I recently got a chance to ask Darren Moore, the man behind Betting Gods, a few questions about his background, the Betting Gods platform and what we can expect to see from Betting Gods in the future.
It’s a fairly lengthy interview, but it makes for some interesting reading and if you stick around to the end there’s even an exclusive announcement about a new feature you can expect to see from Betting Gods in the next month or two.
So without further ado, here’s the full interview:
When and why did you first become interested in betting and how did that interest end up leading to the existence of Betting Gods?
I love answering this question as Betting Gods isn’t just a job or career for me, it’s a lifestyle. That lifestyle I guess goes back many years to when I was 14 and had my first ever job working in the family grocers. As a spotty, geeky 14 year old I was obsessed with computers and flying (I was destined to be an airline pilot from a young age, and had a scholarship lined up, plus a place reserved at flying school in Naples, Florida – however that’s a whole different story in itself!)
Building up my work-experience of dealing with customers face to face in my weekend job, I learnt the values of not just customer service but what I now call customer delight. Customer delight is what I see as not just providing what the customer wants (as in the case of customer service) but exceeding his or her expectations and going the proverbial extra mile to show that you genuinely care and have the customer’s best interests at heart.
This value I have carried through all my life (I’m now 32) and across all my career paths which have included work as an office manager, funeral director, armed police officer, local government positions and for at least six years now, my work in the tipster industry.
What you now see as BettingGods.com was first born from my own personal interest in horse racing betting as a form of money making. Technically I’m a college dropout, but was studying A Level Maths so I’m not afraid to navigate my way around statistics and the odd formula if it makes me a few quid!
So my betting career was born several years ago, betting in an evening on the US Horse Racing place markets, and I’ll be honest. I was making a lot of money for quite a number of years. Not wanting to brag but I had the big detached house down a private lane, double garage overflowing with cars and expensive accessories (watches, phones, etc). However, the ‘Greed Monster’ took over and I not only lost my winnings but also the life I’d built up – divorce followed, and so did sleeping on my parents’ settee every night for 6 months (that felt like 6 years!).
I don’t mean to write a sob story and I’m certainly not looking for sympathy but that was the biggest lesson of my life – the need for discipline.
So, picking myself I set out to create a formula that would help me build up my life again, get things back on track and everything would be hunky dory. And, it’s taken some time and some tweaking but I got there.
I started off dutch betting, and had being do so successfully for a few months when I started talking to a guy who ran a small football tipping site. Cutting a long story short, we setup in partnership and that was my first venture into life as a tipster.
From there I began proofing my selections to a larger site (but now one of our smaller competitors) and launched a service on their site, earning per week what I had previously only been earning per month.
I became more involved with that site over time, and became a part of the operational staff. However I could see a lot of missed opportunities within their business model and sadly I didn’t feel I was being listened to, and more importantly neither were the customers (remember my customer delight comments).
Speaking to a friend I’d gained during my time with the above network, we set out on our own venture, which, though initially was intended mainly as a venture into the affiliate side of things, ended up annoying the network we were working for who saw it as a conflict of interest and kindly told us where to go.
I guess this could be called a kick up the arse. We saw this as an opportunity to go all out. We no longer had to tread on eggshells and were 100% free to do what we wanted, how we wanted and when wanted.
Things went very well together, you may remember TipsterWarehouse.co.uk – it operated for around two years, grew in popularity and was well respected.
Now I’m aware that my former business partner has previously been interviewed here by Kenny and touched on the Tipster Warehouse subject. Let’s just say for the purposes on this interview that we both wanted different things and went our separate ways.
Quentin Franks who was part of the Tipster Warehouse site moved across to BettingGods.com which was launched in March of 2014. Other tipsters soon followed Quentin and fast forward two years, Betting Gods has become a registered company with members across the UK, Europe and as far as Dubai, Australia, New Zealand and the US.
I’m also delighted to have been personally featured on the Virgin Pioneers site (yes, Richard Branson’s platform for upcoming Entrepreneur’s), as well as an interview quite a while back in The Guardian regarding the rapid growth of Betting Gods in its early days.
As a brand, BettingGods.com now features at multiple UK racecourses on the jump fences, plus trackside advertising. We’ve sponsored several UK races, plus are delighted to feature monthly in key sports publications such as Racing Post, Racing Ahead and The Golf Paper.
Although a lot has happened to get Betting Gods to the stage it’s at now, there’s many exciting developments – recently, imminently and scheduled for the future.
How do you think Betting Gods compares to similar services and what do you think separates Betting Gods from the competition?
Naturally I’m somewhat biased but I believe we’re only similar in that we provide sports betting previews and tips in the way that other companies out there do, such as Bet Advisor or Betting Expert.
At Betting Gods, we don’t just provide subscription based services in the form of a free daily newsletter, or paid tipster services. We also provide several blog posts each week previewing a wide variety of sports such as horse racing festivals, the weekend’s greyhound action, upcoming tennis tournaments and golf events.
Plus for true success when betting it’s vital that people are learning new skills and building knowledge. That’s precisely why we share educational content such as how to build a betting bank, or a guide to different betting terms.
We also appreciate that a lot of people work tirelessly and are unthanked for what they do to enable us to enjoy betting. That’s why we have regular profiles of top jockeys, trainers, or a look back at our top 5 flat racehorses for example.
Above and beyond the email and blog content, we have a dedicated social media team taking care of our Facebook, Twitter and Google+ pages. Again, sharing content valuable to anybody, whether a seasoned betting professional or a complete novice, placing their very first bet.
Beyond providing such valuable, enjoyable and rewarding content we are also delighted to provide members; past, present and future with an unparalleled level of service. We are contactable by email, post and just this month we have now introduced telephone based customer support, managed by our dedicated team of customer support agents; Fran, Kerry and Lisa (thanks for a great job guys!)
Finally if I may digress slightly, we are the only major tipster platform to offer a 60 day money back guarantee. If a member isn’t happy with the profit made, doesn’t like the time of the emails, Heck, if he doesn’t like the colour of the Betting Gods logo then we’ll refund all his payments made in the last 60 days with no hard feelings and no questions asked.
It all goes back to what I said early on; customer delight. If Betting Gods’ members aren’t delighted then neither are we.
What can we expect to see in the future from Betting Gods? Do you have any big plans in the works that you’d like to talk about?”
Funny you should ask that question, for a couple of weeks now we’ve had a team of web developers working full-time on something that will massively change things for members.
With close to 50,000 emails being sent by Betting Gods on a daily basis it’s only natural that some go astray en-route, whether that be a bounced email, something slipping into the spam folder or one of Gmail’s many magical tabs.
This is an exclusive I’m revealing here; we’re anticipating the launch of the Betting Gods members area by the end of June – an online area where a member can login via the website to view his/her tips for that day. So in addition to checking emails, there’s the online access area which is very handy if you’re anything like me and receive from 200 emails (on a quiet day) to over 1,000 (on a busy day) and you just want to focus on the good stuff!
Following some extensive trials with the text message add-on option for a selective number of tipsters, we also anticipate extending that further across the full range of Betting Gods tipsters.
That’s the developments you can expect in the near future. As an evolving customer-centric company we are always listening to suggestions and genuinely do take everything on board.
So as a parting comment if I may – if any readers of the interview have something they’ve longed to see from a betting point of view for many years, or have perhaps pondered over the morning Corn Flakes then drop me an email or leave a comment below and I really will do my very best to ensure that the Betting Gods team and myself delivery exactly what you want and need for the future.
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