Most people who have played Super Bowl squares know the traditional format: a 10x10 grid, random numbers along the axes, a payout when the score lands on your box. It's one of the most frictionless mass-market gambling formats ever invented, but GridGorilla thinks it can be the foundation for something a lot bigger.
The bootstrapped startup, founded by Nathan Thomas and Brett Debari, is building a grid-based prediction app that adapts the squares mechanic for any event with measurable outcomes. Instead of one grid tied to a single game's final score, the product picks four players from a matchup, plots one stat on each axis (points and rebounds, for an NBA game), and asks users to predict each athlete's box. Submit your picks, watch the games, and the more squares you hit, the more you win. Users can submit up to 10 entries per day, with prizes paid out daily, even if it's only 15 or 20 cents.
The product is currently free-to-play and ad-supported. About half the user base is female, and the team is leaning into that as a feature, not a coincidence. "This is a great gateway game to take a user who is not a sports bettor and get them interested in predictive grids, predictive markets, predictive sports," Thomas said on The BettingStartups Podcast. The pitch to the broader industry is that GridGorilla can sit on top of the funnel for sportsbooks, prediction markets, and DFS apps that are spending hundreds of dollars per acquisition to chase the same depositor.
Defensibility is the part the team has spent the most time on. Thomas filed a software patent through a specialized attorney. A 60-page document, $20,000, and a year later, Thomas had a patent that covers, in his words, "systems and methods for selecting a remote device based on…event outcomes." Translation: a user picks from a plurality of options, and the correct one is determined by an independent future event. He thinks it's enough to fend off copycats. "We believe that we have footing to stand on if someone comes up with the same game," he said.
The five-year vision is a pay-to-play product, plus a licensing layer that lets brands and operators embed GridGorilla mechanics in their own apps. In the near term, the team would rather show traction than raise: roughly 1,000 users today, 60% 30-day retention, a sub-$2 CAC on Meta, and an average user playing 25 of the app's quick-hit "instant games" per day. The whole operation runs on three people, no salaries, hosting under $300 a month, and another couple hundred in AI tooling—Thomas estimates Cursor wrote 97% of the app, which is built in Flutter to run on both iOS and Android.
Next on the calendar: a Preakness squares contest, one or two sponsored grids, and a path to 10,000 users before NFL season.
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