tackl — the rocky road from a side project to a business.

In case you’ve been following our work for a while, you probably know that we always set some time aside to work on side projects. We did this with our public transportation app nextr, we did it with our UI Concept for Tesla and with many other small projects. So far those side projects were literaly just that: Side projects that were fun to work on and to learn from. And while those projects worked great as a marketing tool to strengthen the Bureau Oberhaeuser brand, they never felt like they were worth going “all in” on. While some of them were successful projects, we could not justify spending more time on them. As a result, we never fully committed to any of those projects … until now. Introducing tackl!

James Murphy once said, “The best way to complain is to make things.” As with most of our side projects, tackl started with a common complaint. I’m a huge sports fan and for a long time my friends and I bet with one another on various sporting events. I’m not talking about large amounts of money; most bets were for beer or who picked up dinner. To my complaint, there are only two ways to bet on sports online:

1. Gambling platforms like bwin or tipico. These products let you bet real money on a large variety of games, but have the downside that you often end up loosing much of your bet to the bank.
2. Social betting websites like kicktipp. The upshot here is that you can place bets within groups of friends. On the downside, the usability and especially the gameplay of these websites is dated and needs to be modernized. Typically, you are required to join a group before the start of the season and then must bet on each game. Results are displayed in a single large leaderboard, which is updated after each gameday. This is undesirable because you can only join a group once per year and if you forget to predict scores for a gameday you will often lose the chance to win. As a result, you may lose interest during the season. Especially, if you’re not within reaching distance to top players in the leaderboard.

Current social betting plattforms like kicktipp have a very clutterd UI.

I felt like there must be a sweetspot between those static “all season long” social bets and the “bank always wins” gambling platforms. After some initial concepts and designs we quickly reached a tipping point where we had to make a decision: Will this become another concept or do we actually want to build it? The problem is that building an app always means investing a lot more time and money. So the question was: Is this idea worth to spent more resources? To justify such a large investment, we knew eventually we would need to find a way to monetize the idea.

The most obvious way to monetize tackl is to allow real money wagers and to keep a provision of each pot. Unfortunately, providing this kind of gambling service is tricky in Germany and we did not want to found the company in Malta or Gibraltar to begin with (gambling rules are more liberal in those countries). While we nearly canceled the project, after speaking with a few people from the startup and gambling industry, we realized that our idea has huge potential. Due to the legal complexity, we decided to leave the monetization of our app aside for now. We took the risk and bootstrapped the development of the app to focus on a “proof of concept” first. So we hired a CTO, got a few advisors and friends on board and founded a new company named tackl UG.

Since then we’ve been working very hard to bring tackl to life: Creating your own digital product is much different then designing products for clients. All of a sudden you’re a client, investor, design agency and consumer all in one. You have to make critical decisions about which features are worth dedicating resources to. As a designer, I always vote for a highly polished front-end with fully developed features, but now that its our own time and budget we often have to shoot for the best compromise. This is nothing new to me, as I have those discussions with clients on a regular basis, but now it feels like you’re arguing with yourself…

Of course we’ll also start talking to possible investors sometime soon, because some additional money would definitely help to speed up the development process. Until then we must choose wisely on how to prioritize the next features.

Here are the two biggest trade-offs we have had to make thus far:

1. Starting with an iOS version first (all people I know including myself use iPhones). This limits our reach dramatically since the majority of our customers use Android, but building the app simultaneously for both platforms would have taken too much time.
2. Providing only Facebook Connect to login. While providing the traditional email based signup option would have been possible, the challenging part was to build our own social network. tackl is supposed to be a closed environment, where you feel comfortable and only play with your friends. To provide this experience, the app would need the ability to invite friends, profile pages etc. All in all, it would have taken many more months to build this system from scratch. We decided to leverage the existing connections made available through Facebook. The downside is that people without a Facebook account can’t use the app. And allthough we’re not using the Facebook login to gather data, there are still many users with strong reservations against Facebook and their data protection policy. So we’re still planing to introduce an alternative login rather sooner then later.

And of course a product like tackl is never finished. We have ideas for new features pilling up, right next to the pile of unsolved bugs and unfinished tweaks. But for the time being we’re proud that we launched a very solid MVP that is a unique alternative to all of the other sport betting systems out there. See for yourself and download the app.

Here is how tackl works:

With tackl you can start a spontaneous bet whenever you like. Just pick a league, the gameday and the games you’re interested in and predict the scores for each game: The closer you are to the actual result, the more points you’ll get. Next you can challenge one or more friends to accept your bet. Before you do that, you can define a wager. This wager can either be a certain amount of Credits (a virtual currency) or a beer. After confirming the wager and sending out the tackl your friends get notified via push message. As soon as one of them accepts and predicts the scores, the tackl is on. Once the games are running you can see the live scores, together with the predictions of your friends and follow the progress in the leaderboard. The player with the best predictions wins the tackl and the pot of credits.

Since we’re targeting our home market first we’ve decided to start with the relavant leagues for Germany, the 1. & 2. Bundesliga, the DFB Pokal, the European Champions League and the World Cup Qualifiers. Over time we’ll be adding more leagues and languages. As usual this will be a decision of priorities, since we can only tackl one feature at a time. (Sorry, couldn’t stop myself from writing this. ;))

Anyway, we’re excited to have a new baby in the App Store and we can’t wait to hear the feedback and hopefully evolve over time to a leading social sports betting plattform. We’d be very happy if you follow us on this journey on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.

Thanks for reading

Martin Oberhäuser
Founder/CEO of Bureau Oberhaeuser and tackl