Jackpocket CEO Peter Sullivan joins Yahoo Finance Live to explain how his lottery app works and how successful it's been so far.

Video Transcript

DAVE BRIGGS: For the fourth time in just over four years, the lotto jackpot has topped the $1 billion mark. And if you're just seeing this reminder and thinking, oh no, I didn't go out to the convenience store, I don't have time, don't worry about it. You can win a billion bucks without leaving your couch. You can do it right here on your cell phone through the app Jackpocket. We're talking to the CEO Peter Sullivan from Jackpocket. Got the app right here.

Peter, first, good to see you. Take us through the process. How do we go about buying our tickets on your app?

PETER SULLIVAN: Yeah, thanks for having me. It's super easy and convenient. That's what we're trying to do here. Think of us like the Uber Eats for lottery tickets. So essentially, you go on. You can either scan your ID or enter the information. We're going to make sure you are of age, which is 18 and most states, 21 in Arizona.

And then what we're going to do is make sure that you're within one of the 15 states that we're currently operating in. We'll be expanding in hopefully 10 more states this year. You can go on, pick your numbers, submit it. And then you're going to get a copy of the actual lottery ticket that was bought and digitized on your behalf.

The best part is you never have to worry about checking the ticket. We're going to alert you if you've won. We've already had 25 millionaires. In just over the course of this Mega Millions run, we've had over $4 million of winnings from people playing the Mega Millions that haven't hit that top prize, but have hit smaller prizes.

SEANA SMITH: Well, Peter, people certainly are using it. It makes so much sense. It's so much more convenient for lottery players out there. When you talk about how popular it is, how many people are using your app now?

PETER SULLIVAN: So we were the number one app this summer in the entire App Store, which is huge. But right now, in this Mega Millions run, on some of the drawings 3.5% of all the Mega Millions tickets in the country are going through our app. And that's only with 15 states being live.

We've seen in the particular states that we're live in upwards of 15% and more of all the gameplay coming through our app. So it's been growing exponentially. This week we're up another 143% since last week. So everyone's excited with this big jackpot.

DAVE BRIGGS: If you're in the same sentence as TikTok, you're doing something right. Trust is an interesting factor when it comes to the lottery, in particular when it goes online. How do you convince some of the skeptics to stop going to buy that ticket and then they can trust this platform. I hear a lot of people saying, I don't trust it.