Failing Forward: What Insurabit Taught Me (And Why Savvy Scratch Exists)

By Doug Moeller | Professional Gambler & Founder of Savvy Scratch

I tried to build something massive once. Insurabit, an insurance fund denominated in bitcoin. And I don't mean "tried" like I half-assed it for a few weeks. I mean I went all in on creating something that would have required hundreds of millions of dollars to actually work.

Spoiler: I didn't raise hundreds of millions of dollars.

But that failure taught me more about building useful products than any win I've had at the poker tables, and it's directly why Savvy Scratch exists the way it does today. So let me tell you what went wrong, what I learned, and how those lessons show up every day in the scratch-off tool I'm building now.

The Big Idea That Was Too Big

The vision for Insurabit was actually straightforward, even if the execution wasn't. Create a transparent insurance reserve where everything is on-chain and auditable. Price risk programmatically instead of behind closed doors. Pay claims fast. Hold the reserves in BTC to align long-term incentives and preserve purchasing power.

On paper it made sense. In reality I hit four walls I couldn't climb.

The first was capital. Insurance is fundamentally a confidence game. People trust you because you can pay when the worst happens. If the worst-case scenario costs nine figures, you need nine figures sitting there before anyone takes you seriously. I had spreadsheets and conviction. I didn't have the war chest.

The second was trust and timing. Even if you're doing everything right, convincing institutions to move that kind of money into something new, especially anything touching crypto, requires the right relationships at exactly the right market moment. I had some of that. Not enough.

The third was regulatory reality. You can't just disrupt insurance from the outside. You have to negotiate your way in, jurisdiction by jurisdiction, product by product. That's measured in months and years, not weeks. I massively underestimated the friction.

And the fourth was the classic chicken-and-egg problem. Without the capital, I couldn't prove the model worked at scale. Without proving it worked, I couldn't raise the capital.

I didn't get Insurabit off the ground. It stung. But it also cleared my head in ways that mattered enormously for what came next.

What I Got Brutally Wrong

I tried to start at the boss level. The first version of the product needed elite trust and elite capital to even be useful. That's a terrible starting point unless you're a government or you already have a megacorp behind you.

I overestimated how patient the market would be. Potential backers might love your model in theory, but capital flows to momentum. If you can't put wins on the board quickly, you fade from everyone's radar. I've seen the same dynamic at poker tables. The player who shows up talking about their sophisticated strategy but never actually wins a pot gets tuned out by the table within an hour. Results buy you credibility. Narratives don't.

I thought an elegant idea was enough. It's not. The market pays for useful, not elegant. Something you can touch and use today beats something you can imagine working beautifully in some theoretical future.

And I tried building a skyscraper before pouring the foundation. Insurance with BTC reserves is like starting on the tenth floor. I hadn't poured enough concrete underneath, actual users, real traction, smaller provable wins, to support that weight.

What I Still Think I Was Right About

Transparency wins eventually. People don't need perfect. They need honest and verifiable. Aligned incentives matter more than marketing copy. If the structure makes sense, you need less convincing because the mechanics persuade on their own. And there's real demand for speed and fairness in any industry where the status quo is slow and opaque.

Those beliefs didn't die with Insurabit. They just needed a different format. One that didn't require me to somehow conjure hundreds of millions of dollars and navigate decades of regulatory mazes.

The Stupidly Simple Lesson

Make something that delivers value now. To actual people. For reasonable money. Without asking the entire world to bend around your vision first.

That's Savvy Scratch.

I didn't wake up one morning thinking "I should make an app." I wanted to apply the advantage-player mindset, data first, timing matters, skip bad spots, to a problem regular players face every single day. Picking scratch-off tickets without any real information. I spent over 15 years as a professional gambler with over $500K in lifetime winnings from poker, blackjack card counting, and casino advantage play. The through-line across all of those disciplines is identical: find where the math favors you, act when it does, walk away when it doesn't. No nine-figure fundraise needed. No permission slips. Just useful.

How Those Lessons Show Up in Savvy Scratch Every Day

The first lesson was to start where the customer actually is. Not in a pitch deck. Not in a theoretical model. At the gas station counter, looking at 80 different tickets on the wall, with one minute to decide and a line forming behind them. Savvy Scratch answers the only question that matters in that moment: which tickets look best today at my price point? Not at launch. Not in theory. Today.

The second lesson was to ship small wins consistently instead of swinging for one grand slam. Instead of "raise a massive fund first," we ship states one at a time. We started with a handful and now cover 17 states across the country. Each new state is a tangible win. Each one helps real players avoid wasting money on bad purchases. Consistent reliability beats grand promises every time.

The third lesson was radical transparency about the data. We pull from official state prize databases, clean it up, sanity-check it, and surface what actually matters: the top prizes. If a game's jackpot tier is basically dead, its ranking drops. If it's healthy, it rises. No magic formulas, no hype. I wrote about why top prizes are the only thing that matters in a separate post, and the logic behind that focus traces directly back to the Insurabit lesson about giving people verifiable information instead of asking them to trust your pitch.

The fourth lesson was aligning incentives with users instead of against them. I don't need you to gamble more to make Savvy Scratch work. I need you to make better decisions when you choose to play. If you buy less on bad days and more on good days, that's a win for you, which means you keep using the tool. Our incentives point the same direction. That's the structural alignment I tried to build into Insurabit and couldn't execute at scale. With Savvy Scratch, it works at $5 a month.

And the fifth lesson was hiding the complexity and showing only the clarity. There's real math happening behind the scenes. Tracking remaining jackpots, claim pace, tier health, sold-through estimates. But the output is a simple ranked list by price that you can use in ten seconds. Complexity in the engine, clarity on the screen. That's the same principle behind every good advantage-play tool I've ever used. The counting system in blackjack is sophisticated, but the betting decision at the table is simple: the count is positive and you bet more, or it's not and you bet less. Savvy Scratch works the same way. The analysis is deep, but your decision is binary. This game looks good today, or it doesn't.

The Scars That Actually Help

Insurabit forced me to answer some uncomfortable questions that turned out to be exactly the right questions for building something better.

Can you lead with verifiable value instead of pitch decks? Savvy Scratch does that every morning when the rankings update. Can you separate your ego from the outcome? You can fail at something big and still be the right person to build the next thing. I'm the same guy who grinded tens of millions of poker hands and learned blackjack from actual legends. I just had to pick a problem that didn't require a sovereign wealth fund to solve.

Can you stay disciplined with your edge? Absolutely. Data first, timing matters, skip bad spots. That code runs on scratch-offs now instead of cards.

Think of it like table selection in poker. I used to walk through a poker room and scan every table before sitting down. I was looking for the specific combination of loose action, deep stacks, and weak tendencies that meant the math favored me at that particular seat. Sometimes every table in the room looked bad, and I'd walk right back out. No ego about it. The discipline to pass on a mediocre spot is what kept my win rate positive over millions of hands. Savvy Scratch applies that same table-selection discipline to scratch-offs. You scan the games in your state, at your price point, and the tool tells you which ones have the composition that favors buyers right now. If nothing qualifies, you save your money and check again tomorrow.

Why Any of This Matters to You

You don't need my life story to buy a $10 scratcher. You need a clean answer to simple questions. Are the big prizes still in circulation? Is this game getting better or worse over time? How does it stack up against other tickets at the same price? Should I buy today, or skip and keep my money?

That's what Savvy Scratch gives you. The poker background, the advantage-play training, the failed mega-project, that's all just context for why I'm obsessed with getting those answers right. Every morning those rankings update, it's my version of "here's today's ranked list, same time tomorrow, every day." Consistency builds trust way better than any sales pitch, and I learned that lesson the hard way by watching Insurabit's pitch deck collect dust.

Savvy Scratch covers 17 states: Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Virginia, and Washington. It costs $5/month or $50/year, with a 30-day worry free guarantee. If you spend even $20 a month on scratch-offs, one avoided dead game pays for the subscription. Get started at savvyscratch.com/register.

What I'd Tell Past-Me

Pick the smallest valuable loop first. Not the most elegant or ambitious, but the one that lets a real person say "that helped me today." Default to proof over promises. Replace slide decks with screenshots. Replace "we will" with "we did." Make the first win cheap for users, because if the first win requires nine figures from someone, you picked the wrong first win. Tell a simpler story, because "here's the best $10 ticket available today" lands with people in a way that "here's a revolutionary new global insurance structure" never could. And keep your edge while narrowing your scope. Be the same disciplined operator, just pick a problem that doesn't require changing the world's plumbing on day one.

The routine is simple. Open Savvy Scratch. Pick your state. Tap your price range. Choose from today's top-ranked options, or skip if nothing looks good. No massive capital requirements. Just better choices, one ticket at a time, for $5/month with a 30-day worry free guarantee at savvyscratch.com/register.

Play smarter. Time your purchases. Let the numbers guide you. Everything I learned the hard way is baked into the app.

About the Author: Doug Moeller is a professional gambler with over 15 years of experience in poker, blackjack card counting, and casino advantage play, with over $500K in lifetime winnings. He built Savvy Scratch to bring the same data-driven approach that works at casino tables to scratch-off lottery tickets. Follow Doug on X | YouTube