‘When it worked’ Podcast

I was invited onto Julian Leahy’s podcast ‘When it worked’ to discuss my business journey. In his podcast, Julian talks regularly to experts who overcame the odds to forge their own success. His guests share the key moments that changed everything for them. I did the same.

Click on the image below and give it a listen;

You can also listen on Spotify, Google Podcasts and Apple Podcasts.

Here’s a summary of what we discussed, although you’ll have to listen to get the full gist of what we discussed;

First Stop, Failure
I took a business idea out to the market looking for funding and failed miserably. Nobody wanted to back my idea. The idea I had was to launch what would then have been the UK’s first online pay-to-play bingo site. This was something that was happening in the States but hadn’t come to the UK yet. I took this idea out to the market. What happened was I failed with this presentation. I took it out to the market and nobody was interested. Everybody said ‘nope it’s never gonna work’.

Getting To Know The Audience Through A Survey
What I did was as part of my background research to the market, I built a very basic website and listed all USA bingo sites out there at the time (about 12 sites). I then put a very basic pop-up on there to get some demographic stats for the audience – age, sex, expenditure, frequency, recency, all that sort of stuff. I needed to pitch my new site and I wanted to know how much they played bingo and all that sort of thing so that I sounded like an expert when I did my presentation.

Something Unexpected Reveals Itself
A number of the bingo sites that were on my website contacted me and said ‘hey can we advertise on your website?’ So I said ‘send me some money and I’ll put some ads on the website’. Fortunately my background was that I had sold advertising in newspapers and magazines previously so it was what I knew.

The Pivot
That website became the business, rather than what I had pitched for investment for, and it was a total accident. People started sending us money for running ads and we thought ‘right, we’ll give this a go’. We were very much in the right place at the right time and the market grew exponentially.

The Affiliate Model
The gaming market developed an affiliate model and as the sector became more trustworthy and more established we went down the affiliate route, alongside our established advertising model.

Set Back Reveals Even Bigger Opportunity
It took us five years to get an office and some staff and after six years they changed the law in the United States and basically made gaming sites illegal. 80% of our business disappeared overnight.

The whole market decamped to the UK but we were ready. We already knew it was going to come to the UK eventually so we had a website built ready to go. As the market joined the UK we were there to take advantage of that.

We then grew and grew, took on more staff, took on bigger projects, made the website bigger and had a couple of other secondary websites built also.

Getting Acquired by Publicly Listed XLMedia
We were approached by one of the big companies in the market who were buying up the smaller companies. Sometimes people get very very attached to their business but I’d always been of the opinion that if you give me enough money I’ll quite happily give you the keys. Somebody gave us enough money and I gave them the keys!

If you want to hear more of Julian Leahy’s ‘When it Worked’ podcast please see here.

More from Phil

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