Who is Outlier?
Outlier is a sports betting analytics platform that helps bettors make sharper, faster decisions before they bet. Outlier pulls historic performance, prop analytics, matchup data, injury context, and live odds movement across 16 sportsbooks and prediction markets into one workflow. With Outlier’s tools, bettors can cut through the noise and validate their gut instinct with data by digesting relevant trends and insights, tracking line movement, and comparing odds, all in one place, both pre-game and live.
Situation
Outlier's team was regularly shipping new capabilities while preparing a major new product launch with their category-creating live betting analytics app, React Live. Potential for React Live was high, given lack of other similar solutions in the market and the rise of live betting, but a lack of foundational voice of customer research and the speed of product development resulted in a lack of a formalized GTM strategy, as well as an untested feature roadmap. Simultaneously, overall momentum for the original Outlier pre-game app remained high, but the team acknowledged a lack of focus on trial conversion and user retention.
As the product suite had become more sophisticated and extensive, the product marketing motion around it hadn't kept up: Outlier could see greenfield opportunities to increase awareness, conversion, adoption, and overall brand clarity, but wasn’t addressing them. Outlier needed a partner who could (1) design a GTM for, and run, the React Live launch right away, (2) address buyer and user research to inform product positioning, strategy, and roadmap for new and current products, and (3) build a go-to-market motion and product marketing function the team could eventually run on its own.
Solution
A Fluvio consulting team immediately embedded and went to work alongside Outlier's systems, standups, and roadmap reviews in partnership with Product, Engineering, and leadership.
The team started with a sprint to define go-to-market infrastructure needs, building, applying, and refining the model via the React Live launch. The approach was pressure-tested against a real, major launch deadline from day one.
From there, Fluvio owned React Live's go-to-market end to end: audience, value proposition, positioning and messaging, and the launch plan behind back-to-back releases, NBA beta (program to identify and address usability and messaging feedback prior to wider release), NBA GA launch, then NCAA timed to March Madness, as well as fast-follow releases for the Player Pulse feature and WNBA.
Fluvio also ran three research programs in quick succession that shaped product and lifecycle decisions the team was already wrestling with, and also surfaced new areas of opportunity that stood out above the rest:
One on the new React Live audience to gauge product and feature value for basketball bettors
One on Outlier's existing user base that paired customer interviews with usage data to map where people found value and where they dropped off
One on future React Live coverage expansion into football, ahead of the fall professional and college seasons, to understand differentiated value of live football analytics for this audience, and where improvements could be made for an overall v2.0 of React Live across the board.
In tandem, Fluvio helped Outlier's leadership define the company's first in-house product marketing role, from defining the job description to running a structured round of candidate interviews to help identify the best candidates.
Lastly, with the expanded presence of sports prediction markets, Fluvio ran a discovery research program for the Outlier team, using a quantitative pulse survey to characterize the broad sports trading audience, as well as conducting an initial competitive tool review, to get a head start on evaluating Outlier’s future fit into this adjacent landscape.
What began as a four-month, launch-focused engagement was significantly expanded on to cover the mission-critical product marketing priorities: deeper research, formalized positioning, and hands-on GTM strategy and support.
“Fluvio didn’t hand us a research readout and walk away. They were in our conversations, in our standups, working through the same details we were. The research they ran is still shaping how we talk about this product at the board level.”
Client Interview
We sat down with Evan Kirkham, Co-Founder & CEO, and Luis Lafer-Sousa, Co-Founder & President, to get their thoughts on Fluvio’s work with Outlier.
Evan Kirkham
Co-Founder & CEO, Outlier
Luis Lafer-Sousa
Co-Founder & President, Outlier
What was going on at Outlier that made you bring in outside product marketing help?
Luis: React Live was moving toward a hard launch date tied to the NBA calendar, and our marketing team was still forming. We needed someone who could own the go-to-market for that launch specifically, without pulling product and engineering off what they were doing to hand-hold it. Fluvio could step into that gap immediately.
Why Fluvio, and how has that compared to what you expected going in?
Evan: I wasn't looking for a big strategy deck. I've seen enough of those. I wanted people senior enough to make real calls without me sitting in every meeting, who'd actually get in the work with us instead of advising from a distance. That's what we got.
What did the React Live launch actually look like from the inside?
Luis: Fluvio ran the positioning and the launch plan for all three, and built in a beta program that caught a lot of the "how do I use this" user feedback before it reached a wider audience. That's the difference between a launch that works and one that just ships.
What's the lasting impact been, beyond the launch itself?
Evan: Two things, mainly. We understand why people churn versus why they stick around now. That used to be a guess. And we have a real operating model that gets the most out of our product investments.