Forget beating Vegas: KC startup wants sports fans to compete — not throw money at a gambling app

A Kansas City-built sports ledger turns daily fandom into arcade games, puzzles and trivia — all while keeping score of what users actually know. But it’s not another mobile betting platform, founder Chris Newton said, noting the wager is in game day cred — not a payout.

“It’s not DraftKings, it’s not FanDuel,” he said of SPURTS, which launched just as Major League Baseball’s postseason got under way. “It is a ledger, in a way, but of your sports knowledge.”

The premise: Fans already spend hours watching games, following news and arguing about what happened, Newton noted, so why not put all that knowledge toward provable sports IQ status?

SPURTS offers games and prediction-based opportunities, built around what’s happening across major sports in the moment. The free platform is playable on the web and available through Apple’s App Store; an Android version is pending review, Newton noted.

“There’s not really a place to stay sharp,” he said. “I mean, you can watch the news, you can watch highlights, you can watch the games, but that’s where SPURTS is trying to be sort of the platform and the community where sports fandom is playable in a gamified way.”

Unlike a sportsbook, fans using SPURTS compete against each other by logging “the receipts” to back up their talk: The coach who should’ve gone for it. That slugger who was a bum from Day 1. The upset predicted weeks before anybody else was even thinking about the playoffs.

Fans earn their SPURTS IQ — a running record that rises and falls as players put their knowledge, predictions and gaming skills to work.

And right now, Newton is testing the concept with playoff baseball.

October Heat, released Sept. 29 alongside MLB’s Wild Card series, mixes arcade-style innings at the plate with quick brain games and yes-or-no takes tied to actual playoff action.

Aaron Rowhuff — a Wichita business analyst, early SPURTS tester and informal adviser — said the combination clicked for him.

“It takes skill and also trivia, and you try to get the highest score combining both your skillset with also trivia,” Rowhuff said.

The changing daily content is part of the appeal. Instead of relying solely on decades of sports trivia, players have to know what happened recently. Rowhuff has recruited friends by challenging them to beat his scores, with October Heat making an especially effective entry point.

He also cares about his SPURTS IQ.

“Suddenly now you’re watching tennis because you want to make sure your SPURTS IQ is up,” he said.

Swinging for the fences in the ‘preseason’

Newton spent nearly two decades working in marketing, web development, software and related roles — including eight years at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation — before leaving the corporate world to build his own products.

SPURTS began as one of those projects under Newton’s Newthos product studio before becoming its own company, SPURTS LLC.

Today, Newton is its only full-time operator, backed by a small group of advisers and testers. He has bootstrapped the company through its minimum viable product stage and said SPURTS is approaching a few hundred registered users.

He calls the current beta its “preseason.”

“We’re still early, but that repeat participation gives us confidence to keep building,” Newton said.

Now comes the harder part: figuring out whether those few hundred early players can become a sustainable business.

Chris Newton, founder of SPURTS, and the Black Ice Hockey team; courtesy photo

Newton — a member of the Black Ice Hockey squad — is exploring early-stage investment and strategic partnerships while testing potential revenue from advertising and sponsorships, paid memberships and experiences, and licensing.

He isn’t pretending any single game gives SPURTS an impenetrable advantage, he said.

“An individual game mechanic can be copied,” Newton said. “The advantage we want to build comes from the community, each player’s history, and an experience people consistently enjoy returning to. That’s something we have to earn through execution.”

His longer-term ideas get considerably bigger: a February competition that could pit teams from 32 metro areas against one another, plus touchscreen SPURTS experiences in bars that bring the competition off the phone and into the room.

For Rowhuff, though, the opportunity starts much smaller — with a few minutes and a little competitive itch.

“The goal is for people to get in a routine to where they wake up, do their SPURTS, see what they can up their IQ, and then be on their way,” he said. “It only takes five to 10 minutes.”