By James Lovell
To be able to give a little back to racing is a privilege, so to sponsor a race like the Welsh Champion Hurdle is a real honour.
But for my brother and I, it’s even more than that. It’s a milestone that seems to be significant every year.
When we first took it up three years ago, it marked the launch of DragonBet into the online space.
At that point we weren’t really ready. We were wet behind the ears innocents in terms of operational capacity, completely naive in terms of the commercial world, and lacking in technological capability when it came to a fully functioning website.
With high profile recent previous winners Oscar Whisky, The New One and the likes of Silver Streak in the race, the winning horse – Glory and Fortune, trained by Stan Sheppard – probably won’t be remembered by many. But for us, he will always hold a place in our hearts.
We didn’t cover ourselves in glory that day when the website crashed and I distinctly remember losing a fortune when a high profile footballer had unexpectedly signed up and gone on a run.
But the important point was we were live and ready to take our chances.
The path from on-course to on-line at this point had been steep and arduous. We had put everything into it, financially and mentally.
From not knowing what a platform was to endless meetings with Eastern European technology providers, and hours and hours of online learning and i-gaming courses, the journey had been relentless and so had the knock-backs.
The banks didn’t want to know us and neither did the platforms.
But we eventually found one and one chance is sometimes all you need.
Fast forward a year and the 2022 renewal saw Effernock Fizz land the spoils.
The going was described as good that day but it was as quick as it ever gets at Ffos Las. That resulted in a small field and truth be told, it perhaps wasn’t of the highest quality.
The winning horse was small but lovable – and so, I think, was DragonBet.
We had managed to get people to engage in our story – real people, real bookmakers, born from the betting ring.
That year also marked our move to new technology. We were now on the platform we still use today. It was a huge step forward from where we were.
The site had been making money and acquiring customers, which told us the brand was working. What wasn’t working was retention.
We weren’t doing enough to keep our customers once they were through the door.
We had a leaky bucket, and the hole needed to be fixed.
So, this year, we’re on that mission.
The race will mark our transition from a white label operator (someone who uses someone else’s tech and sits under a joint operating licence) to full remote operators.
With the recent granting of our own full licence, it’s now wholly up to us to steer our own ship in terms of many things that were previously out of our control.
For the first time, the compliance side of the business (and the decisions that go with that) are all ours. We are masters of our own destiny.
We’ve also grown the team from that opening duo of two to 26. Some of the roles, in things like marketing and customer retention, point solely at fixing that hole in the bucket.
I can’t tell you what will win the 2024 Welsh Champion Hurdle yet, but what I can tell you is that in the run-up to it and beyond, DragonBet will keep growing.
We’ll be looking to thank our loyal customer base and grow it with retention and marketing schemes befitting us as people and the beliefs we carry.
These are values we’ve learned from years of operating in the betting ring – things like offering a ‘fair’ bet in all senses of the word, putting our customers and the service they receive at heart of what we do, and knowing that bookmaking is always about give as well as take.
We’re proud of the business we’ve built, proud of the team we’ve assembled, and proud once again to be sponsoring the Welsh Champion Hurdle.
