Why Matchbook built an Apple Watch app from scratch
Neil Campbell, product manager at Matchbook, on the decision to build an Apple Watch app in-house
It was an innovation project for us rather than something our core audience needed. When the technology came up, we simply thought âwhy not see what we can do?â Itâs a very interesting challenge for a technical point of view and we were looking at it as a way of testing personalisation models that weâd already built.
I donât think the watch market is at a point where itâs going be very important from a revenue point of view. However we can see that the second and third screen is going to be really important. So we thought about how people are using their mobile app in relation to the desktop and how they are going to use their watch in relation to their mobile. Itâs about looking at how we can get the platforms complementing each other.
There was also definitely a lot of frustration from users when we set out to build this, that the apps for Apple Watch were pretty poor, so we set out to build something with good functionality that we could imagine using ourselves.
Thinking about what a customer might want from the Watch app inspired us. When youâre working on a product so closely itâs easy to forget the customer view, so the Watch helped give us a different lens to think about that. When you have such a small screen you have to ask yourself exactly what do customers want to see, and that carried over to thinking about what customers want to see on mobile and desktop screens as well. From a user interface perspective we came up with a few new ways of organising the data on the platform itself that were then taken over to the desktop.
Personalisation was a key selling point of our Watch app. There are various levels of personalisation. At the basic level, if two customers have a certain amount of metrics that match each other, we can work out what else they might like based on their counterpart. But on the more advanced end, we are looking at things that arenât widespread in the industry yet at all. For example if a customer is looking at his phone at 4.30pm on a Friday, we think he might like to see more previews, whereas if its 2.45pm on a Saturday, just before kick-off weâll show him the really pertinent stats and our bet recommendation. Currently on the Watch app weâve only got recommended markets functionality, but weâre working on the more advanced technology.
This is the type of project you can do when you build your own technology. Itâs a big difference between us and everyone else; we have an ideology of relying on our own technology where possible. Having worked in one of the other big operators until recently, I know the pain of having good ideas die because youâre in bed with a massive technology provider that doesnât really care about your idea.
Matchbook is a relatively small company with a flat structure and a start-up culture. There is a very short cycle for product delivery for us â it took us four weeks to develop the Apple Watch app â and we believe that owning your own technology is owning your own destiny. Speed means a massive amount in terms of bringing an innovation to market. Getting there first makes a massive difference in terms of profitability if you think about something like bet365 and cash-out.