Project Validation
Build it and they will come - and while this little phrase my sound sensible, oh how wrong it is. You could build the perfect product, you could wait until it's perfect before launching, you could become the next big thing, the industry visionary who slayed the nay-sayers and showed them all how brilliant you are. And while that's an appealing narrative to some it is absolutely the wrong way to build a business.
Fail fast - by which we don't mean failure is good, but that it's better to test your assumptions and find out you're wrong as early as possible. Despite what you think, success isn't only about the strength of the idea, in fact, if you listen to Bill Gross in his TED talk entitled "The single biggest reason why startups succeed"you'll find that timing and the strength of the team are more important factors. Failing fast isn't about finding out whether your idea is brilliant or not, we're pretty sure it is, but it's about finding out if your market exists, and if you have the skills required to pull it off.
Over many years in the gambling industry I have developed an acute sense of what the UK Gambling Commission and Isle of Man Gambling Supervision Committee consider to be responsible operations. Having obtained my Personal Management Licence and successfully applied for licences in the UK and Isle of Man I am well placed to help you validate your idea against the current regulatory framework - possible is not the same as legal, so let's get this check out of the way early.
Our next step is to prototype your idea and get it in front of potential customers as quickly as possible. Let me be specific: given freedom and support you probably already have a team capable of doing this within a week. Blank page on Monday, a customer demo on Friday. And of course this doesn't mean that the product is ready on Friday, but it does mean that you've got your first bit of feedback, your first set of validation from the people who you actually hope are going to use this thing.
My Experience
Startups:
Design Sprints; - make use of the process designed in house at Google by Jake Knapp to get a prototype out the door within a week.
Fail fast; a theme I have seen repeated far too often is the fear of putting something live because it's not yet *something* (it really doesn't matter what the *something* word is). This fear of failure is completely natural, but it's crippling your ability to move forward. Define an MVP, agree it, and once it's built, get it out the door and start learning. And when I say agree it, I mean every single stakeholder must agree that the definition of the MVP gives a product suitable to put in front of a customer. Don't put off the conversation with sales (it's always sales) until after you've built it hoping to convince them then. Seriously, just don't.
Build, Measure, Learn; as a mathematician and quant (before I moved into Ops) I have the statistical ability to create and run meaningful experiments and it's my belief that this iterative cycle is the most important part of building a successful startup. The agile framework lends itself to integrating these results into the business development as quickly as possible.
Side Projects; working on Oh Zoe! has given me the chance to dig a bit deeper into Python and prototype some microservices and API to gets things up and running as quickly as possible.
Getting stuff done; everything is urgent, but not everything is important. Calmly managing priorities to make steady progress is vital to a startup's success. Eventually I should run out of important things to do - that's the point at which you fire me.
Creating a productive environment; Andrew Garrood, CEO of MustardBet, is fond of saying, "we're defined by how we fix things" - we all make sub-optimal decisions, but it's how we deal with them, what we learn, and how we apply that to the future which fosters productivity. During the innovation stage employees must have freedom to fail - in a startup you simply can't afford the time and monetary cost of operating in any other way.
Growing the team; as the business grows it will be natural to find employees with more exacting domain knowledge - I can't be your payments / compliance / AML guy forever - nor would I want to be. I do, however, have plenty of experience recruiting for these roles and getting people operational.
Gambling Specific:
UK and Isle of Man Licence Applications; I have successfully completed licence applications in both these jurisdictions for Mustard Systems Limited, managing the entire process from initial requirements gathering to the final submission.
Compliance / Policy Work; the creation of company wide policy documents to address the regulatory requirements following review of the legislation.
Information Security and Remote Technical Standards; I prepared the ISMS policies and was the main point of contact for the auditor. I ensured our development team produced a product compliant with the Gambling Commission's Remote Technical Standards.
Payment Services and PCI-DSS; acquiring a suitable payment processor and acquiring bank can be notoriously difficult for new licence holders; a lot of the mainstream payment providers do not deal with gambling related companies. Additionally, you will be required to be compliant with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard and, at the very least, complete and Self Assessment Attestation of Compliance - a process I have completed for Mustard Systems Limited.
Third Party Integrations; I have experience sourcing and evaluating third parties for the supply of game state data, pricing data, ID&V, payment services, casino games, address finders, and live chat. I have enough technical experience to evaluate their offering, and enough commercial experience to negotiate at industry rates.
App Development; I worked closely with an external team who built the Android and IOS apps for MustardBet. On a weekly basis I worked with their PM to review progress, monitor performance and prioritise the backlog. I was also responsible for managing the process and relationship with Google and Apple once the products were complete.
About You
You have an awesome idea, (potentially) a team of people, but you're not sure what's next - please get in touch.
I am available as a permanent employee, contractor or consultant - all subject to availability.