BetRegal diary – Defining our go to market strategy

Former Pinnacle Marketing Director Aly Lalani is one of the drivers behind the launch of BetRegal.com, a new European facing sportsbetting and gaming brand created to provide its customers with the “best possible value” in prices. After creating the brand, Lalani is back to share his experiences about the challenges of bringing a new brand to the market.

Having worked out ‘the initial ideas of what the brand will look like to the customer, and having a very general idea of where we were going to find our customer, the discussion naturally evolved to us trying to define a go to market strategy for BetRegal.

We have options here, right? My partners and I have all had lots of experience working with and for some of the largest sportsbooks in the industry, and we have access to infrastructure that would make it a viable option to build our product internally. I mean, building it specifically to our own spec has to be the best option right? That way we get exactly what we want.

The downside? It takes time. We’re talking about a pretty complicated risk management platform, along with a brand new front end, ability to integrate payment providers, customer service infrastructure, fraud infrastructure, and a whole bunch of other elements that a non-technical person like myself wouldn’t understand. Not to mention the ever changing world of compliance.

Back to the bar.

In all seriousness, this requires a serious strategic discussion. Are we willing to wait X months (or years) to build our own platform? What are our other options? What are the cost and resource implications? Through lots of discussion, and with varied levels of disagreement, the decision was made as a group that our strategy would be to try to get to market as quickly as possible with a quality product, and begin building the brand in our key markets.

Of course that means we will have to sacrifice a little in terms of ultimate desired functionality, but the plan all along was to continually evolve the website based on market desires and influences. Remember, we defined our mandate as being for the customer…it makes sense that we use their input to improve our customer experience.

Anyone who has been to any of the conferences over the past couple of years has seen the increase in software providers. Now some of the biggest stands and the biggest brands are software providers, who make it especially easy for new brands to get off the ground by providing a lot of the required infrastructure.   

We set initial meetings with all of the larger software providers, and some of the smaller ones, at ICE in February of last year. Anyone that has visited this particular exhibition will understand the jostling for position and near frenzied desire to attract new business at the ExCeL. With a keen eye on our intended differentiator of having the ability to manage our odds pricing to a very granular level, we reviewed most, if not all of the software providers.

After much deliberation, we decided in the end to use the EveryMatrix platform. After 13 years in the iGaming space, I was in a better position than most to cut through the noise. I was already aware of the sportsbook solution offered by EveryMatrix, and some of the companies they had helped to bring quickly and effectively to market, but I was immediately taken by the platform’s granular margin management.

Now admittedly, no one platform was ideal for our needs. All required some sort of compromise. That was the sacrifice we made with the decision to get to market quickly. Fortunately, our most important BetRegal brand feature is still fully under our control. We are going to treat these customers like royalty. I feel confident in saying we will have significantly more customer service staff than other operators at the same stage in their life cycle.

EveryMatrix seemed to offer the type of product we needed to aggressively manage our pricing model, along with all the other operational requirements to get to market relatively quickly. It looks like EveryMatrix is the right provider for us.

At the end of the day, the software is only a tool, choosing one over the other doesn’t guarantee success. It just positions us to better control our intended differentiator. We need to develop a quality, engaging product and get some players in the front door. The only way we can ever be competitive in terms of our pricing is with liquidity. The more liquidity we get, the more we can move towards our goal of offering the ‘best value for the customer’.

It’s exciting to know that we have a backend supplier chosen for BetRegal.com.

Let’s design our product and figure out how to get some players!