We recently connected with Payton Soicher and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Payton, thanks for joining us today. What’s one of the most important lessons you learned in school?
I did not really ever find a subject in school that I really enjoyed until I was a sophomore in college. I had always gotten good, not great, grades and never really had any issues getting homework done or feeling like I was behind the rest of the class. However, there was nothing that I felt like I had been challenged on, nor did I ever feel like I fully understood why we would learn the things we did.
So sophomore year in college, I had an academic advisor sit down with me and figure out what subject I should declare for a major. I had taken some math classes and enjoyed it, but now I had to decide if I wanted to get a bachelor of arts or a bachelor of science degree. I really did not enjoy learning a second language in high school (which I now regret), so I went in the route of going towards a bachelor of science. This meant I had to pick between physics, chemistry, astronomy, or computer science. I thought that computer science just meant doing excel spreadsheets, which I already knew how to do, so that seemed like a no brainer.
After my first CS-101 class, I ran back to my academic advisor and said “This is a total mistake. I have no idea what in the world that was, but that made absolutely no sense”. I wanted out. But, credit to my advisor, he told me to stick with it and that I was smart enough to learn it, something that I really hadn’t heard from a professor before. He challenged me when I had never really been truly challenged in school yet.
It’s been ten years since I had that conversation, and now arguably my biggest passion is coding. I can’t get enough of it.
The overall lesson was that when something seems way too complicated and hard to understand, don’t just push it off to the side and look for something else. So many times now I’ve had to try and learn something that feels uncomfortable and doesn’t make sense. The scariest part about that is it makes you feel dumb, and nobody wants to feel that way. I’ve seen so many times where people refuse to learn something that would make their life better because it’s uncomfortable. Every time I feel intimidated and feeling like I am trying to wiggle my way out of doing something I don’t fully understand, I remember how I had the same feeling after my first coding class. Now I can’t imagine my life without it.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I’ve been a sports fan from day one. My father was a sportscaster and seeing him work at his craft, I’ve admired how creative he was for having perspective on sports, regardless of whether I agree with him or not on his opinion of the matter. I wanted to try and do something like that, but don’t have the same desire to be a broadcast journalist like he was.
Right out of college I started out at a sports data consulting company that worked with ticketing data. After that, I had worked at Sony PlayStation on their MLB The Show game. I was learning how you could mix things together like math, data, and sports and how it all could come together to make a fan’s experience better.
When working on Rankings Right Now, which is a website that uses machine learning to try and predict the AP and the College Football Selection Committee poll rankings in real time, the goal has always been to try and enhance the experience of college football fans. To bring something new to the conversation. Rankings are such an important part of the college football discussion because it’s plastered everywhere on advertisements, the scoreboard when you’re watching at home, and also determines the final 12 teams who make the college football playoff.
Everything I’ve built is geared towards the fans. Improving the algorithms, giving people more information to play with, simulations, everything is for them and that’s what I’m most proud of. I’ve had people reach out and say that they use the website each week and can’t get enough, which is all any creator of a product wants to hear.
There are many levels of “successful”, but as long as people are using it and it contributes to the discussion in college football, I am completely satisfied.
Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?
Since I am an online platform, social media is the main source of 100% of the users who sign up for my website. The most important thing when it comes to social media is automation. When there are 134 teams that are eligible to be ranked each week, you can’t spend hours doing screenshots, manual posts, updates, etc. Especially when you’re first starting out, you don’t have the budget to pay people to constantly be on social media and making posts. It’s not like you’re coving a local team, you’re covering the entire college football landscape. It is a lot of time.
The most important thing you can do is try to figure out “how can this be done on its own without my intervention”. That means writing “bots” to make sure that posts get automated, and then spend your quality time answering questions or engaging with your audience. I’ve saved hundreds of hours this year just with the automation I’ve been able to put in. I’ve been lucky that I can write a lot of the automation myself because I have the skillset to do so, but everything should always come down to “how can this be done automatically”.
What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?
Everything that my website provides is nice to have, but nothing works without the quality of the machine learning algorithm. When it comes to machine learning models today, a lot of people still don’t fully understand how they work under the hood, and that’s fine! It is sometimes easier to discuss the website with them because they don’t really care about how the algorithm is working, but they enjoy the product. Cool, easy.
Then there are the people who DO understand how things work under the hood and have questions. Since it is a proprietary algorithm, I don’t share the code base with people to check how things work. This can be frustrating to show other data scientists who want to verify your work and make sure you’re not just making things up the entire time. In this case, the most important thing to do is to be as transparent as possible. We post to social media and have a newsletter each week that shows the algorithm’s real time predictions, as well as the final predictions. The final predictions are key because they show how close or far off the algorithm was from the real rankings. The closer they are, the more people trust the product and the more entertaining the product becomes because you can know that it’s not just Payton over in the corner making up his own rankings, which isn’t interesting to anyone.
When anyone says “Well we can’t verify your algorithm”, I can immediately point them to the previous newsletters that break down how close things were to reality. Each time I’ve done that, the tone immediately changes from the person I’m discussing with. It turns it into “This is a black box and I can’t trust it” to “Ah, this is actually pretty good”. If I just constantly tried to defend why the algorithm is right or if I strategically only showed off the best predictions, I’d lost trust with the audience who enjoy what the product actually does. Showing both the good and bad makes sure that I’m not hiding anything, which everyone appreciates.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.rankingsrightnow.com
- Instagram: @rankingsrightnow
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61560080904054
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/payton-soicher/
- Twitter: @RankRightNow
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@RankigsRightNow
- Other: Newsletter: https://rankingsrightnow.substack.com/