In early 2024 my co-founder Luca and I were chasing a bad weekend we couldn't see clearly. The morning after, when we tried to total the damage, was the morning we decided to build a tracker — not a tipping service.
It was a Sunday in early 2024. Luca and I were both deep into a losing weekend on football. By the evening I was chasing — doubling the next stake to "win back" the previous loss, then doing it again because the next one would surely land. I had a clear feeling that I was "up overall" for the season. I had no proof. I just believed it.
That's the trick of recreational betting. Winning bets are vivid. Losing ones blur. You compose a highlight reel in your head and call it your record.
The next morning we sat down to total the season. Three bookmaker apps each. A Google Sheet. Bets placed across different leagues, different weeks, different currencies (we live in different countries). One bookmaker we'd quit mid-season — those records were partial.
We couldn't do it. Not properly. Even when we wanted the real number, the friction of finding it was too high. We got it to "probably" but never to "actually." And the "probably" was much worse than the story we'd been telling ourselves.
The realisation wasn't "we lost money." It was "we hadn't been counting."
Whatever was off about our betting habits, the bigger problem was that we weren't seeing them. We'd been operating on a friendly version of the truth.
We started building Zort that month. The core decision was made on day one: this would not be another app telling people what to bet on. The market was already full of them. We didn't need another voice in our ear. We needed a mirror — snap a slip, see the number, no judgement, no advice, just truth.
That's also why "your bets, organised" is the tagline now. We're not selling you predictions. We're not selling you an edge. We're snapping your slip, doing the math, and putting it on a screen you can't argue with.
The most important thing tracking did — and still does — for both of us is separate two activities that look identical from the outside.
There's entertainment betting: a few quid on a Saturday match with friends. You watch the game more closely. You laugh either way. The stake is small enough that whether it wins or loses is a footnote.
And there's compulsive chasing: a stake that exists only because the previous bet lost. The number is bigger than your usual. There's an internal urgency. The win wouldn't feel like winning — it would feel like relief.
The two feel almost the same in the moment. They look completely different in a monthly P&L.
Once we could see the chasing pattern in our own tracked data — sharp spikes in stake size that mapped cleanly to losing weekends — the pattern lost most of its power. We didn't quit betting. We still place the occasional entertainment bet. But the chasing essentially stopped, and the totals dropped massively. Not because Zort told us what to do. Because we couldn't pretend anymore.
This is also the reason we're tightening how we talk about Zort. We're a tracker. We help people see their real numbers. We have responsible-gambling tools built in for a reason. We are not — and were never meant to be — a "win more" app.
If you're reading this and you suspect you'd rather not see your real number for last month, that's exactly the moment to look. It's also the moment Zort was built for.
— Ilgaz, with Luca
Co-founders, GIS Analytics Limited
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