Case Study: Bookbreakrs

Background

Alan is a self-funded solopreneur who developed Bookbreakrs, a football predictions app.  The driving inspiration for the App was to help people who love football to benefit from their knowledge without being taken advantage of by bookmakers and tipsters.  On Bookbreakrs, real football fans share their best predictions with each other, and their profitability statistics are tracked directly within the app.  Fans can follow each others predictions, and can create private leagues to compete against their friends. Cash prizes are also given to the best monthly and season-wide predictors.

When Alan came to us Bookbreakrs was in at the beginning of the traction stage.  The user base was fairly stable, with an monthly active user base of 500-800 users, and a life time user base of about 5,000.  There was a large (8,000+) but relatively inactive community on Facebook and Instagram. User growth was highly related to promotional activities.

Alan decided to work with Startup Circle because with a full time job, he realized that he needed help.  As a solopreneur you can’t do & learn everything, and he knew wasn’t getting to important things that were necessary to grow the business.

The main issue Alan faced was that revenue from the app was low.  The app was free to play except for the creation of private leagues. There was no affiliate or advertising revenue (a policy decision by the founder to keep the predictions 'honest').

The challenge for Startup Circle was to get the app ready for outside investors or an Accelerator program. We knew this meant we needed to increase revenue by 100x – a tall order by any measure. However, we planned to do this by increasing revenue per customer tenfold (from 10p to £1.00), while also increasing active customers ten times (from 500 to 5,000 users). The resulting £5,000 per month would cover running and competition costs, and leave a healthy margin for expansion, making this an attractive proposition for investors or an Accelerator program.

This is an established app with a significant user-base. However, the low revenue and static customer base indicated that we initially needed to re-examine the customer/solution fit. This meant going back to users to identify why they used the app, what was missing in the app, and what they would be willing to pay for. We worked with the founders to conduct user interviews and to survey the current user base. Using the results of this research we identified four different user personas, across two dimensions, confirming our belief that the app is used both as an aide to placing bookmaker bets, and as a casual gaming platform.  We then conducted a split A/B test on Facebook to test the two personas that we judged would have the greatest revenue potential.