Andrew Wood spent nearly seven years advising land-based casinos, online operators, tribes, and gaming REITs as an investment banker before betting on an idea of his own. Two months ago he left banking to run Rally Tabs full time, a sweepstakes product that reimagines the bar-room pull tab as a digital, ownable sports card. The company's current digital product is now live in 39 states and Washington, DC.
Rally Tabs didn't start there. Wood and his co-founders spent two years first running a physical pull tab route in Wisconsin bars—same price, same look, same feel as any other pull tab, just with a live sports bet attached.
The idea worked, but the format fought itself. "The pull tab crowd really likes instant gratification, where our product at the time was a little bit more of a deferred gratification," Wood said on the BettingStartups Podcast, and that mismatch is what pushed the team to rebuild. The rebuild became a digital pack: users pick a sport, league, and team, then rip open a pack to reveal tabs—cards loaded with parlays, props, or other sports predictions tied to that team's next live game.
What separates Rally Tabs from a typical prediction market or scratch card is what happens after a tab loses. A card that doesn't hit isn't dead—players pay a small recharge fee to reactivate it against the team's next game, building a running portfolio across sports and teams rather than a one-and-done transaction. "We've kinda shifted the paradigm from renting...to owning," Wood said, framing it as the product's core differentiator against the pack-ripping apps, prediction markets, and fantasy tools it otherwise resembles.
Wood is candid that customer acquisition, not the product mechanic, is the open question right now. "Anything with sports betting or predictions or anything around just kind of the sports gaming universe is a marketing company," he said. Rally Tabs is still testing channels—online ads, content, and in-person activations at sports bars, stadiums, and tailgates—to find what sticks. The company has run on a friends-and-family round to date and plans to pursue institutional capital once it has conviction in its acquisition funnel, which Wood pegs at six to eight months out.
Rally Tabs is live with baseball now, with football tabs launching August 30 ahead of the NFL season Wood expects will be the company's biggest proving ground. Beyond that, he's eyeing a return to physical retail and in-stadium activations, chasing what he calls the product's core use case: something built to be used in and around a live game, not away from one.
