About this episode

Nathan Thomas and Brett DeBari discuss their digital platform Grid Gorilla, which transforms the Super Bowl squares concept into a year-round prediction experience.

Ep. 208 features Nathan Thomas and Brett DeBari, the founding team behind GridGorilla, a digital platform that evolves the classic Super Bowl squares format into a year-round, player-stat-based prediction experience. Hear them discuss: Brett’s journey through tech sales at Dell and AWS to previous gaming startups, and Nathan’s 20-year engineering career ranging from biomedical startups to database architecture How the team identified the "mass market" appeal of Super Bowl squares and adapted it into a year-round digital product Moving beyond final scores to create player-performance grids involving stats like points and rebounds across an x and y axis Why they opted for a free-to-play, ad-supported model to lower barriers to entry and onboard non-bettors. Leveraging AI-simulated matchups (e.g., LeBron James vs. the '86 Pistons) to keep users in the app for multiple sessions per day Nathan’s experience navigating the complex, one-year process of securing a software patent for their predictive grid system Why the three-person team chose to remain self-funded and the "leap of faith" required to build the company without meeting in person How Nathan operates as a one-person dev team…

People in this episode

Guests: Nathan Thomas, Brett DeBari

Topics covered

• digital gaming
• Super Bowl squares
• player-stat-based predictions
• entrepreneurship
• tech sales
• AI in gaming

Keywords

• Super Bowl squares
• Grid Gorilla
• digital platform
• player performance
• AI-simulated matchups
• self-funded startups
• software patent

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Grid Gorilla, Dell, AWS, Meta

Products: Cursor AI, Flutter, Golang

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