The idea....
Back in 2004, I did a series of presentations at Financial trader events.
My role was to explain what I was doing on betting exchanges, basically trading them like financial markets. It was a new and novel concept and appealing to people trading the stock market.
In the 90’s I’d been trading a lot on financial markets, but getting access to the same tools the professionals use was very difficult and pricing was a severe barrier. As trading on Betfair took off there some rudimentary bits of software available, but they were nothing like I was using in financials.
I knew if I could create something similar to things I saw in financial markets, I could really take my betting and trading up a level.
Bet Angel was that creation!
Getting established
The problem I faced was choosing whether I coded something myself, or if I got somebody in to help. I was like a kid in a sweet shop in the markets, so I figured it may be better to get somebody on board to do this sort of stuff. So I started canvassing for interested parties.
By coincidence, somebody who attended a presentation emailed me and asked if I had thought about creating software. We immediately hit it off, and Bet Angel was born.
Curiously it wasn’t called Bet Angel at first. It was called something else, but the domain was not available. Bet Angel, the second choice, was available and that’s how it got its final name.
I was keen to ramp up development quickly, and that would require somebody full-time on the coding. So we figured that if we made Bet Angel available to purchase, it may give us enough money for a full-time developer, maybe.
As a result, the first copy of Bet Angel was sold in February 2005.
Where we are now
Incredibly it’s now two decades since Bet Angel was launched. So much has changed since then.
No sooner had we released the first version of Bet Angel, than we started fielding requests for updates and improvements. Fairly soon after launch, it was obvious that Bet Angel would be driven by our customers.
What original was created as tool for me to be able to achieve all things I wanted, quickly transformed more into a customer driven model.
That is a process that has continued continuously since then. If you visit our release schedule on the forum, you will see that we keep on moving Bet Angel forward: –
https://forum.betangel.com/viewforum.php?f=46
Some of this, like the integration of live racecourse data from TPD, came through ideas we had and often takes more than just a bit of coding to bring to you. But a lot of features and enhancements are suggestions and recommendations from customers. For that, we are very grateful.
The next version of Bet Angel will include a mixture of clever things you haven’t thought of yet and a range of customer suggestions.That wouldn’t be possible without your support, suggestions and, of course, funding which we continue to plough into new features.
And for that, we are very grateful.
Bet Angel customers, we love you!
