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 closed beta 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 us