Today we’d like to introduce you to Evan Rama.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I started building companies while I was a student at UT Austin. I had no network, no funding, and no real idea how to build a startup. I just knew I wanted to create something people genuinely enjoyed. My first company was Kupid, a live college dating show. In the beginning, I couldn’t afford venues, equipment, or marketing. I didn’t even have a car, so after class I would DoorDash on foot around Austin. I ended up walking more than 70 miles delivering food just to fund the next show. Every dollar I made went right back into the business. Marketing was another challenge because I couldn’t afford ads. One day I bought a cheap jester costume and spent hours walking around UT Austin handing out flyers. It looked ridiculous, but people stopped, took videos, and shared them online. That one stunt generated more attention than anything else I had tried. It taught me that when you don’t have money, you have to be willing to do things other people won’t. What started as a small campus event grew far beyond what I imagined. We produced 27 sold out live comedy and dating shows, completed two national college tours, and performed in front of more than 15,000 students across the country. While building Kupid, we noticed something interesting. The audience wasn’t just watching the show. They were constantly debating what would happen next and making predictions with their friends. We realized the real opportunity wasn’t the dating show itself. It was turning live entertainment into something people could actively participate in. That insight led us to spend the next three years rebuilding the company through multiple pivots until we launched CRSHMARKET. Today, users can trade on the outcome of anything happening live. Since making that pivot, we’ve raised $850,000 from investors and grown CRSHMARKET into one of the fastest growing live prediction platforms.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Definitely not. We’ve spent nearly three years building different versions of this company, and we’ve pivoted three times to get to where we are today. There were countless moments where it felt like nothing was working. In the early days, money was our biggest challenge. I was DoorDashing on foot just to pay for our next event, and every dollar we earned went straight back into the business. We couldn’t afford marketing, so we had to rely on creativity and constant experimentation to get people to notice us. As we grew, the challenges changed. Producing live events across the country was incredibly difficult. Every show came with last minute cancellations, logistical issues, and unexpected expenses. After each event, we would take what we learned, improve it, and do it all over again. The hardest decision was realizing that Kupid, the company we had spent years building, wasn’t the biggest opportunity. Walking away from something that was working on paper was incredibly difficult, but we believed interactive prediction markets had much larger potential. We rebuilt the company from the ground up, redesigned the product, and spent months testing new ideas before launching CRSHMARKET. There have been plenty of setbacks, failed experiments, and moments where we questioned whether we were on the right path. What has kept us going is the belief that every failure gets us one step closer to building something people truly love. We don’t give up easily, and that mindset has been one of our biggest advantages.
Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
CRSHMARKET is building the world’s first livestream prediction market. Today, entertainment is passive. You watch a livestream, scroll through the comments, and move on. We think there’s a much better experience. On CRSHMARKET, viewers can trade on what they think will happen next while the stream is happening. Markets settle in as little as 60 seconds, turning every livestream into an interactive experience. What makes us different is our infrastructure. Instead of only supporting major sporting events or elections, we’ve built a platform that can create and settle hundreds of prediction markets during a single livestream. Whether it’s a dating show, a creator livestream, a game show, a poker match, or a reality competition, almost anything happening live can become a market. We’re also building for creators, not just traders. Our vision is to give every creator a new way to engage and monetize their audience by making viewers active participants instead of passive spectators. What we’re most proud of is our willingness to reinvent ourselves. We started as a college dating show, spent years learning how audiences behave, and completely rebuilt the company around one insight: people don’t just want to watch live entertainment, they want to participate in it. Since launching CRSHMARKET, we’ve grown to over 20,000 users, generated more than $175,000 in trading volume, raised $850,000 from investors, and are continuing to prove that prediction markets can exist far beyond politics and sports. Our mission is simple: make every livestream interactive.
Are there any books, apps, podcasts or blogs that help you do your best?
A lot of my motivation comes from studying other founders and seeing how they built their companies. The biggest book I’d recommend is Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke. It completely changed how I make decisions. As a founder, you’re constantly making bets with incomplete information. The book taught me to focus on making the best possible decision with the information available instead of judging every decision by its outcome. I also spend a lot of time reading founder stories. I love learning how companies started, especially the messy early days that most people never hear about. Reading about founders who were broke, got rejected, pivoted multiple times, and eventually broke through reminds me that every successful company goes through long periods of uncertainty. More than anything, I enjoy following founders who are still in the middle of building. Watching someone go from zero to one is incredibly motivating because it makes success feel achievable. It reminds me that every great company started with someone figuring things out one day at a time.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://crshmarket.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/evannrama/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evanrama
- Twitter: https://x.com/Evanrrama
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@KupidDatingShow
