Joe Holka

Background

About Joe Holka

The decision to end my career as an athlete was paralyzing in many ways. I played hockey at both the Division I and minor professional level, but ultimately, I hung em' up to bet on myself and pursue a new dream in the sports business. Today, I am a full-time content creator specializing in fantasy football, daily fantasy sports, and sports betting- When I officially retired, I moved back to Minnesota, and I was honestly putting off getting a real job at all costs. I decided to give myself 1 year at the content thing. This was in 2016-2017. Around this time, I started to get close with a couple high-stakes Daily Fantasy Sports players who were transitioning from Poker, which was a fantastic learning experience in itself. Fast-forward, I ended up full-time at FantasyLabs, a DFS tools and content site where Mark Cuban was an investor and strategic partner. Ultimately, they sold the company to The Chernin Group, forming The Action Network. Basically, my role was to write content, help develop tools, customer support, provide feedback on the app, and a million other things. I ended up getting laid off after the 2018-19 football season, and that was the first time I realized how important it was to build a personal brand and audience that I owned, because it was basically starting at square one because most of my content was behind a paywall at Labs. I think I had like 3k followers on Twitter or something. So I started live streaming on Twitch, creating content on YouTube, and building a community on Discord. At the time, 1-on-1 DFS coaching for high stakes players was paying the bills. Fast-forward three NFL seasons, I've built a six-figure business and a pretty diversified social platform where my primary focus has been live streaming on YouTube, driving traffic on Twitter through collaborations/guests. I've been experimenting on TikTok since before the pandemic on multiple accounts. I've been able to secure some pretty big sponsors along the way. Last year, my show was Presented by FanDuel, which was obviously huge for my credibility and brand.