It’s not very often that a game played between a small group of friends turns into an actual business. It’s even rarer that such a game catches on with tens of thousands of people to the point where the creators can start new jobs in a brand-new industry. A company founded in 2019, and a product launched in 2022, Lebom has grown from a friendly office competition into a fully-fledged consumer app with more than 50,000 active users in just three years.
The business is the brainchild of Guy Phillips and Chris Ricketts (CEO), who both came fresh into the industry from media and advertising backgrounds. Before Lebom became an actual business in 2019, Phillips would organise a small-stakes football score prediction sweepstake among his co-workers in the office. The fun of participating was the main selling point, rather than significant monetary gains.
By 2022, the Lebom app, which was built in-house, has transformed the duo’s concept into a football score prediction platform that allows players to place small stakes among friends. Players predict the results of the latest round of 10 Premier League fixtures and agree a stake between themselves – a maximum of £50 – that gets put in a collective pot. Points are allocated for correctly guessing results, while bonus points are awarded for matching the exact score. The player who earns the most points wins the pot, minus Lebom’s 10% fee.
The company recently launched its Lebom Universe feature, scaling up operations to allow players to compete against people outside of their private groups for bigger prize pots with maximum £2 stakes, and, while the platform has experienced notable growth in the last three years, a harsh lesson had to be learned along the way. In 2022, Lebom had its licence suspended by the Gambling Commission for failing to properly integrate GAMSTOP’s self-exclusion database into its platform. The issue was quickly resolved, and Lebom had its licence reinstated just four days later.
Aiming to quadruple its customer base and reach 200,000 users by the end of the 2025-26 football season, the platform is available to anyone of gambling age, as it leans heavily into the social aspect of betting. Since its inception, Lebom has always marketed the app’s unique selling point as being a vehicle for having fun with friends, rather than a way to score big wins.
EGR: Where did the idea for Lebom come from?
Chris Ricketts (CR): For years, Guy would run the manual form of Lebom in the office where he would get everyone to predict the scores for the weekend’s fixtures on a Friday while putting in a small stake.
As he described it, everyone would get involved, and it didn’t matter if they were into betting or football. It was a bit like The Grand National; you don’t really have to care about horseracing, but most people want to put on a small bet as part of the social occasion.
He and I got talking and we couldn’t really see a similar product out there. We wrote a one-pager about what we wanted Lebom to be and, I can safely say five years later, it is what we wanted it to be. It hasn’t really changed. It’s better than what we first sketched out in terms of product, but in terms of the idea, nothing’s changed. We’ve got plenty of ideas and a roadmap of exciting features we want to introduce, but what won’t change is the hero game.
We raised an initial amount of money to build a prototype, we had a live product and the people we got to play it loved it. We went to the Gambling Commission and got a gambling licence. We’d never been through that process before, so there’s been a lot of learning.
EGR: How did you go about turning a concept that was initially run from the office into a product with more than 50,000 users?
CR: Before we had raised any money at all or built anything, I had a virtual team of people who liked the idea so much that they were willing to give Guy and I their time. We started to build the idea out from there. We raised a bit of money through friends and family in an initial round just to build the product. Then we had something we could give to people to play – and whoever played it, loved it.
Then we started to do a little bit of marketing to get more people interested – in the hundreds, not thousands – but very quickly we realised our onboarding wasn’t smooth enough. We had sufficient proof that people liked the product to raise a bit more money, then develop more of the tech and do a bit more marketing. Then we repeated that process all over again.
We’ve been live for three seasons. The 2022-23 season was about establishing proof of concept, and by the second we had a better product, but the platform would break. We decided to calm down on the marketing and focus on building a better product that could handle the volume of people and give them a better experience.
EGR: What technology do you use to run the platform?
CR: We built all the tech ourselves from the bottom up, with James Pamplin, our genius chief technology officer (CTO). We don’t have any third-party tech, bar our banking partners and live feeds from Opta for live scores. Using our own tech means we can be bespoke and responsive. After we built our CRM, we started to have customers talk to us as we got bigger. This means our players help dictate which upgrade we go for next. We haven’t got a huge tech team like others in this sector, so we’ve had to prioritise, but we’ve had thousands of our customers talk to us. We will be guided by what our players want to see.
EGR: How did you market the product?
CR: What really started to work for us last season was using social media. We found a couple of [football] podcasts like Pitch Side and FilthyFellas and developed a playbook – these guys won’t be scripted. We gave them Lebom to play, and then they’re watching the games, the goals go in at the same time and they’re playing Lebom with each other. Their reaction is genius. There’s excitement, banter, celebration, heads in hands, all those sorts of things. However, these reactions are only coming because they’ve won or lost a fiver from their mates. Either way, it’s not really the money that’s making them celebrate, it’s the fact they’re having a laugh together.
EGR: Do the risks associated with such an unpredictable marketing strategy ever worry you?
CR: I am confident that people are going to enjoy the product every time they play it. We produced a TV ad which we put out on Sky Sports, but like anything in the social space, people are going to turn off if they think they’re being sold to. It’s easy to tell when someone’s being paid to promote something, but when you see them playing a game, you can’t fake the authenticity of their reaction. So far, it’s worked really well for us.
EGR: What is Lebom’s target demographic?
CR: You’re not going to be able to appeal to everyone. Even though the product is built with everyone in mind, our advertising has always been focused on the 25- to 35-year-old male segment. Although our advertising is focused there, when you look at any five-age segment there’s really no difference in how the 18- to 24-year-olds like to play versus, say, 45- to 50-year-olds. Our over-60s are a really strong cohort as well. We’ve just worked with actors Ralph Little and Will Mellor on their platform The Two Pints Podcast. They’re 45 and 48 years old, respectively, so that will play to the slightly older audience who are really keen on us as well.
It’s the ‘all ages’ proposition which gives us the confidence that we can scale up even further. We’re very upfront about a 10% fee we take. We signpost that in four places before anyone places a bet. That 10% is lean, so it needs to work at scale, but we have the confidence because of that audience profile being so broad.
EGR: How do you lure your players away from traditional bookmakers?
CR: If people want to place a bet, they can place a bet. We’re not necessarily looking to change that. Our fight is in not being associated with that. We don’t call ourselves anything to do with betting – we’re more in the fantasy football or office sweepstakes crowd – but we do have a gambling licence.
I think customers appreciate our control frequency. You can’t bet on just any football [matches] as we only do 10 rounds of games, and there’s a maximum stake limit. It’s not a platform where you can chase your losses because, ultimately, you can’t play on your own.
EGR: How difficult was it to scale up operations to launch the Lebom Universe feature?
CR: One feature that was heavily requested [from users] was the ability to play against more people for a bigger prize pot. That led to us launching our Lebom Universe feature, which is our first public pool. You can’t go straight to playing Lebom Universe without playing in a private group first, where you decide the stake among yourselves. When you do play [Lebom Universe], you’re limited to one ticket per round with a maximum stake of £2. It’s a public pool for more prize money that we’ve built with our brand values.
The scaling up is something we worked hard on. Our private group functionality was working really well, yet even that had to be extended last summer. People wanted to be able to play in larger groups, so we had to remove the cap on the number of people that could be included. With Universe, we had to build something that could handle infinite players. Building it has given us tech that we can use on other areas of the app. I won’t lie, it’s been a big tech challenge, but so far, it’s gone down an absolute storm. Of course, not all our customers are playing it but 30% of them played in its first weekend. It’s bigger, but the main thing is it has been done our way.
EGR: We’re approaching a summer with no major men’s international tournaments. How do you plan to maintain engagement?
CR: We have seen in the last two summers, since we started doing any sort of numbers at all, unbelievable retention from May through to August. We forecasted it at about 50% last season, and instead we got 92% from the end of last season to the start of this.
Again, it goes back to the notion that you can’t play on your own, and it’s partly why our cost per acquisition is so low as well. We can market to one person who then does the marketing to their circle of friends. If you’ve got just one member of a group who fancies playing Lebom again in August, they help to bring everyone back together.
EGR: How successful has Lebom been from a financial perspective so far?
CR: We’re a startup after all, and it’s not the easiest time to try and raise money. That said, we’ve had three pre-seed funding rounds so far and we’re in the midst of a much bigger Series A round. Every time we’ve needed to raise more funds we’ve had enough evidence that there’s a real future for Lebom if we put more in.
Raising money in this industry is particularly hard because it’s deemed a saturated sector from an investment point of view. Either that or the taboo about betting and gaming comes in and people just don’t let you through the door. We don’t even get to tell people that we’re a responsible platform or that we’re not a bookmaker – they just class us as such anyway.
But we’re getting there, particularly this season. Revenue is up 43% season on season, which is a huge amount considering our expenditure hasn’t changed. We’re really not far off being masters of our own destiny, whereby we don’t need to take on investment unless we want to. We might take on further investment to explore overseas markets
EGR: What lessons did you learn from the Gambling Commission suspension in 2022?
CR: A big one. I got a call from the Gambling Commission telling us they were going to suspend us, which was a real slap in the face. It was a simple mistake, but it was naive as well.
We had GAMSTOP logos on our site, but we didn’t have the database integrated, so it didn’t recognise registered players. At the time, we only had around 300 players. I think the Gambling Commission was unnecessarily harsh in its treatment of us and there was a bit of an agenda there, but it happens. We sucked it up and had our licence back within four days.
As a startup, it was naive of me and the team not to recognise the issue – we just hadn’t done enough research in that area. However, with informed hard work, four days later we got our suspension lifted. It led us to what we should have done originally. It was a startup-related mistake that was fixed really quickly and became quite a strong narrative to show people how good we were.
If that had happened a few years down the line when we had 50,000 players, it would have been terminal, so it was a good experience to go through early on.
EGR: After reaching 50,000 users, what’s the next milestone the company is targeting?
CR: We want to quadruple that number by the end of next season. We’ve got a UK roadmap, which we’re really excited about trying to execute over the next couple of seasons, and then we’ll make some decisions as a company.
We’ve got plans to do this in other markets we’ve identified. There’s no real ceiling for where this can go. We’ve really got some pace now, and we’re just going to put our foot on the accelerator and go harder next season, while improving the product all the time.
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Chris Ricketts discusses tapping into the social aspect of betting, taking risks with “authentic” marketing and why amassing 50,000 users is just the start
The post Q&A: Lebom’s CEO on plans to quadruple the customer base first appeared on EGR Intel.