I think Instagram sold for US$1bn with 24 employees. Tinder didn’t start out as a dating App. It was a workflow management App that was running out of money. They took a punt with the technology they had created and applied it to dating. They had no idea if it would work. Now they’re worth billions.
worry about public disclosure statements etc., there is a different risk profile that will allows us to move a lot more rapidly.
YOU SHUTTERED BEFORE GOING LIVE TO THE PUBLIC - WAS THAT IN FACT A LUCKY BREAK?
Up to date our marketing focus has been B2B, whereby we’ve targeted our operator partners. It’s great that everyone knows us in this space, and in terms of our reputation, it’s not been a concern. Te operators recognised that we’re a start-up; they’re glad that we’ve made it through - and now they want us to get to work. On the B2C side, we’ve been extremely fortunate that this happened prior to a really big launch. We haven’t started our B2C consumer-facing activities, looking more to customer acquisition strategies as opposed to a branding strategy. So, in a lot of ways it was very fortunate that this happen now, rather than six months from now - whereby the effects would have been far more wide ranging as we’d have been a consumer brand by that stage.
WHEN’S BETCADE NOW LAUNCHING?
Unfortunately, we’ve been set back in terms of timeline, mostly due to the fact that we don’t have the staff we had before. All the technology is intact, but we have a skeleton crew at this point, which means we don’t have the bandwidth to handle new customers, so we’re just making sure that our current customers are happy. We have had a couple of people say that
they’d like to re-engage with us, but we don’t have the capacity or support they’d need. I think it’s going to set us back a few months. We are planning to get up to speed in Spring and during Summer we’ll be removing the beta-label.
WHAT’S BEEN THE COMPANY FALLOUT FROM THE CLOSURE?
We are back to start-up status again. Right now it’s me and my CTO. I’m CEO and everything else. We’re back to our original line-up.
AS YOU GO CUSTOMER-FACING, YOU’LL BE DOING A LOT OF SPENDING - HOW DO YOU SCALE TOWARDS THAT?
From a management standpoint, we have all the technology in place to manage those campaigns, what we need is the right people to helm those aspects for us. It’s not easy to do, given we are in a specialised field. You can’t take someone from outside the gambling industry and asked them to get up to speed immediately. It will take time, but we built the company to scale appropriately. It’s about getting the technology to work and then the right people to helm those activities. We had a great team before, and that helped us and worked out to their advantage, as they were in high demand back in January. However, what that means is that we need to find new people.
HAS IT BEEN A DIFFICULT A PROCESS? Because our situation wasn’t determined by our
own business metrics, but by external factors, it would be really easy to claim bad luck and become dispirited. But with any start-up you go through these highs and lows and what I’ve learned is that you can only control your elements of the business. You put everything you can into a project, but there are so many external factors that are just not in your control. And that’s just what you have to deal with. However, I think we did the right thing being proactive in communicating with our employees, our partners and the press about what was happening. I think that earned us a lot of credibility. I think that’s why so many people want to help us now. We didn’t just shutdown, we communicated the process from start to finish - and we kept at it.
I was always sure about our value proposition, it was about finding an investor that believed the same. We’ve been fortunate in that we’ve been able to continue our journey by finding a new investor. It has been taxing, but also a good learning event and a validating one too. All that hard work, communication and dedication has meant that we have been able to turn-around the company and commence operations again. Te new investors saw that we put everything in the right place, and the restart has gone really well. Vendors still want to do business with us, customers still want to do business with us. It’s all about how you navigate the waters.
WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE BEFORE LAUNCH?
You can download
Betcade.com right now, it’s a beta service because we don’t have the payment elements in place right now. However, you can get Betcade on your Android phone, all the casinos and sports-books are great partners and have wonderful content. We are spending our ad dollars getting people into the store today, but before we go really big with integrated campaigns on TV, radio etc., we have to make sure our analytics and tracking are working so that we can completely understand the consumer journey, because that’s going to be super important. We need to know that we have the capacity to handle the customer service and account management on the operator side too. Ten we will be ready to go.
NEWSWIRE / INTERACTIVE /
247.COM P79
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