Circl: a fan engagement startup with enormous growth potential

Circl is an English start-up that aims to provide ‘fan engagement’. The app challenges sports fans to predict fun facts and events during live matches. Dutch Sport Tech Fund is one of the proud investors in this startup. Will Hawkins, CEO and founder of the start-up, talks about Circl’s growth plans and explains how the company has already quadrupled its value in recent months.

It is our mission to change the way people watch and bet on live matches. Circl is a fan engagement experience that is safe and positive; with this, we offer an alternative to the unsafe and unethical products that dominate the gambling market. Many traditional bookmakers use a business model that leads to gambling addictions, but Circl makes it fun and safe to bet on a sports match with your friends.

This is how it works. When you watch a live football match with your friends, you guess, for example, who will get the first yellow card. Depending on the events during the match, the pot of money shifts to other friends in your ‘circl’. Whoever has the pot at the end of the match wins the stake. Most likely, they’ll treat the rest of the group to a round of drinks, since you’re watching the match together. Circl earns 10 percent of the group’s stake.

We see that the online gambling sector is growing tremendously fast. We want to help change this sector. We do this by adding value for everyone and by providing a positive experience for millennials and Generation Z, who are often disappointed by traditional providers.

The Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC, or: the cost per new customer) is quite high in the online gambling market. Many companies invest around £150 per new player. We approach this more cleverly. Circl is a social platform where friends invite each other, much like on Facebook. If you invite a friend and they accept your invitation, you both receive a small reward. We also want to use influencers to drive further growth. 

We are a relatively young company, about fourteen months old, but we can already share a few successes. We have completed a pre-seed funding round of £350,000 and are now working on a second funding round at a valuation four times higher. This is because we have received our gambling license for the United Kingdom. This license is difficult to obtain and therefore particularly valuable.

The platform has been built and the MVP – minimum viable product, the version with the most basic features – is ready for use. We are also part of an accelerator program, in which I have found a mentor: the former VP Product of Google. Our product will go live in December and there are already thousands of people on the waiting list who are eager to use Circl as soon as it goes live.

We hope to launch our product in the United Kingdom by the end of this year. In three to six months, we aim to raise an investment of 2 million pounds, at a valuation four times higher than our current valuation. We are also receiving support from the Dutch Sport Tech Fund, which connects us to Venture Capital funds and co-invests in the new round.

We hope to reach new markets in the future. In the United States, for example, there is a high demand for fan engagement opportunities. Europe, particularly the Netherlands and Italy, also has other interesting markets. We also hope to introduce new ways of playing together and to add other sports to the platform. eSports is a logical next step, but tennis, cricket, rugby, and boxing are also popular sports and therefore offer plenty of opportunities. In this way, we hope to grow into an ecosystem of games and players.

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