In this interview with CalvinAyre.com’s Becky Liggero, Adam Wilson of Bookee explains how their mobile app makes sports betting easier for punters.
It is already 2017 and by now, most gambling operators think they know everything about today’s players. Searching the word “millenial” on Google will give you thousands of information about the generation that everyone thinks as hard to please and understand.
In a nutshell, millenial players tend to get more personal and thus they don’t mind exchanging data with other players on who they are, where they are and what they want to do if it means they get a richer, more functional app experience in return. This means great app engagement and retention throughout the user lifecycle.
The downsides of this attitude, however, are they tend to be fickle, impulsive, and hyperactive.
“The millenial audience have the attention for maybe 30 to 60 seconds at the most. The challenge was how do we get the right bet to the right user, at the right time,” Adam Wilson of Bookee told CalvinAyre.com.
To address this dilemma, Wilson said they come up with a sports betting mobile application that can make sports betting easier for punters and at the same time make it appealing to this generation’s players.
Wilson said they have brought a “Tinder for betting” concept to market, in order to make mobile betting “personal and social” for the casual bettor. The new industry player states that it wants to introduce consumers to a “true 21st-century gaming experience,” by marrying bookmaking with a Tinder-style yes-or-no functionality.
“First and foremost, the first thing that the customer sees when they logged in to Bookee on their mobile phone is a bet – one, individual bet. That’s different from every other sports betting app. When you logged in to some other unnamed online betting app, you normally are faced with 10 to 50 bets. Once your eyes have adjusted to what’s there, you need to make a decision on what you are looking for. It can be intimidating and troublesome,” he explained. “So with bookee, we want to simplify the entire process to serving one bet to user at a time. And when you see that bet, you will instinctive binary decision to make: ‘Yes I want to place that bet.’ No I want to find another one.’ If you want to place a bet you swipe right, and if you want to find another bet, you simply swipe left.”
Aside from it’s Tinder-like feature, Wilson also noted that they have introduced a split betting feature in order to make sports betting more personal. The inspiration for this feature, according to Wilson, was taken from online transportation network company, Uber.
“Basically, we thought it would be really cool to split a bet in the same way you can split a taxi ride. If you find a bet you like and you think ‘my friend will like this’ you basically tap the split bet button, which will access your contact list, and if they do have bookee, you can very simply send a bet. They gonna first get notification, it will be ‘do you want to split this bet, yes or no’ and that’s it,” he said.
Wilson, meanwhile, revealed that they will be rolling out new features in 2017. These new features came about as a result of the feedback they got from the app users.
“A lot of the feedback we are getting is that the app is really to use but sometimes when you are look at it thought 3:1 and you want to tap 2:1. I might take you three to four many swipes to find it. So we have built a feature called drilldown. So basically, on top of every deck card, you’ll see a tab that is c4 market. You can find any bet within that market. If you tap it and you can swipe right to place it,” he said. “We are very very close to have a soft launch inplay, which is a last jigsaw puzzle for us to completely deliver as a fully rounded sports betting solution. The one major entertaining enhancement in play is that, as opposed to having a confirmed page when you place a bet, like we do with the other stuff, when you swipe an in-play bet, it is actually a bet, so it can be furious, it can be fast, it is awesome and you should definitely give it a go.”
