Locker Room Labs Partner Spotlight: SportsDataIO with Dustin Sullivan
Welcome to the first edition of the Locker Room Labs Partner Spotlight. We sit down with our industry and technology partners to discuss the evolving world of sports tech and the powerful advantages made possible by working together. To kick this series off, we spoke with Dustin Sullivan, president of SportsDataIO, an award-winning data and content provider fueling the sports technology sector.
Let’s start with the basics. What is SportsDataIO?
DS: We produce and collect sports data and content across a wide number of sports that appeals to the North American sports fan. That content ranges from scores and stats to betting picks, fantasy projections, news & images, and beyond. And we deliver that content through our API and through off-the-shelf mobile friendly widgets.
We license that content to a range of different verticals, but predominantly focus on the gaming, media and fantasy segments.
How did SportsDataIO become what it is today?
DS: SportsDataIO got started in 2008 — so last year was our 15-year anniversary. My business partner, Scott Gimpel, initially launched the business with just NFL. And those first 10 years were a grind. We’re self-funded so our organic expansion covering new leagues and additional content offerings took a while.
Looking back, we’re thankful it took the time it did. It gave us the time to refine our products and technology. This ultimately led to being in a very unique position once PASPA was repealed: deep experience delivering fast, reliable, and accurate content via battle-tested technology.
Today we have three pillars to our business: our API feeds and responsive content widgets mentioned above, and most recently our BAKER Predictive Engine. BAKER generates play-level simulations for every game of the season, allowing customers to generate predictions and projections for individual plays, players, games and full seasons.
What kicked off the SportsDataIO + Locker Room Labs Partnership?
DS: Our newly minted partnership with Locker Room Labs is actually just the formalization of a very long collaboration. Our teams have a long, long history of working together on other projects. It only made sense that we team up in a more official way with the recent launch of Locker Room Labs.
Our partnership really all started on a development project with Adam Polasek, co-founder of Locker Room Labs. We worked with his team of developers, and unlike other experiences, it was streamlined, fast, and like a breath of fresh air — really.
Soon, we sent one of our customers his way and heard glowing reviews. This led to another and another. And I thought, finally, someone gets it. They say they are going to have [a deliverable] done by a certain date, and then it gets done by that date.
So, this is what started our partnership. A long collaborative history working together that has now morphed into something official.
What’s the value that this partnership brings for you and your customers?
DS: Locker Room Labs is a crucial resource to our customers. If they don’t have a developer in mind, or they are struggling with the output of their current one. We have somewhere we can trust to refer these customers to.
Because integration, even if it’s our easy data feeds, is just a lot of work. The faster we can get people integrated and using the data, the faster they unlock the value of our product. They’ll be happy, and we love that, right? So why wouldn’t we refer our customers to a company that already knows the ins and outs of working with our data and integrating our feeds? They aren’t coming in cold. They know exactly how it works.
We love it because it streamlines the entire process for us, for our customers, and even for Locker Room Labs. There is a minimal learning curve for everyone involved.
Looking to the future, what’s in store?
DS: This partnership unlocks a lot of potential for the future of sports technology, and it’s going to facilitate a ton of innovation between our two companies.
Some of which is already underway. It’s too soon to speak to specifics, but together, we plan to change the way data is ingested into sports technology. Whether for sports media, betting, or fantasy, we’re excited to build new solutions together.
About Sportsdata.io
SportsDataIO is an award-winning platform providing sports data and content feeds. The company produces millions of data points spanning thousands of games each year. They provide robust APIs to responsive widgets and visualizations and the powerful Baker Predictive Engine. At the heart of SportsDataIO’s operations is a mission: to deliver accurate sports data in real-time, all packaged within enterprise-grade products that prioritize user experience.
About Locker Room Labs
Locker Room Labs is a US-based and software engineer-owned development team specializing in sports, betting, fantasy, and iGaming. From UX Design and MVP Development to Custom App Development and Staff Augmentation, Locker Room Labs is tailored to bring sports software to life. A testament to their innovation is “The Playbook,” a proprietary sports platform-as-a-service that accelerates development time to market and curtails custom software build costs for clients.
