BETBUTLER, BETCADE, BADUGI ALL FAILED WHY IS IT SO HARD TO START A NEW GAMBLING BUSINESS?

 

Over the past 3 years or so we have met well over 100+ founders of various startups at multiple conferences such as ICE, EIG or the Amsterdam Affiliate Conference, over coffees after receiving or sending cold emails to “see if there’s any way we can work together”, or at the dreaded pitch events that terrorise conferences throughout Europe to find the next big thing. They're still looking!

Myself and my co-founder Ronan have kept note of most of the ones we’ve met or come across and have tracked their success, well mostly lack of, since we stumbled upon their new ventures over the past 3 - 4 years or so.

(Note: One key point here is that I'm in no way criticising any of the ideas or companies as we're doing it ourselves in terms of a betting related business. Most are solid ideas and great products but the sector is just a very tough nut to crack. And I'm not saying none will make it.)

From what you’ll see below the very sad conclusion to this is that the success rate for gambling related start-ups is looking excruciatingly appalling. We’ll start by taking you through who of the 100+ ideas has had any sort of success and who has either likely closed down (based on some criteria we've used) or trucked along with just the founder spending an odd hour or 2 a week looking after it.온라인바둑이

I'm sure there's loads of ideas that have made it or have not that we're not aware of and that we've missed, and some that we have down as being likely closed when we're not. Let us know if this is the case.

Okay so we’ll start by listing all of the companies we’ve looked at over the past 3 years. This has been done in partnership with a friend who has being doing a similar exercise for the past 4 years. Caveat here is that we have have not met all of the companies on the list, but our partner has met most. 

(Note the ones highlighted in green are the most high profile success stories. You guessed it - they're all B2B based. No. 47 Mondogoal is down as likely closed but note that their B2B side of the business is still active. If a company you know or own is incorrectly categorised let me know and I'll change it ASAP.)

Overall the situation looks bleak for starting your own venture in the betting space, especially if you’re looking to get going with a successful B2C platform as we didn’t locate many successful B2C related startup that had cashed out by selling for a sizeable amount (€1m +) or that has achieved a decent amount of traction with sizeable player numbers.

Of course we’d have to include Fanduel and Draftkings as successful B2C startups since they’ve raised a ton of money, are revenue generating in the millions and have acquired millions of players in the process, regardless of whether they’re profitable or not. I didn’t include them in the research though as they’ve been around for the past 5 years or more. 

Overall of the 150 + companies and ideas we’ve come across the majority (68%) were predominantly B2C providers. As you’ll conclude from the table above the failure rate for B2B’s is certainly a good bit lower at 45%; however, as is the trend how many of the B2B companies we’ve come across, and who may have harassed you on LinkedIn, originally started out with their own dreams of the next big app or site that would attract millions of players only to resort to B2B to pay the bills? My guess is a lot of them. 

The case very well might be that entrepreneurs start out with bright ideas of launching the next Fanduel or Draftkings, or to simply build up enough accounts so that they’re bought by Draftkings, but ultimately fail, run out of cash, or simply lose the will to live and stick with their day jobs.