In early December, Carimus co-founder Tony Pease appeared on WRAL TechWire’s Tech on Tap podcast to discuss the origins of the company’s GoodBookey app, the popularity of the app in light of new legalization initiatives in sports gambling, and the future of linking technology applications to social impact.
According to Tony, the idea for GoodBookey, a charitable gambling app that reroutes profits to charities, came from a weekend golf trip with several friends. He explained that the buy-in for the five-round tournament was $100 per person and that while the competition was stiff, the winnings never made it out of the celebratory drinking session to close the weekend. “It occurred to me that people didn’t care about the monetary value of the bet, but cared about ‘I beat you,’” he explained. “Money served as a marker, and I thought there might be a better way to value that money, to channel it to higher impact.”
After gathering his team of five co-founders for multiple meetings at the Raleigh Times bar, GoodBookey was born.
On the ups and downs the Carimus team has endured building GoodBookey in the right ways, Tony laid down a philosophy to live by: “In the startup world, you just have to embrace the chaos.”
Now, as Carimus continues to grow—and the GoodBookey app along with it, the team is marching along with its business plan, onboarding new charities each month and adding new features to the platform. “The two biggest problems charities face are raising money and getting new donors,” Tony said. To help charities gain even more exposure and dollars, GoodBookey is expanding from its basic peer-to-peer betting model to allow for prop bets (filled in by users in ‘tweetable” lengths) and promoting sponsored events, where brands can align with charities for social impact.
With more states seeking to legalize sports gambling, Tony noted that the legalization movement, which involves other businesses like FanDuel and DraftKings, has made explaining the GoodBookey concept much easier, so that more charities and more users understand the business, how it moves money to charities, and makes money for itself through promotions and processing.
“A certain section of the population doesn’t want to do gambling since most people lose money gambling,” Tony mused. “We’re just trying to make it more fun, socially engaging to donate to charity.”
Check out the Tech on Tap Podcast; you won’t regret it! Additionally, we’ve linked the episodes below that Tony and GoodBookey were featured on.
