Thomas Koller spent 30 years in consumer goods before he ever walked a gambling trade show. He doesn’t play slots, and doesn’t think another casino product will win over people like him. “You cannot get someone, for example, like me, to play slots,” the Quiz2Coin managing director said on the BettingStartups Podcast. A quiz about his football club is a different story.
That idea drives Quiz2Coin, a skill-based quiz game where players answer questions on topics they care about and compete for cash. It started pre-COVID as a free-to-play quiz Koller built with a friend. When UEFA asked to white-label the product, the team started thinking about what fans would want beyond bragging rights. Trips to ICE and SBC showed Koller how much money sat in cash games.
The other unlock was AI. Before ChatGPT, the team had 750,000 to 800,000 handwritten questions across 27 categories. Now it can generate fresh, timely questions around the clock. That lets it run daily $100 cash quizzes for players spread across time zones. Quiz2Coin also sells entry into tournaments with fixed or dynamic prize pools, and keeps 25% to 30% of entry fees as a rake.
Koller said the platform has roughly 100,000 registered players, mostly from Telegram, with 5,000 to 7,000 playing at any given time. Some $100 quizzes have drawn 1,200 players with no marketing behind them.
He thinks this can work where HQ Trivia didn’t because of who’s playing. HQ Trivia was a general knowledge game funded by sponsors and venture capital, and it had to keep raising prizes to hold attention. Quiz2Coin builds around fan bases—the NFL, Champions League soccer, Star Wars, Game of Thrones, the Oscars. “A fan sticks around nearly a lifetime,” Koller said. Timing matters too. Questions land during halftimes and breaks, when fans are looking at their phones and not the game.
Vouchers have been a surprise source of revenue. Koller said more than 20% of prize vouchers get redeemed, which could make affiliate deals the company’s second-biggest earner after the rake. “In our case, the people have the feeling that they did something. They earned it,” he said.
He sees Quiz2Coin as close to prediction markets: a knowledge-based way into real-money play for people who would never open a casino app. Koller said the free-to-play entry keeps it on the skill-game side of the line. The company already requires players to be 18+, runs KYC and AML checks, and will geofence any US state that objects.
Koller said he and his partner have put about $800K into the business over two years. Quiz2Coin is now raising $2M, has $1M in verbal commitments, and expects to close before year-end. The 12-person team, spread across Greece, Poland, and Ukraine, is getting the system ready for 500,000 concurrent players by February, starting with the NFL, March Madness, and Champions League. He would rather cap entries than risk an outage. “The worst thing that can happen is you run such a big event and then the system cannot handle the volume,” he said.
Next up is scale. “Prove that it works, make sure nothing breaks, and then increase the audience,” Koller said.
Listen to the full podcast on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.
