Innovation in sports betting is one of my favorite areas to explore in the iGaming industry. David Sargeant of iGaming Ideas introduced me to the team behind WantMyBet, a start-up company that has created a platform to simplify sports betting and make it more social. Earlier this month I was invited to the WantMyBet offices in London and this is the story behind their innovative and growing product for the sports betting industry.
Olly Joshi is the co-founder of WantMyBet and he started off by explaining how he and his partner came up with the concept for the platform.
“Back in the day at university we all used to put our own bets on every weekend, we’d take screenshots, we’d place them on Facebook and we noticed there were loads of tipster pages out there that give you a link to go and place a bet on a bookmaker’s website…you’d click it and it would take you to a bookmaker’s website and drop you on the homepage. You’ve got to find the bet again, you’ve then got to sign up, place it, deposit, all this sort of stuff and its quite a lot of barriers to entry, especially if you don’t really know what you’re doing. And they kind of assume you do”.
The key here is simplification. As someone who is not an avid sports bettor, I find sports betting sites rather confusing and platforms like WantMyBet have been designed to solve this problem.
“So we thought ok, what if we create a platform that made it easier to bet, made it a bit more transparent with the people who are sharing their tips so you can actually see if they are any good at betting- they’re not just putting up a tip and saying this is definitely going to be a winner- you can actually see their track record and if its worth copying. We just made it easier to bet so you don’t have to leave the site, you can deposit, you can easily find tips and markets, we stripped out all the markets which we feel might come across as confusing to a user who doesn’t know much about gambling”.
When Sargeant first brought WantMyBet to my attention, he included a link to their commercial, a high quality production that impressed me right from the start. The commercial highlights the fact that WantMyBet will help punters “beat the bookies”, so I asked Joshi why bookmakers would want to partner with a platform like this.
“Its one of those things where the bookies are trying to get new users. I think as an industry they haven’t really enhanced what social is yet, obviously they’re trying to become more social in the way they position themselves, but they haven’t really harnessed how you get groups of people regularly actioning off their social behaviour. Being a part of WantMyBet is a great way for them to access those groups of people who are actively engaged and like to talk about their bet and like to copy bets and brag about bets. It’s a way that they can get involved and you know, the bookie does always win at the end of the day”.
The WantMyBet commercial alone has accomplished so much for the fledgling company, proof that high quality productions like this will impress punters, bookies and investors.
“We launched [the commercial] towards November of last year, since then we’ve had almost four million views across Twitter and Facebook. We’ve got an amazing reception so far, its great looking through some of the comments on Facebook, there are so many people saying, ‘this is the thing I was talking about the other day, you should check out’. It really has gone down very well and we’ve had people in the industry say this is the kind of advert which has blown the bookmakers out of the water compared to the types of adverts they do, and I’m sure they have much higher budgets. So its hit the sweet spot which we were hoping to do, we wanted to make it fun and light-hearted but also talk about what we do and try and get a bit of our brand personality across which I feel we have done”.
The WantMyBet team has gone through several rounds of investment already, something any start-up must become skilled in and confortable with in order to push forward. Joshi shared some of his biggest tips on how to deal with and impress investors.
“I think the biggest tip is to hustle. To speak to as many people as you can, don’t be afraid to tell people your idea. Be enthusiastic, be passionate and people will thrive off your energy if they like you and then you can sell them what you’re trying to do and hopefully they’ll share your vision. Even if they don’t and they like you personally and they like what you’re trying to do, most of the time they will be happy to introduce you to someone else and then the ball keeps rolling and you just carry on”.
If you have an innovative idea and are looking for investment, send in your information through the CalvinAyre.com ventures form.
