this bet so it's a much more social experience."

Unlike most competitors who focus on promotions and user experience, Dabble encourages community interaction by enabling customers to view other profiles, see their bets, and copy them. Users can follow profiles, chat, and share bets, making the Dabble platform feel more like a community space than a solitary betting app.

Challenges in Building a Social Wagering Community

One of the main challenges Dabble faced in creating a social sports wagering community was content moderation. With customers able to chat through Banter channels, comment on bets, and add descriptions, there was the risk of inappropriate content being posted. 

"The most obvious and probably biggest challenge that having social in our app brings is moderation. We need the ability for thousands of customers to add free text to their bet descriptions or be able to chat with each other on the platform in a public channel. Customers are going to say 'funny' things, and we have a team dedicated to monitoring what people are saying on the platform to make sure that there's no abuse."

To tackle this issue, Dabble is exploring AI moderation tools from Stream, including real-time alerts, block lists, sentiment analysis, image moderation, and banning capabilities. 

Another challenge Dabble faced was the presence of strong third-party social communities on platforms like Reddit, Facebook, and Discord, where sports enthusiasts were already engaging in vibrant discussions. These external platforms allowed users to share their betting strategies, wins, and near-misses, creating a sense of community outside of the Dabble ecosystem. The challenge for Dabble was to not only replicate but enhance that social experience within their own app, providing users with a reason to engage directly on the platform rather than migrating to third-party sites. 

This required building a platform that could compete with these established communities while offering more tailored, engaging features specific to sports betting. Dabble aimed to bring these off-platform conversations in-house, allowing them to retain and nurture the community of their users while offering a safer and more connected experience than third-party platforms could provide.

Searching for the Right Solution

When it came to choosing a chat and activity feed provider, Stream quickly became the leading contender for Dabble.

Though O'Callaghan wasn't part of the team during the selection process, he notes that Stream's strong reputation, rock-solid documentation, impressive list of enterprise customers, simple API integration, and comprehensive customer support made it a standout choice.

Dabble's primary need was for a robust feed feature to display and copy bets, which Stream's Activity Feeds API handled with ease.

Integration of Stream's APIs

Dabble's integration process involved four engineers who focused on implementing feeds and later introduced chat functionality. The development team found Stream's documentation and support invaluable throughout the process.

"There might've been four developers. They all said how easy Stream was to integrate, how supported they were with the team there, but also they commented on the quality of the documentation that was available, which meant that they were just able to move really quickly."

Stream-Powered Social Features on Dabble

Dabble has harnessed the power of Stream's APIs to create a dynamic social experience for its users, integrating several features that allow for real-time engagement, interaction, and community building. 

• User Feeds: The feed is central to Dabble's experience, providing users with a constantly updated stream of bets and entries placed by other punters. Upon signing up, users are instantly exposed to this social aspect, where they can see and copy bets from other profiles. The feed is personalized and tailored over time, allowing users to see bets relevant to their preferences or specific events, such as an NBA game or a horse race. The ability to seamlessly follow other users and copy their bets with a single click enhances the sense of community and simplifies the betting experience.

• Bet Descriptions: With Stream's chat functionality, users can write detailed descriptions of their bets, explaining why they chose a particular bet or player. This feature serves as a way for users to communicate their reasoning and influence others to copy their bets. This social layer adds a deeper level of interaction, with users discussing strategy and outcomes, thus fostering a collaborative environment around wagering.

• Comments and Discussions: Users are encouraged to comment on bets, sparking conversations about specific games, players, or betting strategies. This feature has led to highly engaged discussions, particularly in the U.S., where users debate player performances and game outcomes, with some bets receiving upwards of thousands of comments.

• Banter Channels: Dabble's Banter Channels, powered by Stream's group chat capabilities, allow users to participate in public forums where they can discuss various sports, teams, players, and wagering strategies. These channels are topic-based, ranging from player trades to injury reports, and provide a space for like-minded users to connect. The constant stream of conversation within Banter Channels keeps users engaged and deters them from taking their interactions off-platform.

• Private Group Chats: Users can also invite their friends to private group chats, enabling them to discuss bets or specific events in a more personal, controlled setting. These private chats are less moderated, giving users the freedom to interact in a way that feels more like a group of friends gathering around a sports game.

• Real-Time Interaction and Personalization: Stream's APIs allow Dabble to provide real-time updates to its feeds and chats, ensuring that users are always seeing the latest bets, comments, and social interactions. This live experience is crucial in a fast-paced environment like sports wagering, where outcomes and discussions change rapidly. Moreover, the feeds and chats are increasingly being personalized for individual users, showing them the most relevant content based on their previous behavior and betting preferences.

• Moderation Tools: Given the free text and open communication capabilities, one of the key challenges for Dabble is maintaining a safe and positive environment. Stream's moderation tools help manage this by flagging inappropriate language, automating the review of certain terms, and using image moderation to prevent the sharing of offensive content. This ensures that Dabble remains a fun, inclusive, and safe platform for all users.

These Stream-powered social features have allowed Dabble to transform a standard sports betting app into a vibrant, interactive community and collaborative betting experience that differentiates Dabble from competitors.

Business Impact

Since integrating Stream's real-time communication components, Dabble has seen smooth development operations without any major issues. Key metrics they monitor include uptime and support response times, both of which have been excellent since the integration was completed. 

"We've had a very positive experience with Stream, so I can highly recommend any business that wants to have a feed or a chat experience on their platform work with Stream because the value that you get out of the products and the service you get is extremely good."

Future Plans with Stream

Dabble has no plans to slow down its partnership with Stream. They are discussing the potential to integrate more advanced AI moderation features and video chat functionality. They are also considering a revamp of their Banter channels with threaded conversations.

Dabble's integration of Stream Chat and Activity Feeds has been instrumental in building its social sports wagering community. By creating a more engaging, social betting environment, Dabble sets itself apart in a competitive market. When asked whether they would recommend Stream to other sports betting apps, O'Callaghan answered with a resounding "100%."