Betting Special
Q & A : ADAM KALMANSON , BOOKEE
Dubbed the ‘ Tinder of the betting industry ’, mobile sportsbook Bookee has been making waves with its swipe-to-bet app . Co-founder Adam Kalmanson explains the inspiration for the product and the challenges of entering the highly competitive UK market to iGaming Business .
You ’ re a relatively recent entrant to the igaming market . How difficult is it to be a start-up in today ’ s competitive marketplace ? It ’ s very difficult . Any start-up is hard because you have to go through the track of proving a concept , raising money and
“ We looked at Uber , Facebook and Twitter , all the big giants in the tech world , and thought about how we could apply some of their principles to betting ”
proving an idea . With gambling it is more difficult because there are certain barriers to entry — costs , licensing , getting things up and running in a regulated market . There has recently been a lot of consolidation in the space — Paddy Power Betfair , for example — and there is a huge marketing drive from the incumbents , so it is harder to break through . The marketing budget for Paddy Power Betfair was £ 300 million this year , so those are the kind of factors we are up against .
How have you worked to establish volume given all the competition in the UK gambling market ? In truth we haven ’ t yet . First of all we have to prove concept — will people take on what we are offering ; will they enjoy it ; will they play ; will they come back ? The next thing is to get the product fit for the market so we can push it out to a greater number of users and improve it using feedback . Each stage of it has been a very iterative process and we ’ ve used this first year of being live to hone the product and get it to where it is now , which is a much better product than when it started . We
started off with a very simple swipe-based concept and we offered the users almost no choice . It was simply a binary action decision : swipe left if you don ’ t like the bet to see a new one , swipe right if you want to accept and place the bet . Then we called all our users and got feedback . They liked the simple fluid concept but they wanted to find their bet , change their stake , do other things . So that is how we ’ ve come to where we are today , which is more of a fully fledged sportsbook . We have options , we have inplay , we have accumulators , we have a far more rounded product . But volume is still to come .
Do you have any advice for others looking to follow a similar path ? Surround yourself with people you trust and people with experience in the industry . Knowing the industry and having experience is very useful for networking and contacts .
Are there any mistakes you ’ ve made that you think others could learn from ? At the beginning we tried to do too much too quickly and nothing was done properly . Then we scaled back , adopting more of a lean start-up methodology and set out to prove one assumption at a time .
You ’ ve been described as the Tinder of betting and you ’ ve also said you ’ ve taken inspiration from companies such as Uber . What appealed to you about these companies ’ approach and how are you translating these ideas into gambling ? One of the ideas for founding Bookee in the first place was we looked at how people , especially Millennials and young people , consume content and we felt that betting was being left behind . We looked at Uber , Facebook and Twitter , all the big giants in the tech world , and thought about how we could apply some of their principles to betting . One is the search versus discovery principle . We wanted Bookee to represent a search versus discovery interface so rather than someone going and looking for what
“ The marketing budget for Paddy Power Betfair was £ 300 million this year , so those are the kind of factors we are up against ”
iGamingBusiness | Issue 105 | July / August 2017 | 55