Q&A: Ex-MetroPlay MD Jamie Walters talks up his new venture
Co-founder of Tau Gamimg talks marketing, mobile, and why he is impressed with 888's Dragonfish platform
Q: How did you and fellow co-founder James Newman team up together to form Tau Gaming?
A: James was a supplier to us at Metro Play and he’s got an existing company called Digital Adventures which is an affiliate business and has a number of websites which have valued customers and we’ll utilise to drive acquisition. There’s already an existing infrastructure around that for a lot of the acquisition that we need to do including live PPC campaigns which just needs to be repointed for our business. We’re bringing both sides of the operator and affiliate businesses together and building a marketing services business as much as an operator business.
Q: Do you plan to launch any major advertising campaigns?
A: TV is very much in the pipeline but we need to make sure we have all of the digital performance channels at maximum efficiency before we do that. That’s priority number one. All the standard digital channel metrics need to be spot on and once we’re confident they’re delivering what we need then we’ll go above the line.
Q: What is the make up of the team?
A: We’re a modern business so we have a lot of people who work with the firm but don’t necessarily work on-site. There’s a strong remote working culture which is great as it keeps the business pretty lean and you can get great talent that way as well. The philosophy of the business is to free up as much cash as possible to acquire customers. Every pound we don’t spend on marketing is a pound we’re using not acquiring customers – that’s a big mantra for these early days of the business.
Q: Why did you pick Dragonfish as your platform partner?
A: I had an existing relationship with the commercial team but never did business with them at Metro Play despite having discussions. We obviously looked around the market when we were setting up Tau Gaming but I was always impressed with Dragonfish. Its bingo product is fantastic and it has a really good track record of start-up businesses delivering high growth and getting high valuations off the back of it. That’s the kind of model that we’re pursuing.
Q: And you expect to launch bingo in Q1 2015?
A: Yes, our plan is very much multi-skin and we have a roadmap of when we went those skins to come out. What we aim to do is create products that appeal to certain niches with a different team and offering. The route we want to take is to use content-rich experiences beyond the game itself and using content as a marketing tool to drive engagement with the customers. It will be content you can’t get anywhere else in the market. We don’t want to take a bonus-led approach to our customer engagement.
Q: What are your plans from a mobile perspective?
A: We’ll have a mobile app ready to submit to the iOS store as soon as we go live online. For marketing, mobile is going to be hugely important and we’ve partnered with Silverpop as our email service provider and its mobile capabilities are really strong. We expect mobile to be 50% of our revenues.