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How Playfulbet Grew To 400K Followers On Facebook And 300K On Twitter

Even though Playfulbet’s product is e-sports and sports betting games, our success in capturing thousands of users and followers has not been left up to chance.

Behind Playfulbet there’s a young team that first and foremost love what they do, as we get to work with our biggest passion — games. And it feels even better to share these insights when our devotion is bearing fruit, as our social media following have been growing exponentially the last few years.

We recently reached a couple of milestones in our social channels, as we reached 300.000 followers on Twitter and 400.000 followers on Facebook.

As mentioned earlier, nothing is left up to chance, and at times we’ve been overwhelmed by the massive growth from some of our campaigns, especially as Playfulbet has been expanding internationally.

LOVE

We love our followers, and have great respect for everyone that follow our social media channels. And here lies some of the key-elements to our growth, we have a big emphasis on entertaining our audience every single day.

It’s important to see you social media as an extension of your product, as our social channel is an extension of Playfulbet’s betting platform.

We focus on communicating with our audience, and not just broadcasting a message. In this we use all kinds of media tools like pictures, video, GIF’s, surveys and contests that can steal a smile or a reaction from our followers.

If you have a product to leverage through the platform, use it for what it’s worth. We give away our virtual money (Coins) that users can take advantage of on the platform to win prizes.

The precious feedback

To maintain a high interaction rate in your social channels is key to keep growing. As we are a sports betting platform we base a lot of our content on actual sports news. In that way we’re staying relevant to our followers, and not only entertaining. I think this is one of toughest nuts to crack — stay relevant.

If you’re interacting with your audience every day, you’ll be sure to get feedback, which is very valuable. It’s important that you follow up on all your feedback, as your brand will be more credible, and your followers will be more faithful if they feel they’re being heard.

Jorge Badenes, content manager at Playfulbet — an itnig startup.

Having depurated non-toxic social networks where the user feels comfortable also serves as a real time barometer of what’s going on in your company. At Playfulbet the users may ask for support about prizes they’ve won or they aspire to win, they report cheaters and people who don’t play clean by using multi-accounts, which are forbidden, or they simply alert us about canceled or suspended matches they want their coins back from. All of this is super helpful for our team, and makes our platform better.

Right now we’re engaging our followers all across Europe and in Southern America, giving away hundreds of prizes every month, while creating entertaining content. Follow us for some inspiration on how you can do the same, because our team rocks!

Playfulbet, the adventure continues..

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This post was written by Jorge Badenes, content manager at itnig startup Playfulbet.

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How To Make A Startup Community Grow And Become More Inclusive

There’s tons of events in the Barcelona startup ecosystem, you can find all the itnig events here.

Everyone that works in startups desire a strong, growing and inclusive community. It’s something everyone benefit from, founders, VC’s, developers, marketers, the list goes on.

How you perceive a community often depend on if you’re a local or not. In Barcelona the startup community is a good mix of both Spanish people and expats from all over the world, which is a great thing.

I’ve been a member of the startup community in the city for well over a year now, and I’ve been impressed by how inclusive and fast-growing it is. To help me analyze why and how the ecosystem has been growing, I spoke to a local expert.

Want to go fast or far?

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit is the CEO and founder of MarsBased, director of Startup Grind Barcelona, and the man behind the Slack group StartupBCN. As a local, he’s seen the community grow fast for the last years, and have recognized a clear difference between certain companies:

Some companies fail to understand that an ecosystem is a perfect sum of the actors that contribute. Go alone if you want to go fast, go accompanied if you want to go far, as the African proverb says.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit at Startupgrind’s two year anniversary in Barcelona this year.

Even though tech startups is dependent and built by developers, it’s important that all events isn’t exclusively for this group. Bacardit says entry-level events are key in building and growing a community:

Events provided by new startups or even public administration, where you get free non-technical content, not using acronyms or tech-jargon so people can start soaking the startup vibe and culture without feeling lost.

Too many “rockstars”

As Brad Feld wrote in the well-known book “Startup communities”, inclusion doesn’t just mean to invite as many of the people you think will fit into the community, it actually means everyone, according to Feld:

“Welcome everyone to the startup community. Everyone should have the perspective that having more people engaged is good for the startup community.”

Wise, experienced startup founders are essential in all communities that want to grow, but it’s important to not forget the youngest group of the ecosystem.

Young people who’s hungry for experience with their whole life ahead of them, and with“nothing to lose”, can be an incredible resource to a growing (or a stagnant) community. They’re often not limited by the same things as older, more experienced members of the ecosystem can be. Limited time, money, pride, are things young people more rarely have, and make them more free to be active and engaged.

Bacardit explains that even though the Barcelona ecosystem is getting better every year, there’s still too many older “rockstars”.

There is an established “startup mafia” which is everywhere, pulling the strings of the community. If you’re not friends with them, you won’t make it. The biggest pitfall is the conquer-all attitude of some companies that try to gain foothold within the community without caring about other companies.

The founder believes giving before getting, is the key to growth.

An inclusive startup community is where being a competitor does not matter. At this level, companies should partner more often than not, even if they’re competitors.

He continues:

If even Microsoft and Google or Apple partner from time to time, why shouldn’t startups?

Build something that lasts

In Barcelona we’re very lucky to have an extremely strong city brand, but not all cities have the world’s best football team, and millions of people coming to visit every year. If you don’t have a strong identity, it’s easy to start drawing lines to other places that have fostered world-famous entrepreneurs.

You often hear that cities brand themselves as the Silicon Valley of this or that, but if you want your startup community to develop in a healthy way and be a reference to other communities, I think it’s important to stay true to who you are.

For instance to call Barcelona the Silicon Valley of southern Europe would look good as a title in news articles, and create a bit of buzz, but to base your brand on your own talent and success is something that will last much longer, even though it takes more time and effort.

So if you’re part of a startup or a tech company you now know some of the things you should, and shouldn’t do. And Bacardit has one last encouragement to you:

I believe most companies should host an event or two a year just to learn what it can bring them, and how difficult it is. It’s a nice way to pay the community back.

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This post was written by Sindre Hopland, media manager at itnig.

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GymForLess Will Now Let You Work Out Across Borders

CEO Oriol Vinzia checking up with his team at their Poble Nou offices.

The Barcelona-based startup will in October launch new features to their product, and let people work out across borders in both Spain, France and Italy. This was a natural move for the startup that recently have grown a lot in the B2B market, says CEO Oriol Vinzia:

We work with international companies that have workers that travel a lot. If you live in Barcelona, but work a lot from Paris, you’ll be able to choose amongst hundreds of gyms in both cities with our programs.

The itnig company recently closed a bridge round of €160.000 to keep focusing on their technology, as they’re planning on closing an A-round in the beginning of 2017 explains Vinzia:

We’re aiming for a round of €1 million or more, so we’ll start approaching investors from October.

2017 will be the year people talk about the disruption of gyms

At least that’s what CEO Vinzia think is coming as one of the big industries of disruption next year.

There are several big online gym marketplaces that are growing, and we’re the biggest one in southern Europe. I think the industry we’ll read a lot about the next year, is the disruption and digitalization of gym-services.

Brazilian competitor Gympass recently landed in Spain, but they’re only focusing on the B2B market, says Vinzia.

We’ve already established a strong B2C market of thousands of users, and we’ve recently seen great growth in our B2B market. Our challenge now is to find the perfect balance for our focus on the two markets.

Crossing the million mark

GymForLess offers three different programs that gives you access to hundreds of gyms. Here’s the map of Barcelona.

GymForLess had a turnover of €350.000 last year, and expects a turnover of €1 million by 2016, according to the CEO:

By 2017 we’re predicting a turnover of €2.5 million.

The company will now focus heavily on their tech product. With over 100.000 active users on their app they aim to add additional features that goes beyond working out and locating a gym.

We want to add personal trainers, possibly a marketplace to buy gym clothes, but also to add a social layer between the clubbers, so friends can challenge each other, and compare results from their exercises.

CEO Vinzia also adds that they’re looking into possibilities with connecting the app to pulse watches and other devices.

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This post was written by Sindre Hopland, media manager at itnig.

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Fast, simple and reliable: Jekyll

When we decided we needed to redo the itnig website from scratch we managed to synthesize our needs in three words.

Fast, simple and reliable.

Is there anything faster, simpler and more reliable than static html? Writing a static html page in the dynamic world we live in was out of the question but we needed something that would allow us to do so in an easy way. That’s when we found Jekyll.

Jekyll lets you generate a static html site from dynamic components such as templates, partials, liquid code, markdown, etc.

Data structure

Data classes are structured in Collections, each collection being a folder where each instance is represented by a file. Each one of these files starts with what they call Front Matter a header where all the instance attributes are defined. This Front Matter is what allows relationships between classes, filtering, querying, etc.

Classes that don’t need an html page representation are stored using Data Files (a typical CSV file) instead of being represented by a file in a collection. In our case, we use them to store people working at our startups.

Data Sourcing

We could manually create a file in the _jobs collection every time we have a new job offer, or a new file in the _events collection every time we have a new event, but we love optimising our time, and we already update our job offers on Workable and our events on Meetup, so why not using their APIs? Well that’s exactly what we do. We periodically run a script that retrieves all jobs from Workable creating a file for each one that is then stored in the _jobs collection. We do the same for the upcoming events and we also use the Google Drive API to retrieve the latest version of the people CSV file.

Design

Once the structure is defined and some data is created you can start working on the design. You can define some properties and attributes on any file using the Front Matter, and obtain and play with your previously created data using Liquid (a templating engine created by Shopify), to finally show it using HTML.

Conclusions

After working on and maintaining a Jekyll site for a couple months I can say it meets our expectations, but there are a couple drawbacks you should take into account before jumping into adopting it.

The first one is precisely what makes it fast an reliable, that is, the lack of a backend. Before choosing Jekyll you’ll have to ask yourself if your project is simple enough to avoid user registration and complex class and DB modelling. If it is, go ahead.

The second one is the lack of a “backoffice” for non-tech people. Whenever we manually update the content of a file (adding for example the video url of an event once it is online) it needs to be synced with the repository using git, and deployed to the server where the site is hosted. This might look simple and clean from the developer’s perspective, but when the content has to be updated by non technical users, this can be a problem. You’ll have to make sure your content manager knows or is willing to learn git.

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Hacker Bootcamps VS. Universities: What to choose and what's in it for the future?

Hacker schools or bootcamps are getting more and more popular. You’ll learn a programming language in 2–3 months, and you’re more or less guarantied a full-time well paying job.

If you compare this to signing up to a four-year degree at a University and getting tons of study loan, the short-cut through a hacker school is obviously tempting.

But what are the incentives to attend university, and does a “degree” from a hacker school limit you in any way?

We asked the experts.

“If you want to work go to a hacker school, if you want to work at Google, go to University”

The big pro about hacker schools is obviously that the distance from the school to work is a lot shorter, but is a person well prepared to work in a startup after graduating from a 2–3 months program?

“You can not become a CTO with just a bootcamp experience!” (Marc Alier, UPC)

CEO and co-founder at Codeworks a Barcelona bootcamp, Alessandro Zanardi, acknowledge that universities are vital for training specialists in more complex computer science areas:

We need engineers that have stronger theoretical experience. If you’re dealing with big data or artificial intelligence you need developers that have a university degree. If you want to work at Google with AI, get a Ph.D.

The university problem

Marc Collado is director at Iron Hack Barcelona, a bootcamp that also have campuses in Miami and Madrid. Even though Collado now represents a bootcamp, he himself went through a five-year University program at IQS:

The universities are too embedded in society. At Iron Hack we analyze the job market, and work towards creating a program that actually helps businesses hire a much needed workforce, and gets people into jobs.

Ludo (Marc Alier) hopes universities change the way they treat their professors and teachers, and agrees with the bootcamp hackers that there is a lot to be improved with the institution stretching thousands of years back:

The problem with University is that the professors are incentivized to be researchers, not to be good teachers. You get promoted if you’re good researcher, not if you have experience from tech companies or do a great job as a teacher.

Bootcamps do not build CTO’s

Professor Alier is grateful that bootcamps fill a whole and a demand in the market, but he wants to make one thing very clear:

I have seen examples where people have finished bootcamps, and they’re told that they can start a company. I’ll tell you this, they always screw up, always!

He continues:

You can not become a CTO with just a bootcamp experience!

Zanardi at Codeworks does not like the negativity towards the concept of screwing up:

This is a classic example of the difference between bootcamp mentality and university mentality. The best people from all sectors and industries are people that know what it’s like to fail hard.

Also Iron Hack’s Collado weighs in on the CTO statement:

A CTO needs more soft skills than hard skills, it’s about experience, recruiting, mentoring, but yes of course the guy needs to be technical, that’s for sure.

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The post/video/podcast was produced by Sindre Hopland & Masumi Mutsuda, the itnig media team.

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