00:00:02
So, Malcolm, how how is it to handle a twoman casino? I mean, usually you have huge teams running casinos, but uh you’re a twoman show, so so how do you handle that? Well, luckily, well, it’s basically the same answer, but at the moment, we’re focused on sports book, so we don’t have a casino offering. um that was kind of a conscious choice to build our brand more around the sports book world, but it’s the same idea and running in fact running a sports book is is arguably more difficult than than a

00:00:34
casino because you have to you know do certain things. Um, in fact, you know, obviously we get the odds feeds from odds providers, but in order to crack sort of a niche market in here in Ireland where we’re based, uh, we noticed that the Irish basketball sort of main super league wasn’t being was no one was providing odds for for the games really. We thought, okay, well, that’s that’s a gap in the market. So, but I literally have to, you know, yesterday I was setting odds for 11 games.

00:01:04
Wow. And you know, I’m I’m no expert on the league, so but it’s kind of fun because you actually feel like a real bookie. Yeah. Yeah. And I I definitely pay more attention to how those games go compared to the games where I don’t have any control over the odds. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. That’s admirable. That’s uh that’s not something you see very often at least. So what what would you say is your your primary focus right now? So the primary focus is to complete

00:01:34
the what we’re calling the proof of concept. Okay. Because we the bookie is coming out to the market with essentially a a twist on the conventional model. Mhm. That twist being that we give we share half of our gross revenue every month with our losing customers which is very sort of cooperative and very customerfriendly. It sounds like a simple concept, but it actually has some powerful sort of second level effects on things like gambling, responsible gambling, um, customer engagement, things like that.

00:02:10
So, we’re trying to prove that this concept is both profitable, that it’s ticks all the the metrics that we’re looking to for now impress investors with, you know, does our model lower customer acquisition cost? Does it increase retention rates? Yeah. Does it foster word of mouth? You know, yeah, organic growth, things like that. And once we can pro once we prove that, then we’ll get the investment to expand into the UK and the rest of the world and and you know, become the next Uber of the

00:02:41
betting industry. Yeah. Very cool. So, um, the Wshare that’s kind of, uh, your primary retention tool then? Yeah. You do you have any other retention tools or is that like this is the the sales pitch? Obviously it is but uh yeah that’s that that is in the one hand yes that’s it on the other hand there are aspects of it that can you can use to enhance. So I guess to back up a little bit because this concept of the WS share is not that simple a concept when you actually dig down on it. So what what

00:03:17
does giving half of your gross revenue back to the losing punters actually mean in reality? So in reality, if every single customer lost that month, they would all get half back. That that’s a pretty simple math. Where it gets a little complicated is when you have the winners. So any winner will dilute that 50% down. Yeah. To as low as 0% if we have a losing month. December was a great month for us. Yeah, we had a healthy, you know, ROI on bets and our losing customers got 42.7% back. So, literally if a customer

00:03:53
lost a,000, they got 427 back cash in their account which they can withdraw. They lost 100, they got 42 back. Whereas in prior months, we’ve we’ve had, you know, 3% if if we’ve we find it averages to about 25 to 30%. And we we expect that to stabilize more as our customer base grows because you know with smaller customer base there’s more volatility obviously. So that that’s how it works. But but back to your your question what does that mean for other things? Um well for customer attraction obviously that’s

00:04:26
powerful. So we would expect to be able to convert more customers based on any type of uh advertising. But then for retention retention is pretty easy. I mean, once people receive their first healthy We share, yeah, are they really going to go back to wherever else they came from? Yeah. It’s pretty unlikely unless unless they just have a bad experience with some glitch on our site or something. But the the the other thing that we want to really build out and this will happen over time when when

00:04:54
we the capital to invest in some tech and some higher customer numbers to make it relevant. But we call this the bookies view feature. And if you’re a customer s and what what would you bet on if you bet on a sport? Uh for me it would be football. Football. Okay. Football. You bet on football. You’re an active customer. It’s July and it’s late July and the British Open Golf is on. It’s on TV. None of your Norwegian players are factoring and you don’t bet on golf. So you’re you’re not really interested in

00:05:25
the result from a from that perspective. So, what we the bookie wants to do is publish what our position is on each of the golfers. So, let’s say uh Rory Maroy has been heavily backed, but Scotty Sheffller has not been backed and they’re battling down the stretch. You’re going to be cheering for Scotty Sheffller because if he wins the the W share pool increases, which ultimately will increase the amount you get back at the end of the month if you have a losing month. Yeah. So this can be, you

00:05:55
know, we can do this for any popular sport, premiership, football, things like that. So it’s just a it’s a pretty handy way to increase the engagement and essentially our customers can have a little bit of action on everything. Yeah. Without making a bet. Very very cool. That’s very very cool. Have you already noticed you you mentioned it already uh but have you already noticed that players are more engaged and and more loyal on uh we the booking compared to I don’t know uh previous companies

00:06:26
you work with industry standards things like that have you already noticed some some patterns there I have um now it’s a little bit hard for me to compare because uh truth be told I have never worked in this industry before and this is my first company So all right a lot of uh learnings are going on right now. Um I can imagine yeah but but you know we we’re seeing the retention as being really strong. Our numbers are small right now and and one thing that hasn’t really blown up yet is the the friendto

00:06:57
friend referral. To be fair we haven’t really set up a system for that yet. But I think at the moment because we’re so small and we don’t have a marketing budget etc. And because quite frankly we’re presenting something that’s so much better for the customer like just legitimately you have this sort of too good to be true phenomenon which is very real in this world. Yeah. And you know it’s just it’s just there. But the good thing about that is that once we do get to some sort of basic critical mass of

00:07:28
of you know a few more people lose using the platform that goes away because then you’re you’re like okay I’ve got two friends who are on the platform. it’s it’s working fine and that and that that that that goes away. So yeah, I mean basically the the early indicators are really strong for things like retention and we need to raise a bit more capital and test out the acquisition side of things. Cool. And u you mentioned that you you do a lot of the odds uh building yourself uh but you are also using uh

00:07:56
some external providers I guess for odds. How do you decide on which one to choose because I mean there’s uh quite a few to pick uh pick from. How do you go about to choose a provider for that? Yeah. Uh to be honest, um platform provider has been the most challenging part of this experience. We went live originally on one platform that wasn’t really fit for purpose. It was a fairly new company and to be honest, they went out of business. But one good aspect of of being at that company was that we we

00:08:27
like the odds we were getting. Essentially, when you’re giving 50% of your gross revenue back to your customers, you need to be very conscious of costs. So, if we just plug and played sort of the standard business model for what our competitors are on, we would not be profitable. So, we have to spend a little less on things like platform. We’re not going to be dependent on the affiliate industry because the affiliate industry, they’ll charge you like 30 to 50% of of revenue. So yeah, we can’t

00:08:58
give half of our revenue to customer and the other half to affiliate. We’re left. We’re left with nothing. Yeah. No, but the beauty of our model is that we’re not dependent on the affiliate industry. The whole reason the affiliate industry is so strong is that our competitors have no differentiation. So they depend on affiliates to say, “Okay, customers go this way, go that way.” Whereas we can do that ourselves by just presenting our our model. Yeah. Very cool. And for for these uh these payouts for payouts

00:09:28
and withdrawals on the Disha model, are there any I would imagine if there are any unique challenges with the payment processing part of it? I mean uh do you get a lot of of feedback on this part like are are customers like coming to you with hey I should have this but I only received this and how do you go about that part of it? So at the moment uh it’s a bit of a manual process. Obviously, we’d like to get to the point where it’s much more automated through both calculate well the calculation is

00:09:59
actually very simple with spreadsheet. But yeah, at the moment the process is that we literally go into each customer’s account and manually, you know, someone has 10 euro, we we put in the€ 10 euro uh and then we send them an email sort of fairly standard email. Okay, the we share last month was 30%. You lost 100 euro, therefore we’ve put in 30 euro into your account. We’d like the platform to be able to do this and so that when they log in they’ll have a little popup message saying this we

00:10:27
don’t want to bug them with emails but at the moment that’s just the way it is. So yeah it’s it’s a problem that should be fairly easily solvable with yeah little just a little bit of tech. Yeah because that was uh one of my last questions was like uh the plan forward. you you’ve already mentioned, you know, creating a little bit of uh more awareness, getting more more active, getting more investors so you can expand to different markets and uh obviously some automation. I would imagine uh with

00:10:55
the player base growing than uh that that would need to to get in place. Are there any other uh big plans on on moving forward than what I already mentioned? Not really, but yeah. Uh essentially at the moment we’re looking for fairly a fairly modest raise, you know, 200 to 500,000 to to really focus on Ireland, you know, treat that as our as our universe and because that that’ll really allow us to properly prove out the proof of concept and then we can very confidently go back to the sort of

00:11:28
more instit institutional investors to who can say yes, you’ve you’ve done a very comprehensive proof of concept and we’re now confident that we can give you the money to to do the expansion. But but back to your earlier question, there was one little funny anecdote from a a new customer. So, I was I was actually in a in a pub before one of these basketball games. It was the finals of a cup and I was speaking to this to a new c a relatively new customer. He’d been there a couple months. December again

00:11:56
was a strong month for us with the with the high we share amount and he this this customer had had actually had a winning month. So, he didn’t get the W share. And he said he was talking to another new customer who had just joined in December. Yeah. Who had lost I don’t know how much. And this customer was saying, “Wow, like because they were really joining more for the basketball bets, they didn’t weren’t aware of the WShare program.” And they said, “Oh, did you get your Christmas bonus?”

00:12:26
And the guy said, “No, no. Um, you know, I had a winning month, so I don’t I don’t get it.” And it was the other customer who had the losing month was almost sympathetic with him saying, “Oh, oh, you didn’t get, wait, but but you lost money. I I won. You just lost less because of this.” It’s kind of funny. Yeah, that’s funny. But yeah, I mean, that’s all the questions uh I had for this uh for this quick uh quick podcast. Is there anything uh else you would like

00:12:53
to mention? No, I guess I I guess the only other thing is we really think of ourselves as not only the most customer-friendly but also the most socially responsible betting company out there. The reason for that is not so much, you know, how we act as a company, but really how our model changes behaviors. If you can imagine losing say a,000 euro in the first two weeks of the month, we’ve seen this behavior, by the way, and perhaps you can’t really afford to lose more than that. If you’re with another operator,

00:13:23
you might just might want to chase that bet and and you’re in a big hole. And to be honest, that oper operator might even be pushing you in that direction with a VIP or something. With our model, and we’ve seen this, that customer will often massively scale back their betting. So, if they if they normally bet a hundred euro a bet, now they’re betting Fiverr just to have some interest. Or they they just shut it down. and then on the first day of the next month they get say 300 into their

00:13:51
their account. They start again, maybe lose that and maybe a week after then they deposit. Yeah. So it’s really responsibly calmed their whole situation down and they never go into a downward spiral. Obviously there can still be people do that all the usual things for that but inherently it’s far less likely on our model. Very good. Well, thank you so much, Malcolm. I wish you the best of luck and uh hopefully we will read a lot about We Share in the future. Okay. All the best. Thanks. Thanks, Scots. Bye.