Startup TopProp Seeks A More Social Aspect To Daily Fantasy Sports

For Griffin Kurzius and Michael Zavagno, the road to running a daily fantasy sports app that creates the social feel of a virtual sports bar and creating a different way to attract interest in the vast world of daily fantasy sports and sports betting started in their freshman dorm at Wake Forest in the mid-2000s.

Both are longtime fantasy sports players and in the same fantasy football league with other college friends for over a decade. The duo just wanted ways to make it more interesting, more informal and social.

Now Kurzius is the COO and Zavagno is the CEO of Top Prop, a relatively new player on the daily fantasy scene but one differentiating itself from the bigger names while raising about $500,000 before its launch.

Making it more interesting is where the creation of Top Prop came in.

Launched at the outset of the 2021 NFL season it differentiates from the top daily fantasy sports outlets Fan Duel and Draft Kings. Instead of drafting a whole team with a salary cap for daily purposes, Top Prop offers users props to guess the forecasted fantasy points for two players.

“Through the years we looked at other daily fantasy sports platforms, but what drove us more than anything was the head to head nature of it all. play against friends, that kind of communication and the smack talk,” said Kurzius, a Cleveland native. “And also, the issues we have on the other platforms is how complex they were. So for us, we just want to have one (person) put $20 on a game and enjoy and watch it.”

An example would be a head-to-head quarterback matchup.

For instance, TopProp may forecast Russell Wilson for 20.5 fantasy points against the 22.5 fantasy points for Josh Allen. A user can take Allen and give the two points or select Wilson and take the two points.

“We we’re offering a fairly different you know, way to play daily fantasy than a DraftKings or FanDuel,” Zavagno said. “I think that makes our target audience fairly different as well.

According to Zavagno, the more casual nature of Top Prop’s daily fantasy system is catering towards younger users with their average users being 25 years old, a demographic more likely to be concerned with the statistics of Stephen Curry as opposed to the entire stats of the Golden State Warriors.

“Trying to kind of cater to those types of folks who are interested in kind of a casual social, you know, more interactive type experience,” Zavagno said.

“We’re targeting a different audience,” Kurzius added. “Kind of the Gen Z user to make things easy. So, our goal is kind of a different, a differentiated audience and that’ll really let us scale and grow our user base pretty quickly.”

As expected, the NFL is currently the most popular sport, but the company plans on adding the NBA when the regular season begins next month.

The main similarities are in terms of money. Users can play free contests or if they are in 29 states or Washington D.C., they can deposit money in an account and use that money to play the various contests similar to Fan Duel and Draft Kings.

Another goal of the company is to create the social aspect as opposed to the more formal and interpersonal nature of large tournaments. Think of it like a virtual sports bar with users talking about their daily fantasy picks in the midst of a big game.

“And we’re going to be going against each other, you know, that allows us to kind of layer in those social features, the ability to chat with friends, create groups, eventually have badges, leaderboards, things like that, and really sort of, you know, give people more reasons to be on the platform, then just simply swiping for contests,” Kurzius said.