In the following episodes of the CalvinAyre.com innovation iGaming Profiles, we focus on the stories behind two sportsbetting start-ups that recently merged into one- Stakes & Ladders and Bets of Mates. The two companies merged in early 2015 and now operate under the single brand of Stakes & Ladders with both founders taking an active part in the business.
David McGurk is the founder of Bets of Mates, a social sportsbetting company that facilitates competition amongst friends. McGurk spent over ten years as a semi-pro football player, but as his career began to wind down, McGurk decided he wanted to start up his own business. The original idea was formed while McGurk and his friends were enjoying a bet themselves.
“The three of us were sat watching a game and we all lost our bets which were bet against a bookmaker, so we thought the if the idea was we could bet against each other, one of us could actually win. So we went from there and sort of ran with that idea and progressed it and came up with a better idea where you could enter pools of betting against your friends or against strangers”.
At the time, McGurk was able to leverage connections with professional footballers to help spread the word about his new business.
“I’ve got a lot of friends in football where they just helped us with the publicity, they would send out a lot of tweets for us, send messages on Facebook and we got them signed up to the site so fans of the football clubs they were playing for could actually play against players”.
August 1, 2014 marked the date when England’s Football Association issued a new betting ban for footballers and also the date when McGurk had to think about shifting his strategy.
“Unfortunately the FA have instigated a rule where professional footballers can’t bet on any football whatsoever so that kind of slowed things down a little bit for us, so we tried getting the extra investment to boost the website. We couldn’t get it, but fortunately [Stakes & Ladders] came up with a merge idea and things have gone smoothly with that”.