Q&A: Tiago Dias, one of the Founders and CEO of RealFevr
Tiago, tell us a little bit about who you are and some of your background?
I’m an enabler, a dreamer. A football lover. A natural optimist that believes anything is possible, if you want it badly enough. If I had to present myself, that would be it.
I’m 38 years old and I was born and raised in Lisbon, Portugal. When I was 10 I joined Colégio Militar, a Military boarding school in Lisbon. I stayed there until I finished my high school education and then I enrolled in a degree of Industrial Engineering and Management at Instituto Superior Tecnico, which I actually didn’t finish.
I started working in the IT market more than a decade ago, with roles related to sales and later managing commercial and business development teams. I always had really good results with my roles in IT.
In late 2013 I started my first company which was sold last year, pretty much around the same time we started developing RealFevr.
As one of the founders can you tell us a bit about how RealFevr was started?
To be honest, no one knows the exact day it started, and that’s still something we have a good laugh about. It started with José Miranda, our fantasy nerd, introducing me and Tiago Bem, a developer he had worked with in a previous project. This way we could have a qualified take on the bigger scope of a potential company: business, technology and product development. The first six months we spent researching the market, brain-storming and maturing the idea. After deciding that we were going forward with it we designed a conceptual first phase plan that made sense to the three of us.
Things started to get serious in late November 2013 once we understood that there was an opportunity in the market. Our competitors were mostly local platforms and the SaaS providers at the time weren’t as developed as we expected. Four months later we realized we needed more developers and knowhow in terms of technical project management, so we invited Bruno Coelho and then Bruno Tavares to join us.
We also knew the business could be seasonal and that we would need to develop a solution that would enable our users to play more than one competition, including multiple club and national team competitions.
In December 2014 we released the first beta version of RealFevr. At the time we only had draft mode (based on US fantasy sports) and soon we understood we had to broaden our products. The draft mode was too complex for a product that was seeking massification and so we developed the salary cap model that allowed us to have a differentiating product. So at this time we had two different game models for two different types of online users. Salary Cap for the light users and Draft Mode for our power users.
From the beginning our plan has always been to invest the biggest part of our financial resources in research and development. We’ve always known that in the long term, it would be the formula that would lead us to success.
We knew that with a business to consumer model we would need a huge financial effort in marketing and customer acquisition, so we would need to find a different approach to finance the growth. At the same time, everyone was realizing the loss of revenues from classical media to the tech giants like Facebook and Google.
Next we developed a product that could also fit in this market and create real added value for them too. We needed the communication channels in order to grow our user base and one of the biggest deterrents of the media giants not to have a fantasy platform of their own, was the big initial investment in software.
So we decided to offer a shared economy approach, where RealFevr provides its expertise in having the best fantasy experience and the media partners provide us with credibility, their content, and the distribution channels we required.
This way, our relationship with the media partner is stronger and there is a lot more value created from the business relationship. That lead us to our big success with MaisFutebol and Playstation Portugal that brought us more than 100,000 users playing RealFevr.
To be honest it was two and half years of really hard work, devoting all our spare time developing the product, and all this as we kept our jobs in other companies.
By February 2016 a 1.2M€ investment allowed us to focus 100% on RealFevr. In 2018 we’re a company employing fifteen people, with more than 500,000 registered users. And…I really think that this is just the beginning.
We know you’re the CEO of RealFevr, but can you tell us a bit more about your role at the company?
I think my role has always been to lead the way and find a path that would turn the idea into a profitable long term business. To guarantee that all necessary requirements were met for the team to focus on their work and follow our long term strategy.
You need a lot of optimism, tons of hard work, and an exceptional team — this along with a bit of madness and some luck.
The company has four keystones: the game, the content, technology and everything else. You could say I deal with the “everything else” part of it. From commercial contacts, marketing strategies and actions, HR, legal, accountancy, finance, and the overall business model. I’m a member of the strategic council of the company and I also want to ensure the healthy and happy culture at RealFevr. This last part is really important to me.
To be fair, I’ll do whatever I can to move us forward.
How do you see the RealFevr platform evolving in 2018?
We want to have a media partner in five countries, consolidate our B2B business model, and grow and improve our platform in order to allow both users and media partners more options and functionality. Meeting these goals I strongly believe we will surpass the 1M user mark. This May we’ll release the new company identity and image, and we’re in the concept / analysis phase for some analytics tools we will design.
One of our goals is the democratization of real stats access as we believe that they will play a big role in the development of sports in general, and particularly football. To create the best fantasy experience in the world we have a bigger mission — one that help sport to evolve itself.
Can you tell us a bit about the plans for the RealFevr ICO? How will the raised capital be used?
The ICO wasn’t even in our road map. It happened because we always had the idea of creating our own tokens inside the platform. And if you merge that with the fact that we could raise capital, without applying for an A Series, that would allow us to fast forward some of the development ideas we have in our pipeline. This turned out to be the perfect opportunity for us.
We want to be present in more geographies, and continuously develop the platform and the ecosystem supporting the game. This works as a retention tool for our user base, and builds better and more accurate content to support our user’s decision making. We want to grow to different sports, build data analytics tools that create value on the whole football ecosystem, our end users, scouts, coaches, club staff, and so on. And of course we want to try to increase the company’s headcount because, in the end it’s people who make it happen.
To learn more about Tiago Dias visit his profile on linkedin.
Chat with the RealFevr team on Telegram
Stay Connected
ICO Website: https://www.realfevr.io
Notícias em Português: https://medium.com/realfevrico-brazil
Twitter: https://twitter.com/RealFevr_ICO
Telegram: https://t.me/RealFevrICO
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/RealFevrICO
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/realfevrTV
