My Founder journey - a Micro Cap with a Macro market

At a friend's birthday in January 2016, talking with one of the guests, Stuart - I asked how the game which he worked for - one I personally lost whole weekends playing obsessively - ‘Football Manager’, sold the advertising space within the gameplay, the perimeter billboard space around the side of the pitch.? “We don’t sell them - and there’s no technology behind those billboards to allow us to sell them, they’re hard-coded”. It turned out there was no technology globally for brand activations in video games.

I knew the video game industry was exploding, that smartphone penetration had changed the landscape and I saw the number of ‘gamers’ worldwide was now in the billions.

Free-to-play gaming meant studios had to look to monetise through advertising, but as far as I could see this revenue was predominantly made up of games advertising within games - and none of this in the actual gameplay, just videos between levels.

The secondary viewer on Twitch/YouTube was proving that gaming was full-on entertainment - with streamers, or ‘star’ players celebrities in their own right. However, esport teams or gaming talent agencies were struggling to pave a route to profitability and were aligning with brands was full of friction.

Graphic fidelity was better than ever before and improving every year - I surmised at the time, and still do now, that this increased graphical fidelity when coupled with the ever-improving AI toolsets and lack of requirement to code, will transform entertainment and signal the beginning of the end for films as we have known them. No need for a movie star if you can watch a photo-real ‘film’ that you as the user can fully interact with and change the narrative as you see fit.

I saw three companies had attempted to bring brand advertising to gaming through a technology play, between 2003 and circa 2010. All three didn’t exist anymore. After extensive calls with the founding teams, investors, staff and players in the gaming space, it was clear all three were too early - automated trading of digital advertising (programmatic, as it’s termed) was still in its infancy back then and the gaming landscape has changed beyond recognition

Fast forward to 2023 Bidstack now has over 250 games contracted, with our technology integrated into games across platforms, genres and with a worldwide footprint. Bidstack is today an industry-standard in-game advertising and sports rights-holder brand activation and fan engagement platform.

When sharing the story of how we got here with some new recruits, I felt it was probably worth sharing to a wider audience. The journey hasn’t been a straight line, however I felt there were some interesting takeaways that I would like to pass on to anyone on their own journey of building a company from scratch.

The journey the company has been on has always felt organic. We ‘pivoted’ along the way, but I would class it more as simply refining our scope.

The beginning

If I start at the beginning, it was 2015 when the company was initially founded - the initial mission wasn’t in gaming - it was, instead, a vision to facilitate the purchase of last minute digital billboard space in the real world, for minutes and hours. For small businesses - or even individuals wanting to be creative with what’s just a huge, public screen.

I had the initial concept of Bidstack v1.0 in my previous role. Before starting Bidstack, I had been working with an old school friend - from a young age he was just one of those guys constantly hustling, a lemonade-stand, kid entrepreneur type - so, to come and work with him, outside of the personal side, was intriguing. His latest startup gave me deep exposure to fundraising, crowdfunding, the hustle at the early stage of a market - and crucially, how I would do things differently if it was my company to run.

There was one opportunity that I saw - when talking with the QSR market, it was clear to me that these businesses were overexposed when ordering their food stock ahead of time. If it’s hot, soup wouldn’t sell for example, if it’s cold, sushi would struggle to fly off the shelves. The ability to empower these restaurants to push food promotions reactively during the day on surrounding digital billboard screens near their stores, seemed like it would be helpful to them. After trialling a concept with Crosstown Doughnuts in 2014, I felt there was a standalone business in building out a platform that could facilitate that flexibility.

So, after some soul searching and with the support of a few fantastic people around me at the time, at the age of 33, it felt like employment wasn’t a sensible route forward and it was time to try and raise finance, use all the lessons a varied career had given me exposure to, and build something from the ground up.

At the time I had very(!) little money, an understanding of the crowdfunding process, but a limited Angel investment network. So, between working a few days for friends I started to formalise a Business Plan - and shared it with anyone who would give me feedback.

I settled between two ideas - an event and this opportunity/gap around I saw when at my previous company, Bidstack V1.0.

I formed a holding company - and began pitching, selectively approaching people across Linkedin - whilst getting introductions from friends, to people who may seed the initial stages of what could be the business.

The first ￡10,000 of investment came from a guy called Jason, a friend of a friend. Jason won’t mind me saying this, but he had limited knowledge on investing, startups or either of the concepts I was looking at - but, he had ￡40k of savings - ￡30k of which was spoken for, and he wanted to take a flyer on something with the remaining ten.

After a few meetings over a couple of weeks, Jason transferred the initial investment. Before he did, I had a crisis of conscience and asked him whether he could afford to lose it, explained the risks involved and assured him I would do everything in my power to get him a return. I needed the money desperately, but he was (is) a good honest person and I didn’t want to mislead him into something he may regret.??

Jason was insistent and invested.

I remember when the money hit my account - it was one of those moments, where although I was alone at the time, I could hardly contain myself. Relief, meets joy. It was real.

I knew I had to get to work immediately and do absolutely anything and everything to ensure that I gave a return to Jason, who didn’t have to back me - but in that moment, changed my life trajectory.

Over the next weeks, two more investors, Ross and Nilesh, came in for ￡5,000 each after a meeting where I somewhat tried too hard and dressed in some bizarrely shiny suit, meeting them in a bar in Camden on an overly warm day.

The event idea was dropped, Bidstack was the name I settled on - and the original holding company I formed was shuttered. Bidstack Ltd was born.

Why the name Bidstack? Well, at the previous company I’d been at we ran an event ‘Merchant Stack Live’ - obviously ‘Stack’ being a word obviously linked to the technical infrastructure and with this system being a technology play with a bidding layer at its forefront, it sounded ‘right’. The .co.uk website address was available - so, that was it.

Initially I was obsessed with the psychology of going with a lowercase ‘b’ - forcing someone to ingest the brand, which definitely worked - our brand weight carried strongly across the OOH space. But, after the pivot we dropped it, more on that later.

The initial logo design process was probably more exciting than I would have imagined - seeing a document full of logos for my newly formed company was exciting. Which to pick? Well, I went for one encompassing three lines stacked (like bids) and this lower case b. Logo and therefore company branding selected - it was becoming real.

The slogan ‘You are the Ratecard’ was initially coined, as this was a democratised bidding system, with the community setting the floor price.

I remember the first time I handed someone a Business Card with the name on it - and I was sweating, as it’s literally something you’ve created out of your head and it feels overly personal at that early stage. That changes over time.

I’m honest with myself on my strengths and weaknesses. I’m a promoter, a visionary I suppose -? I can see things others can’t, that make sense commercially. Being able to persuade people to go on a journey with you and buy-into a project you’re creating is a necessary skill for a founder, or CEO.

However, I’m no developer and from a business operation standpoint this was all new.

I wanted to find individuals who I could put around me that could help, but I knew I was low on funds and this was a net-new concept, something that hadn’t been done before - a common theme of Bidstack’s journey.

If I look at all the individuals we’ve had involved with the company over the last eight years, I would say all brought something - whether their experience and skill set enabled us to get through certain periods - but, though certain people didn’t ‘work out’ - and the churn we had as we began to scale, was quite high, even the more troublesome leavers helped mature the operational functions of the business holistically.

I personally think of it as when Bidstack was set up, it’s like a park-football team. Trying to get anyone involved at the start and turn up when there’s no place to play (no office) and limited facilities, it’s hard to attract talent. However, when the momentum builds, you climb the leagues as it were - through funding, commercial progress, increased stability - the human capital element improves. Those who were there on day 300 aren’t necessarily always the right people on day 3,000, which we’re on now. The company in 2023 is leagues apart from that of 2015, obviously.

The original team we formed - started to build out a platform we could take to Crowdcube, an equity crowdfunding platform in the UK. Just like with going on a Shark Tank, or Dragons Den - Crowdcube would be a platform to promote the company to potential customers, as well as investors - as a video is required to promote your company to would-be backers.

With a focus on sticking to my strengths, when entering the Outdoor Advertising or Out-of Home space (OOH, billboards in the real-world), I knew Bidstack would have to make a lot of noise to disrupt the incumbents and to carve out a voice in that space, given the comfy, or let’s say established way the money was flowing around.

So, prior to GDPR coming in, adding anyone and everyone I could see on Linkedin who was associated with the OOH space, before extracting their email address and uploading them into email marketing software Campaign Monitor was the main marketing platform I was using for investment and business development.

Regular email blasts were sent out and through 2015 I had a couple of the major Media Owners in the industry engaging with me, advertisers enquiring how they could use our platform and some strategic partnerships that I was working on. Enough of a story to take to a wider investment community.

I needed funding for the crowdfunding video, something that would have high production values - a video that would last, that could be used beyond just a one-off fundraising campaign and didn’t give too much of the data we were gathering away.

Again, through a friend of a friend, I was introduced to a guy, Simon who ended up, after a coffee and a number of conversations about his background and how his company had gone from startup to exit, I received a further ￡20k of investment - enough to create the video I wanted to promote the company on the Crowdcube platform.

At the time I knew the content of the video was absolutely pivotal to the success of the company. If we nailed it, it would go viral across the agencies and would attract funding from those close to that space, as well as putting a flag in the ground in the industry.

I spoke with a number of people in the space and luckily through a referral found a small video production house, Habana Creative. We brainstormed the concept and after cowriting the script alongside their talented Director, a comedic theme was settled on.

Watching auditions from actors who would play the lead role, was a bizarre experience. The Director was adamant on one guy, Jon-Paul, who was selected. The location was booked - an Art Deco building in Victoria, the actors hired and the deposit paid. One of the rules for the video, by the funding platform, was that my face had to be in the video - hence a cardboard cutout mask being as much of an appearance an employee made, but the finished result was better than anything I could have realistically hoped for.

We ‘launched’ the Crowdcube video at the O2, in their large Cineworld space. Promoting the event through email blasts, it had an attendance of about 100 people, which was a superb result - however, I did book the 900 person screen. A bit overkill.

A few weeks later, the Bidstack video and Crowdcube campaign went live. The advice we were given is to launch your investment round with a solid set of initial money committed from our own network - we didn’t have this.

We were looking to raise ￡100,000 at a pre-money valuation of ￡1,000,000 - the insanity of being a startup that’s private, your valuation is just a haggle between you and your investors, with little logic baked in. So, if we completed this funding round I was the CEO of a seven-figure valuation business, something that seemed somewhat wild at that time.

The round came with tax breaks (SEIS) and to raise we had four weeks - a ‘sprint’. When our page went live and the initial couple of thousand pounds of investment came in, it was exhilarating. But, the rest of the first week the Well dried up - no more investment dropped through.

What I was excited to see was the amount of enquiries, with two gentlemen appearing to be very serious - and one was formerly from the OOH space and now worked as a CFO in a fund. I knew the next weeks all focus had to be on converting them both.

It’s interesting how quiet your phone goes in the high pressure moments where failure would be a public embarrassment. It’s a lonely period. The advice I was getting was to drop the valuation - but I refused, knowing that the two potentially game changing investors I was in contact with, were coming back with better and better questions.

As the total raised went to ￡10,000, then to ￡25,000 by the end of the third week, it appeared to those on the outside that we were going to fail, publicly. However, with less than three days to go, the funding dropped through pushing the total over the ￡100,000 limit. I remember getting a text from a Business Consultant I’d met prior to Bidstack telling me to refresh the funding page when we were at 98% funded. There it was - 101%, he had thrown in a few thousand pounds to push it over.

I was alone when that happened - and bounced around the room like a slightly crazed football coach after a last minute winning goal. Crowdcube offered to extend the raise and we overfunded it to 137%. Incredible feeling. No surprise, the phone started to ring again. Public failure averted.

It’s funny how over time as a CEO of an investment-funded startup/scale-up you get numb to the numbers. That first ￡10,000 from Jason - and this round, at the time truly blew me away.

The funding dropped a few weeks later - and it gave me the chance, for the first time, to bring new members into the team.

The evolution of Bidstack v1.0

I’d been introduced to Francesco Petruzzelli who had his own company at the time, Whaleslide - an anonymised search engine. We got introduced by one of his colleagues, Andrew Curran - a great guy who ended up also working with Bidstack along the journey - and it became clear he was keen to help out Bidstack and get involved outside of his full-time commitments.

His developers were based out of Riga, Latvia and he had an influx of CV’s into his team out there. One of which was a guy called Maxim. I interviewed Maxim and ran through my dream for the platforms’ functionality. It was a little ambitious - a bidding platform to bid on last minute Digital Billboard space, complete with a live Data and Insights platform and a built-in design tool that meant individuals could create their own creatives through our website - a Moonpig for billboards, as it were.

Maxim jumped at the opportunity, but needed to hire a small team to work alongside him. It was clear this would take time - after his initial investigations into a spec, the build-time for a beta version would be circa twelve months, a long time I felt.

In early 2016, we had a number of different media owners come inbound asking if our platform could work for different types of media - one was for Connected TV and others included stadium operators and sports venues and franchises.

It was at this time I met with Sports Interactive and their Football Manager commercial team, following that chance encounter at a Birthday do. Not wanting to get distracted and as I was focused on bringing the OOH proposition to reality, I explored these conversations whilst our development team got to work.

What became clear immediately was that the OOH industry was full of barriers for a platform like ours - an open, transparent bidding system. Quickly the Media Owners became aware that a platform like ours, over time, would reduce the reliance and Century-old requirement for a middleman. Landlords could simply put up digital signage on their property and monetise their screens, through digitally traded open market demand.

Through 2016 we continued talking with Media Owners, ‘Poster Specialist’ advertising agencies and middleware companies who produced the software that powered these digital screens.

To help us navigate through the politics of the industry we brought in Eric Penot, formerly of JCDecaux as Chairman and David Payne, formerly of Kinetic (WPP’s poster division) to our Board.

This was the first time I’d encountered negotiations around stock incentives. We agreed a multi-year vesting period for the stock options, which gave both sub 1% of the total equity at the time, which got diluted further with the following two funding rounds we closed-out over the course of our pre-listing journey.

I would highly recommend anyone looking to incentivise any Advisor in their early stage business select a lawyer and accountant to assist with this process.

Hiring in our first UK-staff and looking for an actual office for the first time, rather than basing myself in various coffee shops across London (mainly the Hoxton Hotel in Shoreditch was the prime ‘office’ of 2015), was a surreal experience.

Now, I had a space in The Shard as a hot-desk for a few months as a trial, but fair to say a space where you can’t take phone calls, doesn’t actually have a closed office/room and going in every day felt like I was boarding a plane is akin to an expensive airport lounge, rather than a true workspace.

In mid-2016 we got serious on having our own dedicated space - and moved into a serviced space in Highbury.

Walking into an office building filled with inspiring small and growing businesses for the first time, knowing that we had our own room, that it was Bidstack’s space…was quite emotional. It’s something that I’m sure founders can resonate with. To close the door, setting up the desks - it was like moving into a home for the first time.

The initial team in the UK was made up of four guys, Nilesh - who was one of my first investors, Steve and Rollo - all good guys. Francesco’s Whaleslide moved into the office in a room adjacent to ours - and that was it, we had a space and a small team to get focused.

Every day of the week I was in the office - the weekends in particular felt calming, able to digest and plan how to tackle the following week. How to make increased noise as our tech team went about their work.

The Media Owners started to lean in more through the summer of 2016 further, with over eight signing up for our launch beta test at the end of year. The platform was coming together and a couple of the Poster Specialists were leaning in, thinking about anything from investment to something more.

Crucially, it looked like we had something to build from. A working platform that had billboard space to buy.

With the superb work Max and his team were putting together in Riga, we released our second video - this time a flythrough of how the product would work. Uploaded to Vimeo and blasted across the 20,000 people I had connected on Linkedin, we had thousands of views and had heard murmurs that the industry was becoming a split of excitement about our product and somewhat threatened by it.

The plan of attack was to launch the platform in December 2016, but we needed to keep up the marketing. Funds though, were running low.

Through 2016 our burn was increasing - and our team was expanding to over ten heads, as we ramped up developer resources. The requirement for increased funds was becoming increasingly pressing.

However, the progress was attracting lots of interest to the company. I’d signed up to a number of Angel Investor platforms.

Every evening I was out with potential investors - looking to identify one per month who would invest and support the burn, but we had a fortunate break - a gentleman by the name of Rob had seen our Crowdcube campaign and had been monitoring our progress. He felt we were sufficiently de-risked and fit his investment profile.

He and his group of colleagues wanted to have a formal presentation at their offices. By this stage I’d stopped sweating through shirts and garments at every meeting - the inability to initially regulate my adrenaline was making every high stakes meeting a damp one. So, with every single meeting being crucial to the next phase of the journey, it was time to switch attires to black t-shirts. I think at last count I had thirty. Luckily, the sweating these days has stopped and the black t’s are dropped - however, they reside in a drawer in my room, as a badge of honour (horror?).

This meeting with Rob I dropped the black tee and wore the thickest non-sweat-showing shirt I could find - and pitched to his colleagues. Looking dry at least, throughout.

After an hour of questioning, it felt clear they were closeable. The collective ticket size was circa ￡300k, so a real step change for the company again.

I went and spoke with Cris, one of the investors who came in during Crowdcube, who was the CFO for a well respected fund - he put together the term sheet for the round. Leaning into his knowledge around these matters was absolutely vital. I firmly believe a strength is to realise what you’re not good at - hire or place Advisors around you who look after these elements - and double-down on core strengths.

A robust two-page term-sheet was sent over to Rob and his team. A valuation was settled upon - ￡3.6m pre-money. I went in at ￡5m pre, after some toing and throwing, we settled on a number between both parties and a deal was done.

Rob and his team worked for an investment bank - and being prolific Angel Investors, they leaned in, offering mentorship. Rob would regularly offer a meet up after work to chew the fat over the challenges - and open-up his contact book of investments to help keep Bidstack moving forward apace and me sane.

It cannot be underestimated just how intense it is at an early stage (I say that, it’s been like that for eight years now) and it was absolutely crucial for me to have people who could understand the journey I was on.

Most of the people who I leant into in 2015-17 aren’t people I lean into now. There are many reasons for that - many fellow Founders’ companies didn’t make it - and the conversations became a little awkward.

Mainly though, you become surprised how people are happy to be around you when you’re trying to start things off, when you have very little and are starry eyed. The moment you get any traction, those who you’d like to be happy for you and you’d want to share the success with, aren’t actually as pleased for you as you’d have liked them to be. So, I found myself holding back from really being able to chew the fat over the issues I was facing. The isolation of the journey can’t be underestimated unless you evolve your friendship groups along the way.

Truly the level of sacrifice required I underestimated. The moment Jason agreed to invest, the intensity required to keep the company alive and grow it, has been like nothing else I’ve ever experienced. I suspect I’ve had less than thirty days off in eight years.

Some of the friendships have stood the test of time - and most of those are due to their own companies or prospects following a similar trajectory. Meeting up is truly relaxing, with zero ego and becomes a sharing of ideas. Putting the right advisors around you who can help you mentally accept this side of things. I feel that has been important for me.

As the funding dropped into the account the focus was on continuing marketing and raising awareness of our upcoming launch at the back end of the year.

We updated our website - to what was until recently, the most visited iteration of our bidstack.com - it was simply the first 10 seconds of the Crowdcube video with a blue tint. With the words ‘Coming soon’ - with a sign up for more information.

The number of inbounds was increasing considerably, from all business sectors. I started pushing out launch offers (discounts) and alluding to the fact we would have an ‘Approved’ list of Media Owners and ultimately resellers.

The psychology of pushing out that Bidstack was on the route to becoming an exclusive ‘club’ increased inbounds from Media Owners dramatically. There was a clear attitude from many of the Media Owners that they would sit on the sidelines and wait to see how our initial launch would go - so, I wanted to flip that psychology. As in - if you’re not in now, you’re not coming in. Luckily, it worked with enough of them.

We looked into doing another video. The previous two had been hugely successful at creating anticipation, but at that stage I was struggling to come up with a hook, a narrative - and given our burn had already accelerated close to ￡30k per month, if we were to do anything it had to be impactful.

I wanted to do something that would give again that feeling that Bidstack’s offering was irrepressible - ‘it’s coming, so get onboard’.

Then, there was an inbound to Steve on our sales team that caught my attention and ultimately transformed the companies’ fortunes and eventually led to our pivot and change in direction of travel.

When working for my former school friends’ company, I was the Head of Commercial. One of our director competitors’ Head of Sales had just left his role to go back to Norwich, where he was born and raised.

Norwich City sponsorship

Ben had landed a role at Norwich City FC, working in their commercial team. Norwich had just been relegated from the English Premier League and the season had already begun for the second tier of English football, where they had played three and won three, when we received a message from Ben.

He was enquiring if we had an interest in sponsoring the club and if we did, would we be free to come to the home game that weekend as the club’s guest. If we accepted we would head up for a meeting with Ben on the Friday and watch the game on the Saturday.

Now, I was no Norwich fan - but the fact the main character in our Crowdcube video was wearing a canary yellow suit - and Norwich’s nickname, matched their shirt colour - ‘The Canaries’, made the whole concept quite appealing. Afterall, it would look like it was always planned ahead of time - which I felt would increase the paranoia and excitement surrounding the company as we approached our launch.

However, I was certain a sponsorship would be way too expensive in anything other than maybe taking some billboard space for a game or two.

On that Friday myself, Rollo and Steve arrived at Norwich’s stadium, Carrow Road. Ben greeted us, showed us briefly around the stadium, before we settled into a corporate box to listen to the pitch for our sponsorship dollars.

The front of the shirt was available - but, without committing numbers, was prohibitively expensive as expected. This though was the 2016/17 season and the league had just given permission for clubs to have back of the shirt sponsors for the first time, also.

When Ben flicked through the presentation, complete with Photoshopped Bidstack logos surrounding the side of the pitch mid goal celebration, I was obviously getting a little excited.

When we got to the slide with a mockup of how a back of shirt sponsorship could look like, I perked up. Then we got to the price. It was a fraction of the front of the shirt - ￡75k+VAT. That was at the stage a decent percentage of our bank balance but I could immediately envision the step change it would give us. This was better than simply another video.

Immediately I said to Ben to stop presenting and we have a deal. Clearly not believing me, he kept pitching - but eventually stopped. He wanted me to sleep on it.

Calling a few advisors and a couple of the staff and friends I ran my thought process past them.

My view at the time was that the Norwich sponsorship would carry us through to mid-2017, with the team top of the league and likely to get promoted (hmm, they didn’t), Newcastle United were in the league with Rafa Benitez in charge so increased focus was on the league at that time also. We would get plenty of TV time, have a sexy offering to entertain people with, with matchday sponsorship - and a lot of wealth resides in East Anglia, so I felt we would attract at least ￡75k from Angel’s in the region (that proved correct).

The perimeter billboards around the pitch, I felt we could potentially resell or we could gift this space to our initial bidders as a ‘thank you’ for our launch.

It would also ‘look’ more expensive than we knew it was - and would give us a further premium feel. Plus, I could imagine it would peak people’s interest and give us an ice breaker in conversations - “you must be a Norwich fan, right?” - and that absolutely proved to be correct.

We watched the game - four wins from four. We headed back to London and I started playing around with the wording for an announcement that, again, I’d ‘push’ out through an email blast.

After speaking with Ben on the Monday it became clear there was an opportunity to get ourselves onto the back of the shirts for their midweek televised game against Wolverhampton Wanderers. However, they needed a logo asap and the contracts all signed, including an initial payment transferred.

The paperwork came over, we signed and returned as well as sending over our logo. I headed down to our local bank and made the initial transfer - that was a fun conversation with the bank clerk on the reason for the transaction!

Then, later in the day a concerned Ben called me stating that it was too late to get on the kit for the next game, the Kitman had already prepped the kits for the away match. I was insistent to Ben - I’d arranged a bunch of investors, friends and family to head to a pub to watch the game in Angel, where the ‘Capital Canaries’, the London supporters club come together to watch the games.

Ben asked for me to leave it with him.

He came back hours later with a suggestion - they could get the logos printed on what was basically a motorbike helmet visor strip and pretty much sticker on the logo onto the back of the shirt before getting the job done properly for the games after. Sounded premium…!? So, we gave the greenlight.

Out came the announcement of our partnership - with a photo of the kit complete with Bidstack visor strip stickered-on to the clubs’ third-kit, which paid homage to an early 90’s kit design. Being kind, I would say it collectively could have looked better.

But, we were going to be on TV - so we headed to the pub to watch the game.

The game played out to a 1-1 draw, but when watching I got a little overexcited and bought all the Norwich fans in the pub a round of drinks. The landlord, a Norwich fan, came over - enquiring about the company and after a long conversation he asked about where our business was based - I said we had a place in Highbury but we were starting to think of where the longer term home for the business would be.

He suggested a place in Stratford, a place called Plexal. He was one of only a couple of tenants at the time - and said it was worth a look. Sure enough in the following days myself and Nilesh took a look and could see the enormous potential of the area. Ultimately we didn’t move then, but a year from then it would be Bidstack’s home - and for five years after that.

If we hadn’t sponsored Norwich, we wouldn’t have heard of Plexal - the office where the company went from baby to young adult.

If it hadn’t been for Norwich, I very much doubt we would have moved into gaming and therefore the in-game advertising industry that we reignited wouldn’t exist.

We didn’t renew the following season, but we did take a one-off sleeve sponsorship for an FA Cup game against Chelsea - again, it allowed us to host investors and industry professionals, an evening that created the foundation for our relationships that continue to serve us well today.

We’ve since sponsored the club the last three seasons - initially gifting the home back of shirt sponsorship to social enterprise Badu. The club and their star players of the time continue to mentor the children Badu wonderfully supports.

Our CSR work with Badu has opened many doors for us - and the positive social impact Bidstack has made has helped attract some fantastic talent.

Badu and Norwich City worked together to take the club into the ePremier League, where with Bidstack as the front of shirt sponsors, Norwich City won the FIFA ePremier League just a year ago.

It was one of the greatest collaborations Bidstack has enjoyed in the companies’ history, working with the wonderful people at Norwich City. So, thank you to all of the people involved there.

The beta launch

As we headed towards our launch, we were getting increasingly tense - the platform was too ambitious - but the team had done a remarkable job with my lofty ambitions and as of November, all of the functionality was operating as it should.

Our own testing looked positive. Yes, a few crashes but after these were rectified, the ambitious platform was standing up.

We decided to launch for two days in December - 1st and 15th. This would allow us time to gather data between the beta dates and assess what would be required for a full platform launch, in 2017.

I remember getting up super early on the 1st December 2016. Maxim messaged me saying the website was ready to be pushed live - and was waiting for the ‘go’ sign.

We went live - and my email blast again was sent out far and wide. Rollo and Steve hit the phones and we were in business.

Some very supportive individuals sent across congratulations, gifts and a wave of positivity shot out across our networks - it was real.

We had coffee shops, soft drinks, media companies and a driving experience centre, spent with us. The advertising spaces were spread across London, in stations, by roadsides, in bars and clubs - it was whatever our initial partners were willing to give us.

Our technology wasn’t plugged directly into the screens themselves - that was proving a nightmare with the middleware software providers that ran the digital signage operating systems. Instead, there were a lot of phone calls, emails and negotiations to ensure that each of the Media Owners kept slots free for us on their screens.

We would sell the space on the 1st - and the artwork would go live on the 2nd. That was the initial proof of concept.

Yes, there were a number of house ads we ran back then also for Whaleslide and a couple of friends’ companies - but the fact we had strangers come to us and transact was incredibly satisfying.

The payment systems worked, the bidding logic held up, the data and insights pages were used - we could see, with the heat map that was analysed later.

The UI was a bit clunky, but the feedback was overwhelmingly positive.

With a bit of polishing we went live on the 15th again, this time with more advertisers as we had case studies we could promote after our first go-live.

Maxim and his team can be enormously proud of what they built. It wasn’t perfect at all, but it proved there was a concept that could be built on.

If I look today and see companies that offer a similar offering to ourselves, Hivestack (something about that name that I like…) for example, the industry we created - ‘programmatic digital out of home’ as you could class it, is growing exponentially.

The pivot into in-game advertising

So, why did we pivot? Why aren’t we in Digital Out of Home anymore? One question I get asked a lot - “Can’t you just do both, gaming and DOOH?”. Well, not really.

What had become clear was parts of the team, or those who had heavy influence over the team were quite tired after the continuous fighting against the Outdoor Advertising industry. This was hitting morale quite heavily.

We’d run circa ￡2,000, of which half of that came from unknowns, over the two days of trading. Not bad, with hindsight - but the team was tired.

The company had a big blowout party at the end of the year. What became clear is that the UK team needed looking at and amending.

Feedback on the platform flooded in - and in many ways I regret listening to some of the advice at that time - the suggestion was to reduce the ambition around the functionality, focus on the bidding side alone.

With this in mind the UK team was stripped back just to myself and at that time, Nilesh.

Sensing a weathered approach with the ongoing banging of heads with the OOH industry I stepped up my conversations with Sports Interactive through the early phase of 2017.

I’d spoken to their commercial team Tom and Lee for many months, but I wanted to see if there was a real deal that could be cut for Bidstack to sell the perimeter billboard space in their Football Manager game - and if so, what could it look like. Would it be on the existing platform? Would we look to move away from the real world of billboard advertising entirely?

2017 was a bit of an emotional rollercoaster, arguably the biggest one of all for me personally along the journey. We had just had an acceptable launch of the concept we’d received hundreds of thousands of pounds to bring to market, but there were undeniable barriers we would have to continue to overcome in the OOH space - and the morale of the team had wobbled.

Through Q1 of 2017 I kept the development team focused on the refinements to the platform we had launched over the two days of the previous year. The instruction was that we would go live again in the second half of 2017 - but the date was undefined.

The website was again placed into a ‘We’ll be back’ phase, utilising some of the case studies we had gathered.

The dialogue with Sports Interactive was getting increasingly serious - and a deal for Bidstack to exclusively sell the billboard space within their 3D match engine, was looking possible if we wanted it.

The company was again low on funds - and every month I was having to raise finance to keep the company afloat. If the conversation got technical, Francesco would join and each month funding was secured. We would do the slightly bizarre thing - opening an investment round and taking as much as 6 months+ to fill it. Not ideal for the investor - as they’re in a kind of ‘limbo’ until the round is closed, with no tax benefits or issued shares (!) for their investment.

Pitching the vision of the company when you’re considering a pivot yourself is an interesting concept - so I was floating out a wider vision for Bidstack - ‘Real billboards is an established market, but it’s finite - the virtual world could be our blue ocean opportunity’.

A lot of the investment in this phase was around trust, that I’m proud to have delivered against.

It was becoming clear the platform wasn’t going to go live again any time soon, so I took the decision to shut the UK office and go back to the coffee shops.

Saving the cash but the negative I could sense that the UK team had very much dialled-out. I knew then the only way the company could survive was to accelerate conversations with an exciting media vendor.

Tom and Lee set up a meeting with Miles, the Studio Director of Sports Interactive - and an absolute legend of the football simulation world.

In the meeting with Miles he wanted to hear about the company, what we’d done to date - I ran through the company history, how we also promoted ourselves via our association with football - and how the company understood how to transact billboards digitally better than anyone at the time.

We shook on a deal right there, a three year deal where Sports Interactive and Football Manager were the ‘landlord’ and we were the exclusive reseller, or ‘Media Owner’ - we were no longer a middle man. These were our assets to price and sell, which given the delicacies of publicly pricing the Outdoor industries’ inventory, with all of their existing relationships and differing pricing structures depending on who the buyer was, was massively exciting.

Sports Interactive and this deal would ultimately lead to the company being listed.

We left the meeting - and I took some close friends for dinner to debate a full pivot.

The upsides were:

- No competition

- No incumbent or legacy technology issues

- Gaming as a form of entertainment had exploded and was only getting bigger

- The potential upside from an investment standpoint, if we were the technology underpinning the in-game advertising, could be enormous. Far greater than Outdoor Advertising.

- The story was so simplistic to understand - our technology would control the advertising within video games. I’m a big believer that if a concept is going to cut through, it needs to be easily understood at a high level.

The downsides though were pretty obvious:

- We’d raise a lot of money to build out an Outdoor Advertising platform - how was this going to be explained to investors?

- OOH is an established category, not a single person out of the hundreds of thousands of people employed to buy media in the advertising agencies were building media plans around gaming.

- Therefore, we would have to build an entirely new industry, in-game advertising.

- This would require a LOT more funding than we’d had previously

- Would game developers lean into working with us at scale?

Crucially, I felt this was a far far sexier opportunity - the potential win multiples of anything we would achieve in OOH and I was certain game developers would adopt this on scale over time (which has proven correct) and that the agencies would eventually lean-in to gaming as a medium. Advertising follows the eyeballs - and when someone is immersed in their favourite game, the only way a brand can reach them in that moment is through the gaming application itself.

Over the coming five months, or over the summer of 2017 we worked through the finer details of the contract with Sega Europe, finally signing a three-year deal where Bidstack exclusively represented the Football Manager inventory and our technology would sit within the game itself, to control those billboard spaces. We were Media Owner and the game-side advertising technical infrastructure.

The tech team worked to evolve the platform into a game-focused platform and paused all development on the OOH product.

I met with all of the shareholders one at a time, to explain the rationale of why I had taken the decision to pivot the company into gaming - and why it was, for me, a logical evolution of the business.

Many investors were extremely supportive. One backer though had a defeated and somewhat patronising conversation with me - “I’m glad you found a niche for your product” - clearly never expecting to see any return going forward.

We had evolved from selling real world to virtual billboards. Virtual Out of Home is how we initially coined it, to soften the transition to external viewers.

Again, blasting out to the same set of followers of Bidstack V1.0 the announcement was made that we were moving into gaming and we were to sign an exclusive agreement with Football Manager as our launch title.

Our first competitor formed their website the next day. Game on.

The concept was extremely well received - but I received a number of messages, one from the CEO of a very well known mattress company who were disappointed as they wanted to use our OOH platform to plan a London-wide upcoming campaign. A similar message came through from the Marketing Director of a well-known broadband provider and entertainment company.

However, the decision was made, gaming was our future.

Looking out into the future I could imagine how the technology would evolve eventually to change for the secondary viewer also, watching a game playout on YouTube or Twitch - with the advertising changing for each viewer, targeted to them.

The technical and commercial possibilities were getting me excited (and actually are again as I write this).

When we finally signed the contract with SEGA Europe, when the completed document came over, I just sat looking at the SEGA logo. The emotional connection, the nostalgia, the fact that a company I’d created was now contracted with such a brand and a game like Football Manager - an institution, was just pinch-yourself stuff.

Through the summer of 2017 I’d been doing my research and started adding advisors from the gaming industry, one, Nav had recommended I talk at an event for Space Ape Games in their London office. The theme was around attracting brands to esports and gaming as a whole.

I would be presenting to a couple of hundred people and considering the Football Manager contract had been signed some three weeks days before the event, I didn’t exactly feel like I would be the most authoritative voice in the room, but I knew I had to do it, if nothing more for continued market research.

The event was organised by the UK gaming body UKIE - and speaking alongside Bidstack were esport event organisers, large gaming studios and publishers and former industry heavyweights. Now, I’m not an enormous fan of public speaking - well, the build up to it, the act itself isn’t that bad, but the thought…dear oh dear.

Anyway, up went the first few speakers - and the presentations were polished for the most part, but I couldn’t get over how half the room was still disrespectfully muttering amongst themselves rather than fully engaging in silence.

It was my turn - I hate that walk to the front - and around I turned. Off I started with the pitch, a brief history on who Bidstack were and why we decided to move into gaming. What we saw in OOH and the way the money flowed around through the agencies and adtech partners across the traditional formats in advertising.

What struck me and the moment I referred back to for years when times were challenging, was how silent the room was. No muttering. Total engagement. The gaming industry didn’t know how to attract brands into gaming. That was clear.

The audience were looking to Bidstack for the answers - and though I won’t for one moment claim I had them at that time, I knew immediately I had a greater idea than the others in the room.

The queues after to talk lead to some incredible interactions and contacts, with former EA employees, influencers, studios, esport teams and developers. It was the moment that made me realise more than any time before we really had something.

Now all we had to do was figure out precisely what we needed to build, how much money we needed to crack the space (a lot, I knew that), how to get the media agencies engaged in this medium and knowing there was immediate competition, we would have to sprint.

To save money, I stripped the team in Riga back as we investigated precisely what was required in the build process, now we could get under the hood of a game engine for the first time. I hired a couple of sales and marketing folk to again ensure we were drawing leads towards us.

Supportive investors

We took a small office in the building the Capital Canaries’ CEO/landlord recommended, Plexal over in East London. Luckily we did, as I got a bit of a break when in the office alone just before Christmas.

As we went through December, Fran and myself went for lunch with two guys who were stating they were going to put money in to the business - and as the closing-rate for every investor so far had been a nigh-on 100% hit-rate, I was getting increasingly frustrated that we couldn’t convert these guys. They shook on a deal, but kept going quiet.

It became clear these were timewasters, but despite the fact we’d had supportive follow-on support from the likes of Rob (group of investors) and Simon (one of the 2015 backers), the well looked quite dry as investors were put-off by our ‘high’ valuation after a pivot into gaming.

Sat in the office with the door open, other Founders would occasionally come and knock on our door and have a brief sharing of notes and a chat. One, Pete, came in and spoke to me “James, I’m seeing one of your friends for lunch today”. “Oh yeah, who?” I asked, “Mark”.

Supportive investor Rob had come across Bidstack on Crowdcube before ultimately investing in us, whilst doing research for one of his other investments that was a Content Management System for digital signage. Mark had taken investment from Rob - and we’d previously met up a few times on the OOH journey, primarily to share notes and see if there was anything we could do at some stage.

Mark was (is) a good guy. So, obviously I wanted to catch up with him - so joined Pete for their drink and catch-up. I thought I could have a good rant about these time wasters I’d come across.

It felt quite heartbreaking that we had come so far as a company and now when I was in possession of a potentially life changing contract, I hadn’t found investment and unless one of the previous backers was willing to really dig deep, we were realistically in a bit of trouble. But, I never allowed myself to think that - and kept going to the office every day, alone if necessary to just focus and outreach and spread the word.

Mark was in very good spirits - and asked how I was doing, after he saw the SEGA deal, congratulating me. I was obviously ecstatic we’d got that deal over the line, but I told him about the funding situation.

He immediately came back and said “I’ll invest, how much do you need?” - he had just sold one of his companies, the property business he’d told me about some half a year before. I was ecstatic for him and a little taken aback at his kind offer.

Within one drink he’d agreed to back Bidstack and said he knew people who would also come in. The relief…I can’t quantify.

Over the coming days I pitched to more of his contacts and over the Christmas and New Years period the funding came in. I can’t thank Mark and his friends and contacts enough. Along with Rob and Simon - who were huge backers for me in the early days, along with a guy called Paul who worked with us for a short while, they got us through the real funding hardships.

Heading into 2018 we had some funding to see us through until the summer, though I was well aware we needed considerably more firepower and more experienced talent to drive us forward.

Conversations had begun with some Venture Capital funds and a couple of Family Offices - one of the latter was progressing rather well. At this stage our team was extremely light, it was predominantly our early investor Simon, Francesco and myself going into these conversations - with a lot of assumptions due to an extreme lack of data.

Growth funding

The concept was landing - but again, I was fortunate that the friendship I’d built with the commercial team at Sports Interactive would lead to our funding break, which ultimately lead to Bidstack Ltd being ‘acquired’ and listing via a ‘Reverse Takeover’ on to the London Stock Exchange, AIM market.

Tom at Sports Interactive was aware we were looking for funding - and he’s one extremely well connected guy, I think he once told me his stag-do had over one hundred guys on it, which is quite some feat. He messaged me one afternoon in early 2018, when he was out for drinks with a lawyer friend of his.

I left the office and headed into central London, meeting with Tom and Patrick, the lawyer. They’d had a good afternoon from the look of it. Both had been discussing ways that Bidstack could access funding through Patrick’s contacts - and immediately he had a couple of suggestions.

One route was to remain private and take investment from a super-high networth individual, a former shareholder of a video game business that had recently gone through a lucrative exit.

The other was a route I’d not considered before, to go Public. I’d not heard of a Reverse Takeover before, but the concept was straightforward enough. Bidstack would be ‘acquired’ for shares-only and backed into a dormant listed vehicle.

Kin Group were the owners of this shell; it had previously housed Fitbit’s rival, Fitbug, who had run out of funds in an endless legal battle with their Californian competitor.

The company was put into administration, shareholders offered a CVA and net-new investors had injected circa ￡1 million into the vehicle. The owners of the shell I heard had seen over seventy companies and couldn’t find anything appropriate to list. I was also told they were low on time to get a transaction away.

Tom and Patrick left me with the bill to pick up (a fair exchange for the intros) and Patrick assured me he would come back to me next week, if I can get him a deck over asap.

The deck was forwarded to Patrick and after his initial outreach to both the Angel and Kin Group, myself, Francesco and Simon went for a meeting in his law firms offices in the City.

Patrick made it clear the deck needed a bit of work, but the initial responses had been very encouraging, particularly from Kin. To his credit he ran through all of the pro’s and cons to being a listed company so early in a companies’ existence - I would say most of his predictions have borne out.

A few points were attracting me toward the listing route:

- We had pivoted, this was a route-out, an exit for those who didn’t believe in the gaming story

- Access to capital through the public markets would be far greater for an early stage business

- Control - rather than have a Venture Capital style board makeup which could lead to the management team being diced up too early, whilst getting initial traction

- The story - we believed firmly the market would understand what we were trying to achieve and would support the stock

- Liquid options - being able to offer liquidity with the share options we were offering both staff and advisors meant we would be able to attract a higher calibre of talent

- Acquisitions - ability to acquire-in companies using the paper value of our stock, if we were going to look at inorganic growth strategies

- The CLN - a convertible loan note, ie. a cash injection after light due diligence was extremely appealing. This would be available to us in a few months and would allow the business to focus through the summer and build-out a team

The various amends were made to the deck and it was sent over in final form to the group behind the shell. They wanted to meet, so a meeting was set up at our lawyers’ offices.

At this phase we hadn’t paid Patrick anything - he would make his fees post-transaction. A percentage of the transaction value.

The route to listing

The meeting came about and three representatives of the shell met us. Myself, Simon and Francesco pitched. Questions came back around projections, business modelling, pathway for the go-to-market - among others, but after a couple of hours they left. Patrick came back, sat down with us and confirmed our thoughts - they were keen.

Over the coming days Patrick got a flavour for what a deal could look like - follow-up meetings were booked in, one at our offices and another again at law firms.

After meeting more of Kin’s wider Board and advisors, after their initial questions had been answered, it became clear both sides had a desire to progress to a deal. Again, this meeting was mainly around the business model, the market, why we felt gaming was a huge opportunity for brand advertising etc. It landed.

Myself and Francesco again met with Donald and John a couple of days later, two of the three initial guys from the initial Kin meeting - Donald was the Chairman of the shell as well as their lawyer, whilst John acted on behalf of Chris, who had identified and sought the Kin Group shell initially.

This time it was all about the deal size for the transaction of Bidstack. We shook on a deal subject to due diligence and outlined a timeline for the transaction - and it was tight, this meeting was in April 2018 and we were looking to be listed by September. So, a quick turnaround.

The initial due diligence lists were sent across over the coming days and weeks - we were told this was ‘light’ but I can assure you it felt anything but, at the time.

Added to this, Bidstack had functioned without a full-time CFO throughout our journey to that point. Sure, we’d used external accounting firms, but the process of running through all of our transactions and financials to date was not the work of a moment.

After weeks of incredible work from a small team frantically providing all of the requested data, we sat down with the acquiring party and agreed a figure for the sale of the company - ￡6.8m. We agreed.

The Convertible Loan Note was deployed into the Bidstack Ltd account in June and ￡400,000 was deposited into our account. I went for breakfast that morning when it dropped in and again, the relief and excitement was palpable.

That cash injection meant we could get back on the hiring trail and accelerate our growth of the day to day business.

July 2018 was an interesting month. The bank account looked rosier, we had signed up a couple more titles following the deal with Football Manager and we had a number of candidates looking to join the company.

So, mostly positive. When I say mostly, I won’t go into huge detail, but we had a couple of the UK team try and use the due diligence process as an opportunity to place demands of the company. When they weren’t met, they quit.

Realising that with such a small team this would make a big impact, at the very least from a perception standpoint, that evening we realised we had to come up with a team that was immediately investable.

Overnight Francesco called his Whaleslide team up, requesting all bar two to immediately transition over to Bidstack the following day.

One member of his team, Lewis Hadley, was out having a fantastic time watching England beat Colombia when he got the call, asking him to be in at 9am the next morning.

Lewis arrived the next day, feeling a little tender, as Will Stewart (Creative) also joined and got to work - zero initiation required as they’d worked in the office next door at the previous office location. Both good guys who immediately defused what was a tense environment. I’m delighted Lewis and Will still work with us today - as Marketing and Creative leads for the group. Both have done an outstanding job in making Bidstack appear as it does today, an industry-standard company.

Whaleslide’s Riga based development team immediately switched to Bidstack - giving the company a robust technical division, adding to our already talented group.

One good egg we did already have in place, was another Rob, Mr Dagwell - who joined us straight from a tennis club bar, joined as a Junior at the end of 2017. His obsession with gaming meant he asked for an intro from a consultant we were using at the time. We gave him a role as a junior sales guy.

Rob D joined the business and gave five years of service, before recently leaving for an unarguable career opportunity -? it was quite an emotional event all around.

Rob and Paul, an Angel investor who worked briefly at the company to help in 2018, assisted in running an event we put on in conjunction with Norwich City, the first global Football Manager esport event.

The Football Management World Esport Championship is how it was coined. The thought process behind this was to ensure that Bidstack was viewed as friendly-fire by the gaming community. How many advertising companies are heralded by the people they’re targeting? Not many.

The thought at the time was to reinvest our initial revenues into a prize pool for an esport competition. Utilising our relationships with one of our then investors, who created the gaming show Insomnia, held at the NEC, running the tournament on Football Manager, reinvesting any sponsorship revenues back into the prize pool and tying up a prize with our friends at Norwich City could be a win for everyone as we established our presence in in-game advertising.

At the time I said: “We’ve created this tournament to unearth the best manager in the virtual world - and then bring that person into the real world of football management. We wanted to create a new esports tournament to prove esport skills are transferable”.

Ben at Norwich had been on the phone in early 2018 asking if we would be interested in sponsoring the 25 year anniversary of the game between Norwich City and Inter Milan, with both of their veteran/’legends’ teams playing it out in a charity match. At that time we were short of funds (common theme) but I felt we could use this game as a platform to give something back to the Football Manager community.

The prize was going to be a cash sum of ￡25,000 and the winner would also get to experience being a football manager for a day in real life, co-managing Norwich in the charity game, alongside Mike Walker, Norwich’s most successful manager of recent times.

We locked down a cheap space in the gaming event hall, signed a deal with Norwich and began the promotion.

This was an unofficial event as getting approval from SEGA for the use of the Football Manager ip would take a while, but Sports Interactive provided technical and marketing support.

The event was promoted out through various channels and was picked up by mainstream press. Thousands of entries piled in. To whittle down who would be selected, we trialled each of the entries to create a video on why they should get to manage Norwich City for a day.

The quality of entries was superb - from the US, Brazil, Australia, mainland Europe and UK we had a truly global influx of videos. There were 64 spots and luckily we received 62 videos…everyone who went to the effort of putting one together, got an entry.

We had one father and son combo fly in from the outskirts of Sao Paulo to participate. His Mum and Dad were saving to take their son, Henrique and daughter for a trip to Europe. Henrique’s entry into this event was too good an opportunity for them to turn down, though they hadn’t saved up enough at the time for all four to travel - so father and son headed to the UK.

The buzz between the players was absolutely superb to see. We’d created a profile for each player on the event’s website, Rob D even hosted a streamed ‘draw’ of the groups prior to the event at the NEC.

A WhatsApp group was formed to create some pre-event camaraderie and when the day itself arrived, we had a film crew on site to film the whole event. Those who took part in this incredible tournament are still friends to this day and support Bidstack, quite some feat.

The winner ended up being a guy called Dan Fry, who was presented with his oversized cheque by Cherno Samba - a football player who in the game was all-conquering, whilst in the real world had a less stellar career.

Dan would be in the dressing room at Norwich City just a month later, giving a team talk prior to Norwich City’s Legends taking on the likes of Javier Zanetti, Jurgen Klinsman and Marco Matterazzi. Dan and Jurgen had a memorable interview after the game, crystallising what was a successful marketing plan to bring the gaming community closer to our company.

I digress. Back to the listing. We had a team we could actually work with - and added in a Head of Sales and a programmatic client services expert, to give us clearer direction on how the platform we were building needed to operate.

The due diligence concluded successfully.

Raising funds

Now, it was on to the roadshow - where we would present the company to Fund Managers across the City to see who would be interested in investing on the listing of what would be Bidstack Group PLC.

A new deck was put together now alongside our acquirers, Kin. The moment the CLN was agreed and sent over, both Kin and Bidstack were committed to getting this transaction through - so many long evenings were spent ensuring the narrative was crafted as cleanly as possible to present to Institutional Investors and Private Client Brokers.

I remember turning up to my first pitch - and the nerves I admit, got the better of me. I stupidly attached my emotions to the moment, and I considered the gravitas of the process I was in and the impact of what a successful meeting could do for the company. Pitching as a team, my teammates helped us through that one.

Going forward though we got into a rhythm, pitching the story clearly across an intense schedule, with the Kin team sat on our side of the table as we started to build a book of interest.

We closed out the round with ￡4.279m of funding. ￡779,000 of which was to pay-out a number of the original shareholders, who made a tidy profit each on their investments.

With the funding now secured and the listing document completed after many hours of work from the Chairman of Kin, myself and Francesco were invited to an office in St Pauls to conclude the signing of the completion paperwork. It was a surreal and exhausting experience, reading through and signing piles of papers as the company was officially sold ready for listing.

All we had to do now was wait for the listing itself - oh, and run the day to day.

The company listed in September 2018.

Now, I want to split and talk about the business and life on the Stock Exchange as a micro cap - it’s a rollercoaster and something very different to anything myself or those in the day to day action of the business had experience prior.

Life on the AIM market, being Public

We’re now in our fifth year of being listed - and I would say now obviously I’ve got a clear concept of how everything works.

Bidstack Group PLC is listed on the Alternative Investment Market - a market designed for small to medium sized businesses, looking to utilise the access to capital of being a listed stock.

Bidstack doesn’t have direct relationship or dialogue with ‘AIM’ itself, we have a Nominated Advisor (a NOMAD), a financial services firm that vets the suitability of our firm for a public listing, acting as our regulator.

We have stayed connected with the same NOMAD throughout our listing, which is a sign of strength between our Regulator and the Board of Directors here. If at any stage a NOMAD resigns because it is uncomfortable with a business it represents’ actions, the companies’ shares are suspended from trading.

Keeping that relationship strong is absolutely vital for the company.

Unlike the days of working directly with investors and sending out the Term Sheets ourselves, being listed we have a Broker, an Investment Bank. The Broker will organise the meetings with the Fund Managers of the Institutional Investors or Private Client Brokers who wish to discuss investing into your stock.

The Broker has a dedicated Analyst who writes about the company. The Analyst will interview the management and put together their own forecast and outlook on the business, which is independent of the company. This is designed to give Institutional Holders in particular a guide on how to measure the success of the company.

Again, keeping your Broker close increases the likelihood of successful capital raises.

Being a growth company on the Public Market and having to report every six months, with a full audit carried out by a third party Auditor once a year, is again a challenge.

By the end of 2018 the business had brought in a small sales team, the beginning of a product, client service, marketing and an expanding development team.

We ended the year signing Codemasters, also at the time a listed company, as a client - with their DiRT Rally franchise giving us reach into the racing genre.

However, the shares were trading down from when we floated. The Advisors at the time were keen for me, as CEO, to get out and sell the story on to the Trader podcasts.

I followed the advice and conducted a number of expansive interviews throughout 2019. I remember the first interview, which was pre recorded and the impact it had on the share price within an hour or so of the podcast going live.

Up went the valuation of the company - double digit percentage movements, at this stage the naivety was pretty clear looking back. Watching the share charts almost hourly was a regular occurrence, which is all very silly and short-term.

At the time though it was addictive to share more - it looked like the company was having a positive impact from the expansiveness of my views on the new emerging in-game market and what I felt it could mean for the company.

Obviously your competition is listening, making notes and being able to learn from the shared strategic findings and thought processes. All very silly oversharing so much.

The share price rocketed through 2019 - the valuation went from ￡10m to nearly ￡80m in months. All from excitement and day trading.

Through 2019 Bidstack in the day to day was making stronger progress, hiring in another guy called Lewis, who gave one of the best presentations in an interview I’ve ever seen, if not THE best. He laid out clearly his plans for the company, how he would get the advertising agencies engaged, and how they needed to set up gaming divisions focused around this inventory.

He listed who he would go to and what the pitch would be. How the flow of our programmatic plumbing or infrastructure would need to be connected.

Expectations

It was clear we would need a lot more time but I was aware the market wouldn’t wait for us.

At this stage, in the summer of 2019 the company engaged an M&A consultant and we pointed them at a target.

The company we identified was also involved with gaming and had a clear strategic fit with our vision of becoming the underpinning technology and monetisation engine for the gaming industry.

Contact was made, the top line was in the tens of millions of pounds, with a healthy EBITDA, which would have made the combination profitable.

Initial conversations went very well, Heads of Terms were signed and both businesses were already having detailed conversations of what the enlarged group could look like.

In the end, the deal didn’t get done.

At the time it was frustrating due to the underpinning value it would have brought the company in terms of revenue and commercial opportunity. But, to be honest, with hindsight I’m unsure what the enlarged group ultimately would have looked like over time.

Bidstack would have vanished and the technology that was going to take time to build would have been pushed aside, I’m pretty sure, as earn out targets would have been chased.

Fast forward to where we are today, Bidstack’s core proposition is edging closer and closer to the commercial breakout we always envisioned, something that would not have happened in an enlarged vehicle. Ultimately, the prize for what we are building today I believe to be far far greater and the evidence of that is beginning to be played out.

But back to 2019. When the acquisition fell apart the company was in a tough situation.

The company continued to invest heavily in expanding a team. For every Lewis, we had the occasional poor performer, or someone simply who wasn’t the right fit. Our churn in this period was high.

The culture was changing as we went from being almost like a family unit into something that would be predominantly ‘strangers’. I’m immensely proud of how we’ve improved this over time. The diversity of talent and skill sets in the company is worlds apart from where we were back in 2019 - and a lot of that is down to a far more measured trusting culture across the business.

Approaching the end of 2019 we identified one large committed spend opportunity with a client, a large agency holding group. Again, we spent several months discussing a deal.

The deal though, just like the acquisition, failed to come to fruition.

This left the company enormously exposed. There were ‘market expectations’ from our Broker at the time. With this deal landing, we would have comfortably met those, but without it, we were left in a position where we had no choice than to put out what is called a ‘Profit Warning’ - not a good announcement.

We had to disclose, the moment it became clear the deal was not possible to close within our financial year, that we had no alternative route to hit our guidance.

The company was hit hard from the public market side.

Organic growth

In January of 2020 we had an all hands meeting - and we were quite clear that the company now would have to embrace a purely organic strategy.

We were very honest with one another over the likely targets for the year ahead and what the focus areas would be.

Lobbying the advertising agencies, working alongside the programmatic trading desks and rapidly expanding our gaming portfolio.

Then in 2020, the big break for the industry of in-game happened. With Covid spreading across the world and lockdowns enforced across the globe, gaming as a medium suddenly had the spotlight thrust upon it.

People weren’t outside in the streets, so Outdoor Advertising took a huge hit, Sports and Entertainment took a big impact, again due to people being highly restricted in terms of what activities were allowed at the time.

Hours of gameplay through our network of titles spiked. The surge in gaming led the British Government to communicate with our team requesting for an in-game messaging campaign to promote a ‘Stay Home, Save Lives’ instruction.

With our improving technology, we could target gamers now by geo, age and gender - the campaigns were launched and got global coverage. Bidstack and in-game were becoming a talking point.

Inbounds came through from agencies, from the same Poster Specialists we’d spoken with years before. The Sports and Entertainment teams reached out. There was infighting amongst the agency groups over which department would handle the in-game leads.

It became clear now was the time to increase the pressure considerably on the IAB and MRC - the governing bodies for the advertising industry.

Gaming was beginning to cut through and though it wasn’t palatable for a global pandemic to mean we had our big break, I wanted to ensure our team reacted with speed.

The first gaming divisions were beginning to form. Forwarding to the present day, the quality of the individuals now in-seat in these agencies on the gaming side is a different level to what we’d seen before. The former Esports Lead of EA Sports, for example, is now Head of Gaming at Dentsu Aegis - that simply would not have happened had gaming not been thrust into the spotlight due to the pandemic.

Campaign sizes started to increase - from ￡2-5,000 per campaign we started to see numbers in the UK expand to five figures and our biggest campaign of the year touched six figures.

Crucially the company hit its guidance for the year and the company completed another successful fundraise.

At this stage we’d hired Lisa, who came from WPP, where she was Head of Investor Relations, prior to that she had herself been a successful analyst in the City - the pitch we made to her was clear: stop writing or justifying companies’ actions, come and build a company.

Her task was to make the business far more attractive for longer-term investment, looking for immediate efficiency improvements and crucially work to improve the story we had for Institutional and Strategic Investors. The efficiencies and improved collaboration and communication across the growing company would in time allow the company to forecast forward looking progress with greater accuracy. Not easy when creating a new market, with net-new technology.

The businesses cap table - the shareholder list - was overly heavy with ‘Retail’ Holders. A percentage of day traders is fine, but when the overwhelming majority of the cap table is made up of Retail, it makes it very difficult for the companies’ Market Cap to reflect the true value.

We wanted longer term holders who would see the potential of the business a few years from now, who would invest with patience. We could see we were heading down the right path, but we needed a more mature voice out in the market following 2019’s oversharing.

Both in 2020 and 2021 the company put out more detailed plans on our companies’ goals and ambitions - using the front-end of our published Annual Accounts as a ‘brochure’ for the business, showcasing what our companies’ goals were going forward. Ultimately, this helped attract the attention of a strategic investor.

Through 2021 the companies’ human capital churned as the business struggled to deal with the changing governmental guidance. Onboarding new members of staff fully remotely was a challenge in a fast paced environment like ours, particularly culturally - trying to fully vet someone remotely, onboard them and integrate into a unit was something I’m sure everyone felt.

Raising finance fully remotely was a challenge. Zoom call after Zoom call lacks personality but we did land our first Institutional Investors in 2021. To land this investment we had to finally start to share our plans for a sports-focused offering, Bidstack Sports as it’s recently been announced.

I remember one afternoon full of presentations, I was struck down with Covid and between calls I would be sleeping, would wake, have as much water as I could stomach, power through a pitch and then immediately collapse.

Same thing happened the night in which the round was finally being wrapped, both Lisa and Donald, our Chairman, were calling me late into the evening and eventually I had to say I couldn’t physically stay awake much longer so at least needed to close my eyes for a few hours.

The deal was concluded and the company was funded into 2022.

Our reseller network was beginning to expand considerably in 2021 - with many companies approaching Bidstack wanting to resell our gaming network to advertisers. The enquiries came from across the world and in some instances were small businesses being formed to solely sell in-game inventory.

By this time we had over sixty staff across the group. We wanted the company to focus on a number of areas, but we were thinly stretched.

In October 2021 we had contact from an advertising technology group that was looking to list on the Dutch Euronext exchange. They had an interest in representing our inventory out to the agencies as an exclusive reseller of our contracted gaming inventory.

For us to consider this we required a committed revenue guarantee. We struck a deal that was announced on the 17th December 2021, days after we secured a title for exclusive access to the in-gameplay, in-stadium spaces within a? AAA publishers’ sports franchise.

With this games’ particularly strong footprint in the US we were keen to have a global footprint and Azerion, we were assured would provide this.

The partnership saw campaigns run across Europe throughout our advertising network, particularly at the backend of 2022. Some of the salespeople at Azerion, on the ground, did a very strong job in their territories and the work they did as individuals we’ll always be grateful for.

Sadly though Bidstack didn’t receive payment for the services in keeping with the contract and heading into 2023 we are pursuing the business through the Courts. So, I won’t say much more here, for obvious reasons.

Setting up for a big future

2022 as a year for the company was enormously successful for a number of reasons.

The contract with Azerion focused the teams on other areas, in particular focusing on:

- Pushing the IAB and MRC hard to recognise and publish measurement standards in in-game advertising. Solidifying the industry

- Signing and rolling-out our first ‘Licensing’ partner - as in a company licensing our technology only. Onboarding games and driving demand independently of Bidstack.

- Launch our Bidstack Sports division - we’d identified a use-case for the technology for sports teams and leagues

Additionally, through the year when it became clearer that Azerion would relieve territories back to Bidstack’s group of resellers due to a lack of boots on the ground in certain countries, we expanded our reseller networks across the MENA, APAC and India regions.

I’m delighted that we hit all of our objectives above.

In-game is now becoming a recognised advertising category, the impact of which will see automated revenues increasingly dramatically over the coming 12-24 months. This added to the fact that gaming-specific agencies are now being founded across the globe, going to brands directly to control advertising budgets, our technology will ultimately underpin and run those budgets through the gaming community.

The worlds’ largest advertising agencies now have gaming specific divisions and product offerings - mirroring the same process we saw with OOH and every other major advertising format. Gaming is maturing in the advertising landscape and will rapidly grow across media plans from here.

In mid-2022 when it became clear that the US market needed to be invested-in to maximise the growing opportunity in the worlds’ biggest advertising market.

We had a break, Jude O’Connor who ended up joining in August of 2022 and Camila Franklin a month later, brought with them a team they’d led to a $400 million exit to Digital Turbine, with AdColony.

Our executive leadership team today has recently been bolstered by the arrival of Thomas Bullen, the former CFO of AdColony also.

The team that we have in place today is truly world class. Sitting at just under eighty heads, we have the former CEO of PlayStation Europe, David Reeves as our Chairman, as well as the guy who managed the global studios at EA for decades, Bryan Neider on our Board.

In 2022 we closed-out our first strategic investor, Irdeto. Doug Lowther, their CEO, resides on our Board also - and the clear collaborative opportunities we have with their company, who are the leading anti-cheat middleware out in the gaming market, are extremely exciting for us as we pollinate our technology across studios.

The Bidstack Sports offering is something we’re extremely excited about here. We realised very early on that a prohibitive cost for many gaming studios large and small to enter the world of sports titles, is buying the team and league licences, to make the environments feel and look real.

Adding to that we were having inbounds from motorsport teams, European and NFL teams wanting to be able to control the advertising messages within their stadiums - and they believed having a seat on our platform would allow them to do that.

Through our platform they can change the messaging of their existing partners, on a per-territory or language basis. Perhaps also targeting age or gender - this can empower teams to be far more creative with the commercial deals they carve out for their virtual world assets.

With the data and insights we can provide to sports teams and franchises, we can enable teams or franchises to see for the first time, who is playing as their IP - and also if they’re playing as their IP across many games.

Through our technology, the teams can be reactive and push out messages at highly emotive times - if the franchise has just won the Championship, race or a match in the real world, they can immediately change the content in the gameplay to reflect that. Pushing limited time offers, or bringing in net-new commercial partnerships.

The versatility of the platform we have built excites me and the team enormously.

As we look out into 2023 and beyond we can see that the company has a clear opportunity to be the Industry-leading in-game advertising technology, whilst transforming sports rights in the virtual world.

I hope the above has been interesting and / or useful to anyone looking to build out their own business, or simply I hope it was half entertaining as a read. It’s not been a straight line but with the team, market opportunity and timing, I feel we have an extremely exciting future ahead of us as we chase down and push through an initial $100 million revenue target in the coming years.

Building something from scratch has to be an obsession, but there’s nothing in my life that has been more rewarding than seeing what we’ve collectively built together. Thank you to everyone who has helped on the journey so far.

Bidstack - sure, we are a Micro Cap for now, but with gaming and the virtual world, we're in a Macro market. The future looks very bright.

Is it the dream? Potentially.