Evidence, consented at the source.
Most Australian gambling research runs on self-report and helpline populations — the people willing to talk. Betterself sits with the cohort research struggles to reach: people managing it themselves, privately, with their real bank statements. We're seeking university partners to put that to work.
What Betterself can contribute
- Statement-derived spend, not recall. Consented, de-identified gambling-spend data drawn from users' own bank statements — deposits, money back, operators, timing.
- In-the-moment prompts. The app can put a research question in front of the right person at the relevant moment — "what do you wish you'd known about online gambling?" asked when it means something, not in a survey six months later.
- A hard-to-reach cohort. Our users are, near-definitionally, the deal-with-it-on-my-own 40% — the group most under-represented in help-seeking samples.
Governance you can put in an ethics application
Consent is explicit, granular and revocable. Research contribution is a separate opt-in with its own consent record and an append-only audit trail — never bundled into signup.
De-identification before anything leaves. No names, no account numbers, no raw statements — those never leave the user's device in the first place.
No gambling-industry funding. Betterself takes no operator money of any kind, so collaboration carries no industry-funding entanglement for your disclosures.
What we're looking for
Three shapes of partnership, in rough order of readiness:
- Independent evaluation. Does statement-based awareness plus self-set limits actually change spending? We want that answered by someone with no stake in the answer.
- Collaborative studies. Your questions, our instrument — particularly on young men, sports betting, and the gap between awareness and help-seeking.
- Grant partnerships. WA health funding increasingly asks for practitioner–tech–research consortia. We're a willing industry partner with the data layer already built.
We're a young product with a growing user base, not a population database — sample sizes are what they are today and we'll tell you exactly what they are. What we offer is the instrument, the cohort access, and a founder who will build the study's plumbing into the product.
Working on gambling harm in WA or nationally? The founder reads this inbox.
Talk to usThe button opens your email app — or write to hello@mybetterself.com.au