Sports betting certainly wasn’t part of the curriculum at Pikesville’s Beth Tfiloh Dahan Community School when Brad Kronthal (Class of ’11), his brother Spencer (Class of ’14) and their buddy Seth Sholk (Class of ’15) were students there.
Still, the BT alumni say their day school education was instrumental in providing the required skills to develop their new sports betting research platform, Alloy Sports.
“I think [the school] set us up with a nice, well-rounded, multi-disciplinary approach,” says Spencer, the company’s chief executive officer. “Also, the rigor of the academic curriculum set us up to be hardworking.”
Built by “sports fans for sports fans,” the Alloy app considers the “attributes that you think are important to winning a game, such as a good quarterback play or a good defense, and allows you to develop a winning betting strategy around that,” says Spencer, an engineer from Pikesville who is currently pursuing his MBA at the University of Chicago.
He first came up with the idea for the platform while working at Stanley Black & Decker in Towson. He recognized that the same type of software he used to select building materials could be employed to analyze sports data.
When he presented the concept to his brother — who worked in live sports production for Memorial Sports & Entertainment — and Sholk, a Capital One data analyst, they were all in.
“We realized we could build a product that’s not only for our internal use but for the public to use as well,” says Brad, the company’s chief operating officer. “It’s an easy-to-use app that has powerful, powerful assets to it. The app really molds our career experiences and expertise into one company and one product.”
Developing the app has been “a process,” says Sholk, the company’s chief financial officer.
“Our initial product was built as a web platform, which we launched back in the spring. That took about four months to develop,” he says. “We used an external development team to do that. Over the course of the summer, we brought our development team internal, and we converted all the code from a web-based platform to an iOS [iPhone Operating System].”
These days, Sholk and the Kronthals work full-time for Alloy. They also have three full-time employees. Due to the pandemic, the company works remotely, and meetings are held via Zoom.
“The first time since the pandemic we’d all been together in person was at school for the High Holidays,” says Brad. “That place kind of brings us home, no matter what. Judaism connects us, and we work together every day.”
The Alloy app went live about a month ago and currently has more than 650 users. The goal of its creators is to have 2,000 users by the end of this year’s NFL season.
“Right now, we’re on pace to hit that goal,” says Brad. “We’re really excited about the traction that’s been picking up in recent weeks as more people have gotten a chance to see how easy to use the system is.”
One glitch faced by Alloy is that Maryland has not yet legalized mobile betting.
“Luckily, I live right by the Horseshoe Casino [in downtown Baltimore],” says Brad. “So I’ve gone over there a few times. But once legal betting is live in Maryland, it’s going to be as easy as, ‘Here’s my bet,’ and then two seconds later placing it. But that’s a hurdle that will be cleared very shortly. The legislation has passed.”
Now that their football app has launched, the Alloy team is looking ahead to other ventures.
“We are continuing development with the goals of adding more sports,” says Spencer. “We’re trying to get basketball on the app next, then we’re going to get college basketball and hopefully next year baseball and hockey.”
The Alloy Sports Quickstart app is free but the company also offers a pro subscription that provides more intensive data analysis offered at no cost for 30 days, and $14.99 per month or $120 annually thereafter.
“As a company, what we’re trying to do is give users, and specifically sports bettors, control of how they can do their research and how they can actually bet successfully,” says Sholk. “One of our first slogans is, ‘We’re trying to democratize the sports betting market.’”
For information on Alloy Sports, visit alloysports.com. To download the app, visit apps.apple.com.
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