iGaming Ideas is a company led by David Sargeant who has been a product consultant in the iGaming space for years, working with both operators and service providers who are trying to sell into the industry.
“More and more, we’re finding start-ups coming to us and saying, ‘Can you help us do what your doing for established businesses?’ Start-ups have different challenges [than established companies]—different challenges with their product, challenges just proving their credibility—so out of all this came the brand, iGamingideas.com, which is essentially trying to help new ideas into the marketplace, which is no mean feat in the iGaming space as you know.”
Once iGaming Ideas was launched, Sargeant developed a formula for choosing what companies would be a good fit for his service.
“I’m looking for a good business, I’m looking for a good idea but I’m also looking for a good team—so it’s the coming together of those things that is important.”
Once they determined that a company is suitable, the next step in the process is something that Sargeant calls the validation. The purpose of the validation process is to ensure that the start-up company will be able to raise the money it needs and that the product can be sold to the market. iGaming Ideas helps with this process by bringing trusted advisers into the mix.
“It’s a great way of de-risking the whole situation. It also works from the investor’s point of view as well because they know the product is sellable before it’s built. You see so many start-ups that have spent millions and they end up with a product that’s not quite right for the industry”.
Sargeant’s clients generally fall into two categories, more established companies and start-up companies. Fresh8 is an example of a start-up company with disruptive technology that works with iGaming Ideas. Andrew Sharland of Fresh 8 describes the company as a digital advertising company aimed at sports-betting operators and he says that there are three things that separate Fresh 8’s technology from traditional advertising technologies:
1) It looks at the content of the page it’s on
2) It looks at the user’s relationship with the operator and determines if it’s a registered customer, a new customer, someone who has experience with sports betting and so on.
3) It dynamically creates a format related to what the user is reading on the page.
“[Our technology is] very much both an acquisition tool for operators – it’s a lot smarter than using static ads – but it’s also a big retention tool for operators. It’s an entirely new channel where [operators] can start targeting existing customers and create an e-commerce experience where [customers] consume their media”.
One of Sharland’s biggest challenges with Fresh 8 lies in business development, especially seeing as he is new to the online gambling industry and has yet to build a level of trust with the operators.
“It’s quite a saturated market, very competitive, and actually what David and iGaming Ideas bring to the table is relationships.”
Tecsportis another example of a company that works with iGaming Ideas although their model is slightly different than Fresh 8’s. According to Sargeant, Tecsport are an established company in the sports space and are looking for an entree into the online gambling market. As the synergies between sports and gambling is a natural one, David and iGaming Ideas were confident they could be of assistance.
Mark Stanger of TecSport describes their product’s concept as simple. TecSport develops and will publish the official quiz game for known sports brands such as the NBA or Chelsea Football Club.
“I would be able to log on and see that you are already online and I can challenge you- we can answer 20, 50, 100 questions on our favorite sports club or favorite sport. If I win, I win points for doing it and I go up the leader board and if you win, it’s the same. There’s also an offline mode, so if I’m sitting on an airplane I can play offline and just have fun answering questions on my favorite sports club. But hopefully it speaks to the natural sports fan’s tendency to want to compete, to want to play, to be proud of the knowledge they have acquired over years of following their team and so on.”
Stanger has known Sargeant for quite some time and more recently identified that iGaming Ideas could help TecSport develop a B2B side of business targeted towards iGaming operators.
“The idea with iGaming Ideas is to take the underlying game engine and to present that to operators to see how they can use that. And that could be for fan engagement, it could be new customer acquisition, so effectively it becomes a very effective piece of marketing collateral and David and his team have helped explore that.”
Starting a new company or selling a new idea into the online gambling marketplace is not easy, especially considering how small our industry really is. The message here is that a good idea will not sell itself—you’ve got de-risk by talk with the experts to receive the insight and support you need in advance, especially before spending your life savings on something that is not going to sell.
