Social club: the rise of Australian startup Dabble and its community spirit

Australian social betting startup Dabble has gained recognition and support from both in and outside the industry in the short two years since it launched in July 2021. Billed as one of the fastest growing wagering brands Down Under, the operator boasted 108,000 active customers for the 12 months to June 2023 and reported quarter annualised revenue of A$47m in June 2022. 

Quoted by Tom Waterhouse, a former bookmaker himself, as one of his greatest missed investment opportunities through his Waterhouse VC fund, Melbourne-headquartered Dabble has an impressive roster of backers, including a A$33m investment from Australian betting and gaming powerhouse Tabcorp in October 2022, as well as early investors ex-AFL ace Heath Shaw and former NBA player Andrew Bogut. Having the financial support of former sports stars has given Dabble the credibility it needed, with those household names assisting to onboard new ‘Dabblers’ that are also fellow ex-sports stars.

Dabble, which has been valued at A$165m (based on a 5x multiple of Tabcorp’s 20% stake), describes itself as a sports betting app combined with a social media app. Players can follow other punters, copy bets, chat with each other in the ‘banter channels’ or watch weekly live streams hosted by well-known athletes.

Dabble CEO Tom Rundle, speaking to EGR from the firm’s Darwin office, says the startup has three aspects to its business: being a bookmaker, a social network and a software company where it builds its own technology. The Tabcorp investment enabled Dabble to immediately double the size of its product and tech teams, allowing it to “build more products with more velocity”.

Earlier this year, Dabble completed its first-ever acquisition – DFS platform Moneyball Australia – as part of its growth strategy to increase its demographic of social media savvy sports punters. The interactive community element associated with DFS complements Dabble’s immersive social betting offering. The startup has acquired several thousand players who have migrated over and benefited from strong members of staff from Moneyball.

Here, Rundle, who has an impressive background in gaming having worked for the likes of Tom Waterhouse, PokerStars, Sportsbet and PointsBet, explains the importance of community, Dabble’s content-rich approach and international expansion plans.   

EGR: How did the idea for Dabble first come about?

Tom Rundle (TR): It started with a pair of brothers from Australia who ran a digital marketing business and also large groups, predominately on Facebook, where people shared their bets, talked about them, commented on them and took screenshots. The brothers realised pretty quickly that if you could do all this in one place on an app, that’s what these 10,000- to 50,000-person groups wanted.

They decided all they needed was a lawyer and someone to actually build a platform for them. So, they found Scott , who they had done a little bit of work with, and he’s ended up being our CTO. One of the brothers is our chief strategy officer and the other is our chief product officer . And this was in the middle of lockdown. So, they found me on LinkedIn and I said I’d help consult with them for a couple of months about how to set up a business like this, and then I took on the role of CEO shortly afterwards.

We spent 12 months building the platform, getting the licence, hiring the staff, raising the capital and getting ready. The first six months was bootstrapped by the affiliate business that Jon and Dave ran. So, that gave us a little bit of a head start. And it was during that process that we found our first major investment from Yolo Group. They were very supportive of the idea. We had a few ideas in our software team, but we didn’t have a working prototype at that stage. When we did have a working prototype, were just about to go live and got our licence, we did another round of funding, and they were part of that as well.   

EGR: When did Dabble launch?

TR: We launched on 28 July 2021 offering fixed-odds racing with our social platform, which allowed people to copy, share, discuss and comment on their bets, similar to the Facebook groups. Pretty soon, a lot of those customers got referred. They formed the early group of customers and then we started using other channels to grow. Very quickly, we had 50,000 customers within our first three or four months signed up to try the product. So, it was very quickly apparent that we had something, and the market was pretty excited about it.

We didn’t really offer many promos. We had not much to promote other than telling everyone about a big multi-bet that got up, that 400 people copied and then suggesting, ‘Why don’t you copy his A$40 multi the next day?’. Then 1,000 people copied the same bettor’s multi the next day, which won again, and this time cost us half a million Australian dollars. But it was a really good story. And it looked really good on the app to be able to say, ‘1,000 people have copied this bet and it’s an 80/1 multi’. It took them about 30 days to give the money back, but by then all of those customers were pretty excited.

So, that was really the start of Dabble, plus having a differentiating product in a crowded market was really important for customers who are just used to getting the same offers from the same bookies with the same products.  

EGR: How does Dabble offer an innovative socialised betting experience?

TR: The biggest difference between us and other competitors is that we’re more like a social media business. When you open the Dabble app, you see a feed in the same way as you’d see a feed on Instagram. It’s got the activity of all the people you follow. It’s got their bets and indicators like the number of copies of that bet. We also have comments. So, you can say, when there’s three legs down in a four-leg multi, ‘Come on guys, we’ve got this last one’. That’s really exciting for the people there because they are building their own little community.

We also have banter channels for every sport, people will go on there to give tips and talk about what’s happening in real time. We have Twitch-like streams as well that run five days a week, usually for about an hour or so, featuring guests who are often ex-sports stars. They’re talking to the customers through the banter channel too. As a result, there’s a very strong interactivity between the talent that’s on the show talking about their particular area of expertise, whether it be racing or punting, or ambassadors like Andrew Bogut, who’s an ex-NBA star, and ex-AFL stars Heath Shaw and Dane Swan, and customers.

The guests are talking directly to the customers, who are commenting, asking questions and getting tips. We often put a bet on at the same time, they might get the crowd to help them build their multi-bet or their same-game multi. Everyone copies it and we might offer a promotion on that. It’s very much about interactivity where you’re talking to other people, famous people, and those who are a bit more skilled at betting. Or you’re consuming all of that content, just like the viewers who watch Instagram reels but don’t post Instagram reels. So, that ratio is probably not dissimilar; 10% of the people are creating the content for 90% of the audience.

We also find that a lot of people would like to come in, feel part of a community, copy a few bets, share the fact that they’re all winning together, but then go off and make their own bets.

The last part, which we’ve added, is offline experiences. So, for example, we have a corporate box at the MCG , which is the biggest sports ground in Australia and holds about 100,000 people. Instead of what other bookies might do where they invite VIP customers in for a drinks package, food and the best seat in the house, we’ll have competitions for people who bet A$10. We go up there and it’s the greatest day of their life. They walk in and, in many cases, they meet an ex-sports star of the team they’ve gone there to watch. We’re really trying to create those six-star experiences offline as well as online and create a community feel.

EGR: Dabble is just in its third year since launch and has been described as one of the fastest growing sports betting brands in Australia. What have been your highlights so far?

TR: We’ve had nearly 150,000 first-time bettors since we launched and that’s in less than two years, which is pretty significant. We’ve been growing very quickly. We’ve been doing that without large-scale advertising or TV campaigns. We did dabble a little bit in some broadcaster video on demand on YouTube and Kayo, which is the digital sports subscription channel here in Australia. Most of it has actually been a combination of affiliates, word of mouth and social media sites. We’ve been pretty light in the advertising space.

We’ve been trying to get a lot of the customers in the young adult cohort, 18- to 30-year-olds. Gen Z in particular are very used to doing everything as a group in a social setting online and our product suits them pretty well. We recently signed a deal with TikTok, and they only had three companies they wantedto do business with in Australia as part of a trial of allowing online wagering advertising. There are three large organisations that already dominate the market but we’re not one of them unfortunately. We will be at one point, but we managed to be the first one TikTok chose just because of our content-richapproach, which is aligned to their brand. We’re starting to make inroads with those kinds of deals where most smaller brands would not get a look in simply because we’re quite innovative.

We have streams, which gives us a rich amount of content where we can say to the marketplace, ‘Here’s something cool that happened on Dabble’ as opposed to ‘Here’s a deposit match, here’s a money-back special’. In terms of the streams, we’re getting about 2,500 viewers weekly on a Saturday during horseracing season, which is probably the weakest time of the year. We expect that to get ramped right up. It’s been really attractive, and those consumers are coming back week on week to watch the streams.

EGR: How has the deal with TikTok boosted your appeal and exposure, especially through the partnership with ex-AFL star Dane Swan?

TR: The days are very early. We’re learning about what works and what doesn’t work. And we’re not spending a huge amount of money to do that. We’ve obviously got commitments over time. The real advantage we have with TikTok is that we have a lot of partners, and we deal with one of the sports radio stations to get access to a lot of their talent.

So, anytime there’s a National Rugby League event, we have multiple people who can speak on that. When there’s a big racing event, we have multiple ex-jockeys, trainers or experts. We also have MMA fighters who we ask to talk about their sport. When you chop all that up into what TikTok is about, which is five to 45 seconds, it’s really good content. Even just as a branding exercise, it’s effective. But when you look at cost per install and some of those core metrics, TikTok’s already performing as well as our other channels.

The first steps have shown that the performance is comparative to any other channel, which is a really good start but it’s the tip of the iceberg. We’re not taking something that was made for Facebook or TV, making a shortened version and sticking it on TikTok. We’re actually building content specifically for TikTok. The more we do that, the better we’re going to get at it. Competitors who were perhaps spending more money won’t be as effective at getting to their audience like we are.

EGR: How have features such as Dabble’s in-app Sky Racing capability enhanced your product offering?

TR: This is really important. Around the same time as we got the investment from Tabcorp, we managed to do a deal to get Sky Racing on the app, which provides a lot more of an all-in-one service to customers who want to have a bet, watch the race and do other things on the app, whether it’s chat, watch streams, etc. There’s a couple of other operators that have Sky Racing Vision, one of which is Tabcorp, which owns Sky. We knew it was an important part of our retention strategy and to get ahead of the market to give customers no reason to get off the app. In the same way as you can share, copy, banter all on one app, you can also now watch Sky.

We’re slowly adding new content all the time. We’ve got New Zealand races on there at the moment, races from South Africa as well as all the Australian greyhounds, harness racing and most of the thoroughbreds, apart from one state which is not available to us. Again, it’s part of a long-term strategy to make sure we’ve got this service available to all our customers, rather than a short-term sugar hit. 

EGR: As part of the Australian parliamentary inquiry into online gambling, a possible ban on online gambling ads within three years is being discussed. How will that impact your marketing strategy?

TR: There’s probably two key things there. One is there’s uncertainty about how much of the parliamentary review will actually end up in legislation. There’s a fair bit of water to go under the bridge. One of the recommendations was to prevent ads online. There’s already quite a lot of restrictions which prevent that anyway. Depending on how that plays out, it may impact our strategy or it may not. We don’t really know, but we’ll certainly be making submissions to try and avoid a complete ban.

One of the big challenges is probably that the large incumbent operators have been a little bit careless in the way they’ve approached sponsorship. There’s a lot of sponsorship on shirts, stadiums and TV for events children watch. That’s become pretty saturated, so the community has started to kick up a bit of a fuss. If TV ads were banned for sports broadcasts, that would probably be a good outcome for us, and it would probably be a good outcome for the community at large. But we’ll just have to wait and see. 

Our strategy broadly is that we’re a social network. Facebook, Instagram and TikTok didn’t get new customers by advertising on TV or widely in digital, they just relied on their features and the people within those networks to be able to share what was going on in those platforms. Dabble, as a social network, certainly over the long term, wants to mostly attract customers through that social virality. That’s the huge advantage we’ve got over other operators. So, any restrictions over the long term are probably going to benefit us. But at the same time, we need to still use digital channels and affiliates to grow to a sustainable level. In the short term, it’ll probably hurt us if the restrictions are too onerous. But I think we will definitely be less impacted than other smaller operators.

EGR: What are your plans for the US and expansion into other markets?

TR: We’ve got a strategic plan to go international over the year and we expect to have a product in the US within the next 12 months. We’re actively planning that. We have one other market that we’re looking at, so watch this space.

A$165m       

Valuation of the business (based on a 5x multiple of Tabcorp’s stake)

20%      Percentage stake Tabcorp holds

17.7m          

Number of bets placed in the 12 months to 30 June 2023

59,198        

Number of customers signed up in first four months of launch

18-30        

Target demographic of Dabble customers

Various sources