Diary of a start-up: stuck between the silos
Products that span different kinds of gaming are a great way for operators to improve player revenue, says David Sargeant of games developer Zukido, but finds that resulting arguments over which product team should take the revenue can leave the little guy stuck in the middle...
RUNNING a start up provides many challenges – and customer company politics is one of the best.
My company, Zukido, creates both in-running sports betting applications and mini-games. These products are totally complimentary when sitting on a web page together; most punters like the mixed concept too; and mini-games definitely drive up the revenue of an in-running page, with a good knock on effect into casino sales revenue. However the mixed product concept runs some companies into difficulties.
However many gaming businesses split themselves into product silos – sports, poker, games, bingo, etc – and staff are organised into these silos for marketing, operations and product development reasons, with the profitability of these individual product streams normally has a direct knock-on effect onto the bonuses of the groups of staff. This is where my problem occurs.
Mini-games are usually run through an operators’ games room, so comes under ‘games revenue’. However I am trying to sell a mini-games product onto a page ‘owned’ by the sports betting department. So which will get the revenue, Sports or Games?
A sports product owner has it in their best interest to cross sell other sports products rather than divert his potential bonus into the games managers’ pocket.
A forward thinking company can deal with this. In fact many companies are trying to end the product silo set-up completely, where possible. Marketing is becoming less and less product driven, and instead driven by customer target groups.
This makes sense because cross-selling and up-selling increases the bottom line. Sports betting customers that become sports and casino customers add a magnitude to their lifetime value.
This all may sound like basic CRM philosophy to a lot of organisations, but many companies still struggle with the concept that they are pan-gaming companies, not product-based companies (e.g. “we are a sportsbook with a casino on top”).
The companies that are succeeding are the ones with cross-selling and up-selling at their core, and not ones limited by the silo approach. But then no-one ever said running a start up was going to be that easy…
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