The gamification platform that quietly turns the person in the foam finger into a name, an email, and a reason for the sponsor to renew.
It is a Tuesday in the off-season, which in sports means nothing is happening and everything is at stake. A team has no game to sell, no score to push. So instead it asks its fans a question - rank these jerseys, predict this trade, redraw this mascot - and watches a few hundred thousand of them answer. Behind that question, doing the counting and the collecting, is WIT.
WIT calls itself a digital activation platform. Translated out of the marketing dialect: it builds the little games that pop up on team websites and stadium screens, the polls and brackets and giveaways that look like idle fun and function, very deliberately, as the front door to a fan's contact information. Around 200 brands and roughly 100 teams use it. Most of their fans have no idea the company exists. That is rather the point.
“Gamify Engagement. Drive Revenue.”
- WIT's tagline, which is admirably honest about both halves of the dealHere is the uncomfortable truth modern sports has spent a decade circling. A franchise can sell out an 80,000-seat arena and still know almost nothing about who is in it. The ticket was bought through a reseller. The merch was paid for in cash. The roar is anonymous. Television ratings tell you how many; they never tell you who.
Meanwhile the rules of the open web kept tightening. Third-party cookies crumbled, privacy regulation arrived, and the cheap tricks of digital advertising stopped working. Brands suddenly needed first-party data - information fans hand over willingly - and they needed a reason for fans to hand it over. Loyalty, it turns out, is easy to feel and hard to measure.
The obvious fix - build a custom app, hire engineers, run a campaign - was expensive and slow, and most teams' marketing departments are neither large nor technical. The gap between “we have passionate fans” and “we can actually reach them” was where WIT decided to live.
You cannot retarget a feeling. You can, however, retarget an email address freely given in exchange for a chance to redesign the mascot.
- The unspoken thesis behind the whole businessVaidhy Murti did not arrive in sports the usual way. A Princeton graduate and New Jersey native, he spent his early twenties building Friendsy, a college-based social network he ran as CEO from 2012 to 2018. That venture taught him something specific and portable: how to get a large group of people to do something small and voluntary, at the same time, for fun.
In 2018 he pointed that lesson at fandom and started WIT. The bet was simple to state and hard to execute - that fans don't want to be marketed to, they want to participate, and that participation, done right, produces exactly the data and revenue that the marketing was chasing in the first place. Give people a game, and the spreadsheet fills itself.
The trick was never the contest. The trick was making the contest worth a team's time and a fan's email in the same thirty seconds.
- On why “just run a giveaway” is harder than it soundsIt was a contrarian read. Plenty of sports-tech was chasing the spectacle - bigger screens, splashier apps, the metaverse for about eleven months. WIT went the other direction, toward the unglamorous plumbing of opted-in data and turnkey campaigns that a marketing intern could launch before lunch.
WIT's platform is less a single product than a vending machine of them: a library of 30+ ready-to-launch experiences a team can customize and deploy without writing code. Each one is a different shaped door, and every door leads to the same room - a tidy, consenting database of fans.
Fan voting and prediction campaigns. The mechanic that let Browns fans help redraw the Dawg Pound logo.
Geographic and photo-based displays - the kind the Ravens used to go viral - that turn fans into the content.
Instant-win, sweepstakes and tournament mechanics built for lead generation and sponsor fulfillment.
Every interaction is engineered to collect opted-in fan data and feed CRM, loyalty and partnership reporting.
The platform runs mobile-first, built on a stack that spans React Native, Node.js, Phoenix and Docker - which matters mostly because fans show up on phones, in stadiums, with bad Wi-Fi and ten seconds of patience. The experiences load, they capture, they hand the team a sponsor-ready result. The cleverness is invisible, which is the highest compliment a fan-facing product can earn.
The best fan-engagement tech disappears. The fan thinks they played a game. The team knows they ran a marketing campaign.
- A fair description of what 30+ turnkey experiences actually doVaidhy Murti launches the company in New York, betting that fans want to play, not just watch.
Closes a Series A led by McCarthy Capital, and wins a Hashtag Sports Award for the Cleveland Browns Dawg Pound campaign.
Acquires the Tally Gamification Platform, opens a regional presence in Australia, and is named an Inc. Best Workplace and a three-time SBJ Best Place to Work in Sports.
Leadership team grows; WIT publishes a playbook on gamified lead generation for FIFA World Cup 2026.
The Cleveland Browns are the case study WIT keeps in its back pocket, and for good reason. Asked to refresh the team's midfield Dawg Pound logo, the Browns did something most brands would never risk: they handed the pencil to the fans. Running on WIT, the campaign collected roughly 1,300 logo submissions, drew about 100,000 votes, and generated more than 1,000,000 impressions. The rebrand stopped being a corporate decree and became a thing the fans owned. It won a 2024 Hashtag Sports Award for Best Use of Fan-Generated Content.
Hand fans the pencil and they will draw you a marketing campaign, a data set, and a story - usually in that order.
- The Browns case study, abbreviatedThe client list does the rest of the talking. WIT's activations run across roughly 100 venues, leagues and teams - the NFL, NHL, NBA, WNBA, MLB, MLS, NWSL and NCAA - alongside Fortune 1000 brands including Coca-Cola and Bud Light. Named teams range from the San Francisco 49ers and New York Jets to the Baltimore Ravens, Buffalo Sabres, Tampa Bay Lightning and New Jersey Devils. It is a roster that reads like a Super Bowl ad break, which is roughly the company it keeps.
Strip away the brackets and the foam fingers and WIT is chasing something older than sports-tech: the conversion of feeling into relationship. A fan's loyalty has always been real and almost always been invisible. WIT's wager is that you can make it visible without making it cynical - that a fan who plays a game and shares a photo is having a better night, not a worse one, even as the data quietly accrues.
That balance is the whole ethic of the place. Push too hard and the game becomes a form to fill out; the fan smells the marketing and leaves. Push too softly and the team gets a fun moment and nothing it can act on. WIT's entire product is an argument that you don't have to choose - and a company culture, by the awards at least, that seems to enjoy making it.
The opposite of a passive fan is not a customer. It's a participant. WIT spends its days collapsing the distance between the two.
- The mission, minus the slide deckThe ground under digital marketing is still shifting, and it shifts in WIT's favor. As third-party data keeps drying up, first-party data - given willingly, tied to a real fan - only grows more valuable. The 2026 calendar alone, with a home-soil FIFA World Cup, hands every brand in North America a once-in-a-cycle reason to find out who its fans are. WIT spent 2025 acquiring Tally and crossing the Pacific into Australia precisely because the problem it solves does not respect borders or off-seasons.
So return to that Tuesday in the off-season. The fan voting on a logo thinks they're killing ten minutes. They are. They are also, without friction or resentment, telling a team who they are and giving a sponsor a reason to write next year's check. The game ends, the fan moves on, and somewhere a spreadsheet is one row richer. That used to be impossible. WIT made it feel like fun.
The future of fandom isn't louder. It's two-way. The fans get to play; the teams finally get to know them. WIT is betting the whole company on that handshake.
- Where this is all heading