GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 46 - February 2020

2016. Once we launched the app it was clear in order to make a success of it that I needed to commit fully to it. There was too much work involved with working a job, working for betclever and trying to balance a social/family life, too. The betclever app launched in De- cember 2016. Please tell us about the app, its development and how it has evolved over the last three years. The idea for the app came about from myself and betclever’s managing di- rector, Roberto Romanello. We have been friends for a long time and after working around social media and Twilight Betting for a while I came to him with the idea of doing something together. Eventually we came up with the idea of an odds comparison app to help people with their football accumulators, which is a huge thing for U.K. punters. We needed to find a name and couldn’t have found a better name than betclever in terms of what we offer. Next we needed to find someone who could make our vision a reality. We were lucky to find a developer locally, which made things easier to have face-to-face meetings. Despite this, it still took us al- most two years to get it live. Since we launched it we have added horse racing and there is also a Spanish version that is ready to go live. We have also added a website version of the app that includes our blog where we are now adding regular content around match/betting previews. We still have many ideas of how we want to take it forward into the future, however, a lot of those will depend on the growth of the company. What have been some of the chal- lenges of promoting a gambling app with Apple and Google Play? With Apple, there has been no issue at all. There has never been any issue with submitting a gambling app and since we launched we have luckily had no issues with updates, etc. Now, Google is another matter alto- gether. In terms of Apple, you have to pay a small membership fee, but if you want to develop an app for IOS you need to go through Apple. With Google, anyone can develop an app for Android without having to submit it to the Google Play Store and have a direct download to people’s phones, so when we launched the Google Play Store it didn’t allow gambling apps, so we went with the direct download approach. Google then decided to allow gambling apps, so we submitted an app into the Play Store. All was good for about 18 months and then Google decided to suspend our app, despite there being many similar apps currently listed. It is very frustrating as you can’t speak to anyone on the phone, which makes it impossible to get any sort of sen- sible answer on how to proceed. So (as of December 2019), we are back to the direct download approach for Google. How big is your operation? Do you have employees or use freelancers? We are a very small operation. There are 10 people involved, in total, however, only four who actively work on betclever day-to-day. As you said, we mainly use freelancers to outsource any work. We have a local com- pany that developed the app for us and they still maintain it and deal with any ongoing issues to this day. To be honest, 95% of our conversions are sports . People come to our app/website for that market and that’s where theymostly stay . There is a small cross-over of traffic , but not as much as we would like. 55 G P W A t i m e s . o r g