Spina lets you bet on your favorite childhood games—from Connect 4 to Tic-Tac-Toe

Jackson Erminio doesn’t carry your typical real-money gaming founder background. He came up through sneaker reselling, a failed e-commerce brand, and a marketing agency he built through college and sold last year. He describes his approach as "skill stacking"—each chapter adding a layer to improve the next. When he looked for where to put those layers to work, he landed on real-money gaming.

"I especially saw it over COVID and the years following," he said on The BettingStartups Podcast. "Everything was just betting on basically anything." The question for Erminio wasn't whether the category was growing, where a marketing-native founder with no gaming background could fit in a way that hadn't been done before.

The answer became Spina—a skill-based gaming platform built around live, player-versus-player matches in games people already know: Connect 4, 8-Ball, Tic-Tac-Toe. The pitch, as Erminio puts it, is "childhood games with adult stakes." Players are matchmade in real time, with an optional voice chat running through the game. The rake comes from a small fee per match—not from house edge.

Spina operates on two tracks. There's a direct-to-consumer app that launched recently and is pulling in organic downloads from App Store keyword optimization. And there's a B2B channel—placing Spina's games on existing iGaming platforms—aimed at solving the company's core challenge before it becomes a crisis.

That challenge is liquidity. For a live PVP marketplace to work, someone has to be on the other side of the match within seconds. Erminio is currently solving this the unscalable way—bankrolling friends and interns to fill the queue. The longer-term answer is cross-platform pooling: a player on BetOpenly and a player on Spina's own app can be matched against each other, which expands the available pool across every partner simultaneously. Hub88 is currently in testing, which Erminio expects will open access to a much wider network of operators.

"We're not operating as a house," he said. "Because we're skill gaming, I have to have a bunch of people go and fill those slots for me." The metric he's watching is simple: how quickly can an open game get filled around the clock with no artificial liquidity? That's the inflection point.

Early retention signals are encouraging. Erminio says close to 90% of players who complete one game return for more, and Connect 4 accounts for roughly 70% of all games played.

Spina is bootstrapped—funded out of Erminio's proceeds from selling his marketing agency and his CTO Peter's contribution, which includes owning the server infrastructure outright, cutting hosting costs significantly. Erminio has turned down several early investment offers, preferring to wait until more B2B partners are live and the company's valuation case is clearer. Strategic value matters more to him than capital: "Can they help us? Do they have access to these rooms that I don't currently have access to?"

On the category broadly, Erminio thinks skill gaming is underappreciated relative to the attention prediction markets are currently absorbing. He's watching regulatory developments closely—Spina operates in 41 states—and sees a possible opening as sweepstakes platforms face increasing pressure. The line between skill and chance, he argues, is still being drawn, and where it gets drawn will shape the whole competitive map.

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