Building the Next-Level Fantasy Sports Experience: A Conversation with Julien Sevat of Sam Sports

In this episode of the Knup Sports Show, Ryan Knuppel interviews Julien Sevat, the founder of Sam Sports, who shares insights on creating a next-level fantasy sports platform designed for experienced players seeking a more immersive GM experience. Julien also discusses the challenges of entrepreneurship, the growth potential in emerging markets, and the current fundraising efforts to take Sam Sports to the next stage.

Ryan Knuppel

Hey, what’s going on, everybody? Ryan Knuppel here, Knup Sports, episode 228 of the Knup Sports Show. Thank you so much for being here. Really appreciate all the support. Hope you’re doing well.

We are just three weeks, three weeks from the NFL season starting here in the United States. We’re super excited for that. It’s actually three weeks from the recording of this show. We got – I can’t even remember who’s playing, but I cannot wait for the games to start. We actually got Thursday, Friday, Sunday, Monday on week one this year. So they’re adding that Friday in there, which will be kind of fun, just to get us all excited and going for football season. So really excited for that.

A little bit more housekeeping. We have the SBC Summit Lisbon coming up in September. We’re strong media partners with SBC. And so if you have any questions about this event, if you’re going to this event, please reach out. We’d love to chat with you about it. If you do not have tickets and you are planning on going, please use the promo code new partner VIP. This is for your benefit, not for my benefit. This is good for you. I think it’s like a 50% discount on your ticket or something crazy. One of the best discounts you can find. So please, if you or any of your friends or anybody you know are going, use this promo code. Also show support that we’re proud media partners with those guys. So it’s going to be an amazing event. One of the biggest iGaming shows in the world is going to be happening there in Lisbon. So make sure you check that one out in September.

Other than that, lots of sports stuff going on, baseball going. Yeah, just a great time, a great time to be alive. Hope you’re all doing well as well. All right, let’s dive in. You know what we do here. We interview amazing leaders in the sports business world, in the gaming world. And we have another one here today. We’re excited to bring you. So without further ado, let’s go ahead and bring on my guest today.

Julien Sevat

Very good, Ryan. And I have to say, Lisbon is an amazing city. So great, great place to go in terms of the event.

Ryan Knuppel

I’ve never personally been, but I’ve heard nothing but positive things about it. And so, yeah, it should be, they’re calling it like the iGaming super show of the world or something crazy like that. So it should be an amazing event. Are you going to go?

Julien Sevat

I’m not sure yet. I’m looking into it. But for me, when I think Lisbon, I think my stack do because that’s where we did it and the food. So we love the food, the event is great, the food is great, the location is great. So it’s the triple x, you know, effect. So it’s in the date. Depending if you think we have to do, I’m looking into it. We’re not far with just three hours from me.

Ryan Knuppel

Yeah, that’s perfect. Awesome. Well, cool. Well, let’s get on track here, Julien. I’m excited to get to meet you. I mean, I’ve got to meet you a few times and I got to know you a little bit, but I want the world to know who you are. I want the world to understand what you’re doing with Sam Sports because you’re doing some amazing things in the fantasy sports realm. And so I’m excited to dive in a little bit. Why don’t you start by first telling everybody a little bit about yourself? Maybe about your background and kind of what led you to where you’re at today.

Julien Sevat

Yeah, for sure. Well, I cannot hide the accent. So everybody knows I’m French. I’ve tried after 20 plus years, but it doesn’t want to go away. So yeah, I grew up in the Caribbean, in Guadeloupe as an island. Moved to America when I was 18, where I studied in Florida at FGCU to be more precise and then went back to Europe, Amsterdam, Barcelona, and traveled around to now to be in Krakow for the moment for family issues, for my son more precisely.

As a person, I’ve been always involved in sports. So I started in sports marketing when I was younger, when I was 22, 23, and sports hospitality, selling sponsoring tickets. But I’ve always been attracted to games and playing fantasy. So when in 21, the company I was working for didn’t raise the money, I decided to jump in, create my own company, Meta Sports Arena, that owns Sam Sports. I’m starting to build with a team what is Sam Sports today, which is a mix between fantasy sports with a touch of Madden Ultimate as well as Football Manager because at the end of the day, we wanted to create something different, and this is what we have done.

Ryan Knuppel

Amazing. Yeah, that’s cool. So you spent some time in Florida. I’m in Orlando. Sounds like you went to, what, that’s down there in Fort Myers, right?

Julien Sevat

Yeah, correct.

Ryan Knuppel

That’s a beautiful area, though. Did you enjoy it?

Julien Sevat

Yeah, I loved it. And, you know, in 1998 to 2003, 2004, it was fully different because… You know, I was one of the first to do an FGCU, you know, I started the soccer program over there as, uh, as just a little, uh, you know, college, college sports and, you know, why don’t we take this to the next step? So student government and all these kinds of things, you know, it was amazing.

Ryan Knuppel

Very cool. Very cool. Awesome. Well, thank you for that background. Really appreciate that. So Sam Sports, so you dreamed this up and, you know, tell us a little bit about what it is at a high level. I’m going to pull it up on screen. I’ll pull your website up on screen as well. But why don’t you just give us that thousand foot view of what you’re doing and what you’re trying to accomplish with Sam Sports?

Julien Sevat

Yeah, for sure. So, like I was saying before, the goal with Rosmongry, my business partner here, which is, you know, our head of gameplay within the platform, is to recreate a way where our users manage their teams, you know, like pro owners. And managing a team when you play fantasy is not selecting, you know, your 20 plus players, you’re just offense. We wanted to go deeper than this. So that’s why we have really recreated what we like to say is GM experience.

So we have created 32 men’s leagues. So you have your 32 teams like the NFL, if we talk about NFL. You know, you have your 53 players in your squad. You have your salary cap. You know, we have created an in-game economy. So instead of paying dollars, you know, with the 229 million you could spend in the NFL, you can do this with Sandpoint, you know. So it’s really, you know, our goal is really to put the users that when they play our game and it’s very good within our game, it could almost apply, you know, to one of the 32 NFL teams or, you know, smaller leagues teams, you know, semi-pro teams for a job, you know, because this is what we want to achieve. A bit the same way that people have done with Football Manager here in Europe. You know, we see more and more young kids applying for jobs because they are good into the game, and that’s our goal within this. So I don’t like to be compared to another fantasy team because we are different through the way we have done this through the virtual stadium that we have in it where you control your ticketing your 100 you know you win a game you have you keep your your 100 fan base coming to the game You lose a game, you lose 3%. You can gain your 1.3% back of your fans, but you have to load in every game. So we have created a few ways to gamify a bit what was Fantasy Sports.

Ryan Knuppel

So it sounds like, I mean, that’s amazing, by the way. And I dove in and looked at it a little bit, and you showed me a nice demo the other day, so I’m very versed in what’s going on here. But it sounds to me like maybe this is… So explain the audience a little bit, right? Because you kind of have these buckets of fantasy sports players. You have your kind of like, hey, I just kind of want to log in and play. have these people that are really really into it it sounds like maybe what you’re creating is kind of for that next level of person correct who really wants to dive a little deeper?

Julien Sevat

Correct, correct. Yeah, if you never play fantasy,

then we might not, you are not yet ready for us because we’ll be too intense for you. And we are for what I like to say the experienced fantasy player that is bored to play for the last 20 years the same way, and that is looking to really challenge himself. And we have a tool that we are building, which is called the GM rating. And the GM rating is not just, oh, yeah, I have the most points, I am the best. No, no. What we are looking into it is really analyzing your performance. You know, what players you keep on your bench compared to the player that score, you know, as your starters. You know, we are looking through the whole season, your performance as well. And we give you a percentage on this, you know. And so therefore, we really analyze how you play and not just how much points you add every week, you know. So that’s something that that’s why I like to say it’s for a paying user. So, yeah, if you like to play your 12 men’s leagues, are you going to play a 32 men’s leagues? Probably not. And there is a reason why you don’t like to dig deeper, you know, on your second, third, fourth string quarterback that you need when you have a 53 men’s players team, you know, like the NFL. So that’s why we like to say we are a real true GM experience.

Ryan Knuppel

Yeah. And what I love about that, right, is, I mean, it seems to be a growing interest in sports business as a whole. And like, there’s a lot of kids, especially in college these days that are going through sport management programs and that have dreams of being in like, gm roles right going through the upper offices and going through this whole like team dynamic and understanding that so something like this you know while maybe sounds kind of weird it actually gives you that experience before you even can get into a real team experience right I mean you’re given different You’re learning different types of stuff by doing what you’re doing here than you are in just playing normal fantasy football. That’s one of the things I really love about it is it’s really, truly challenging you from a brain side and how a team works and how to put all that together. So really cool.

Julien Sevat

And listen, I was that kid 20 years ago. I’m a sports management degree from FGCU. I was that kid. I was dreaming to work for a sports team. When I graduated, I sent my CV to all the French teams, and they all said no to me, and I was so disappointed. You know, so the next thing I had was football manager, you know, so at the end of the day. So that’s always been, you know, a way I like to see it. And you said it perfectly. So, yeah, any college student that wants to come in and jump and play this. Yes.

Ryan Knuppel

So what sports are you guys active for currently, I guess, currently? And what are you building out for the future from a sport side? Like which sports are you working with currently?

Julien Sevat

We have American football, as you know, but we are also building soccer, which, you know, for me, you know, it’s in my blood. And even football soccer is going to be very, very unique with, you know, transfer between leagues, which doesn’t exist right now in fantasy soccer, you know. So you can monetize this. We have baseball ready, but we are not going to launch it yet this season. We have hockey ready as well, which we are looking into. But that’s more niche market. So, you know, as we are a bootstrap business, and of course, we’re going to look for partners to, you know, to continue pushing or go to market, you know, within this. We are going to look at the different, you know, stages of where we are. But the games are ready. They are developed. It’s just a question of when we press a button and we release it to the market.

Ryan Knuppel

Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. Very cool. I’m sure we can sit here and talk about the gameplay all day. That’s the fun part, right? But I want to learn a little bit more about the business side for you and just how it’s been developing this, creating this. I love the entrepreneurial mindset and I just love hearing from other entrepreneurs of their challenges, their successes, what they’ve liked, what they haven’t liked. And so on this show, we try to feature a little bit of that. So why don’t you give us, I don’t know, just a little bit about your experience so far as an entrepreneur and how that’s been going and maybe showcase some of the challenges that you guys have experienced at building this.

Julien Sevat

Yeah, for sure. Well, first of all, you know, I’ve been an entrepreneur since 2012 because before this I had my sports marketing business.

Ryan Knuppel

Before it was cool.

Julien Sevat

Yeah, yeah. You know, so it’s when you have a business, you know, people dream. Oh, yeah, you have holidays. You do what you want. It’s not like this. But when I started building this, I built it for a different way because sadly, my wife and I were expecting twins and one of them died. And Eric was born. Eric, my other son, his brother had issues growing up. And so I had to be at home. So I had to keep myself busy. And that for me was my redemption in terms of losing the baby. My way to come out of all this difficult time that we were going through was to put my energy into this.

And building this, the first thing was, how do I find a good team to develop this? And my guys, Hakif and Kisram, and all those guys have been amazing. My development teams, there’s nothing that I cannot say that could take them down because they’ve been very, very good and supportive, knowing what I was going through as well. And that’s really, really good. But then after that, of course, the challenge is what do people want? What do people like? So it’s always a question. And as you said, not everybody wants a 12-person league. So you ask yourself, have I made the right choice or do I keep going and do I continue?

So then, of course, the finance, we are bootstrapped. So where do I spend the money? Do I market before or after? If you look at the moment, everybody knows the answer. But nobody applies the right answer to this. And that’s also the thing. But the biggest challenge, as every business is, how you maintain the money, how you maintain the float. Most startups die within a year or two. Nine startups out of ten die within a year or two. Well, we’re still alive. Of course, do a lot when you breed is my finance. But now that’s why I said, you know, we need to go to market to find partners, potential angel investors or, you know, pre-seed VCs that would like to jump with us on this road, which is amazing.

Because at the end of the day, when you build something from scratch, from a vision with people that you really enjoy working with, there’s no greater reward than this to have achieved something together. It’s like winning a trophy, you know, like Manchester United lifting the Champions League or Kansas lifting the Super Bowl trophy. It’s the same thing for me. So step by step, every season we’re going to build a new product that’s our new trophy and have people happy enjoying this.

Ryan Knuppel

Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. And I’ll let you know you’re not alone in a lot of those challenges, right? I mean, you mentioned it that, you know, it’s some of those challenges you mentioned are the common challenges all businesses and all entrepreneurs go through. And it’s, you know, really how you handle those and how you move forward through those and how you address those that keeps you one of the ones alive and not one of them that has to fold, right? So congrats to you for still being alive. I mean, we all know that business is not easy. And so it’s, you know, you fight through them and you live another day.

Julien Sevat

My dean, my provost from university, Dr. Audrey Levy, which actually passed away last December, you know, said two things to me when I graduated. She wrote me a poem with the last two sentences of the poem that always got stuck to my head: I will not give in, and I will not cave in. And I always keep this in my mind. In personal life, no matter what happens, life goes on. You can face the biggest challenges I have and people have worse than me. You can either choose to stop or move on. You have to move on. Life is too short to miss something.

I love that advice. It’s the same thing in business. You cannot cave in and just think that’s what is falling on you. Every day, continue, continue. And whatever positive you have on that day, use this positive to move on. And yes, it’s hard, but you have to go

.

Ryan Knuppel

I love that you can take advice from all different aspects of life and all different places you’ve been. And you take little things from all that to build who you are. And so I love that. It sounds like you’re doing some amazing things there.

You mentioned that you are fundraising. So are you actively raising funds for the project? I know several people listening to this show. There may be other business leaders that are listening that could be interested. I mean, you’ve got some awesome things going and getting in on the ground floor of something like this. I’d encourage investors to really look into something like that. But you did mention that you are looking to bring on?

Julien Sevat

Absolutely. So now, now we’ve built the project. The idea is to bring a partner for the go-to-market to go to the next stage. You know, so you have to understand as a business owner, you know, what you can take on your own and what you need to go forward. You know, so if there is an angel investor, you know, because we have soccer, we have the app, we have all this coming. So that’s why, you know, it’s now time to bring other people to come with us on this journey to help and move on. And that’s what we are. So yes, I like to call it pre-seed because that’s what we are doing. It’s a pre-seed. It’s not a seed investment. But it’s the idea of the seed. It’s like I said, it’s a go-to-market, but more importantly, because we know soccer is huge, you know, it’s four billion fans. And the goal is to go to the emerging market with this because you are talking about the massive growing community of fantasy sports users over there around 300 million users in emerging markets, you know, and it’s also, you know, around one billion soccer fans.

Ryan Knuppel

Wow, wow. And I’m not sure anybody has done the fantasy side of soccer very well yet. This doesn’t feel like it’s been done very well.

Julien Sevat

I can say, as a user, it’s not. In my opinion, the last 20 years, you still have the same issue. And I’m not talking about Sora, because Sora, what they have done is great, but it’s not really fantasy for me. But it’s the same issue of trading players. You know, when he moved from one country, you don’t have this in the NFL, you know, because you have all the American players there. And, you know, you don’t see players moving, you know, too much to Europe and stay in Europe and come back, these kinds of things. But that’s the biggest issue in Europe. You lose your players every time you play fantasy. You know, you get, oh, yeah, let me give you 10 points back. Well, that’s annoying.

Ryan Knuppel

Yeah, you’re right. You’re right. Well, Julien, this has been amazing. I really enjoyed getting to know you a little bit. How would people get a hold of you if they do or they are interested or just have questions or want to be involved in any way with what you’re doing from a business side? How would they get a hold of you?

Julien Sevat

Well, they can either go on SamSports.io. They can contact you as well if you want. They can reach out to you because probably some of them will know you. Or they can send me a WhatsApp if you want. I can send you my number or I can post it here, you know, plus four, eight, six, or eight, one, three, five, seven to nine, you know?

Ryan Knuppel

And you’re on LinkedIn as well, right?

Julien Sevat

Yes, I’m on LinkedIn as well. I’m on Telegram. I’m everywhere. You know, sometimes, sometimes it’s a very negative because you get bombarded and, you know, my three or four hours of sleep is now reduced to two hours of sleep. Yeah, so it’s hard, but, but yeah. People can reach out to me.

Ryan Knuppel

We’ll put your WhatsApp number all over the place or your WhatsApp number, but we’ll put your website as you see here, SamSports.io. We’ll make sure you’re linked in the show notes and yeah, feel free to reach out to me as well. I’m happy to connect to anyone that wants a formal introduction over to Julien. I’m happy to do that.

So, Julien, what did we miss? We’ve got a couple of minutes, a minute or two here. What did we miss? What did you want to share that maybe we forgot to talk about before I let you go?

Julien Sevat

Well, if we talk about business, you know, and let’s continue because it’s at the end of the day, we could talk about fantasy. It’s a 15% growth in the next three, four years. You know, just in the US alone, you have 60 million fantasy players. But if you look worldwide, it’s 260 million. But growing with India, which is a brand new market, you know, brand new market, emerging, exploding market, that already has 130 million fantasy players. Just half of what the world population has, you know, of fantasy. So it’s very exciting for me. So the future is bright and, like I said, having people coming on board with us, playing our platform, you know, have fun, it’s, you know, come on SamSports, challenge yourself, you know, feel like a GM and try, you know, it’s, you will like it. You get into it and we are building our own chat system within, so you can, you can kid around with your friends. Community within the game. Yeah. I love it.

Ryan Knuppel

Awesome, Julien. Well, I really appreciate it. I can’t wait to see the success you have with SamSports and, uh, I’m here for you if you need anything as well. So thank you for joining. Thank you for being here.

Julien Sevat

No, thank you for having me. So it was a pleasure.

Ryan Knuppel

All right. We’ll take care, Julien. Talk to you soon. Bye-bye.

All right, that was Julien Sevat, SamSports. Hopefully you enjoyed that show. It was a good one. I really encourage you to go out to SamSports.io, check it out, get signed up there, and just really look at it. Man, there’s a lot of stuff going on there. It’s really in-depth, right? And as he mentioned, it’s really for the fantasy player that kind of wants something next level, wants to kind of go on to the next level of fantasy sports, and that’s amazing.

When there’s a product and something out there that kind of has its differentiator in the space, right? Because we see a lot of programs, a lot of platforms trying to do the same thing. So it’s really refreshing when you see new platforms, new products doing, tackling problems that exist in an industry.

All right, well, hopefully you enjoyed that. Please reach out to me if you need anything. Football’s three weeks away. We’re excited. Remember SBC Summit, Lisbon, new partner VIP. If you need a ticket to that, that’s about all I got for you today. Lots of good shows coming up as well. But if you do know someone that should be on this show or that wants to be featured on the show, please just reach out. We love talking to amazing people doing amazing things in the sports industry. So we’d love to have them on as well.

All right. I’m Ryan Knuppel. You can find me out on all the channels as well. And that’s a wrap on Episode 228. Everybody take care. We’ll talk to you soon. Bye-bye.

Julien Sevat of SamSports.io