And I think one of the biggest reasons
@thetailgateapp is working is pretty simple:
They’re in the trenches with the people using it.
This isn’t a product being designed in a conference room by faceless engineers trying to reverse-engineer what sports traders might want.
The people building Tailgate are traders. They’re in the same group chats, watching the same games, sweating the same markets, hearing the complaints in real time, and obsessing over the same little things that drive everyone else in this space insane.
They don’t have to study the community from a distance.
They’re part of it.
So when traders want tighter margins, better UX, more markets, faster execution, or a platform that doesn’t punish them for winning, there isn’t some giant layer of corporate translation between the user and the people actually building the product.
They hear it directly. They understand why it matters. And they can act on it.
That feedback loop is an enormous advantage.
Build WITH the community instead of building a product designed to extract as much as possible from it, and good things tend to happen.