When RunLastMan.com beat PaddyPower into submission

It's not every day you beat the €9 billion company who had a head start!

 PaddyPower recently announced on Twitter, that they are not running their Last Man Standing game format online this year, despite completely overhauling the design last year, purportedly spending in excess of €1 million on the development for it with the separate Last Man Standing app.  We could have told them then it wouldn’t work, because as my Granny always said,  "there's no point putting lipstick on a pig!"

When we set up RunLastMan.com, PaddyPower were the dominant player in the Last Man Standing space.  Any search you did on Google for “Last Man Standing” returned the PaddyPower Last Man Standing platform in positions one, two and three. Despite that, we were convinced that they were doing a terrible job, for three reasons.

1. Free-to-enter only – PaddyPower ran the game as a free-to-enter competition in order to engage existing players. Having no pay-to-play option was clearly stupid.  Why would I tell my friends to enter a competition with a large cash prize that I wanted to win, if there was no benefit to them joining.  If I advertise it with my friends, I immediately reduce my chance of winning.  Despite that, Paddy Power's Last Man Standing competition would sometimes get in excess of up to 10k players a week, as they advertised it directly to their existing players.
2. Anonymous entries – Since there were up to 10,000 entrants, no-one knew who they were playing against.  Getting through an extra week didn’t really matter since you had no immediate group to discuss it with.
3. No social sharing – WhatsApp, Facebook, and Twitter sharing were largely non-existent for the reasons mentioned before.  Why would you share something that there is no incentive to share?

We went about our business rectifying all of PaddyPower's shortcomings. 

1. Pay-to-play– By making RunLastMan.com a pay-to-play format from the start, we immediately made the game worth playing amongst a group of 5 to 500 friends. There was immediately a cash prize worth paying your entry fee for, amongst any group, no matter how big or small.  This meant players wanted to share the competition page because the more people that entered the more money they could win.
2. Named players – You can see the names of each player that joins before the competition kicks off.  You can also see their picks and their picture as each round goes live.  This is incredibly engaging for groups eg. Everyone can see Tom (the Man Utd fan) picked Liverpool in Round 3 which is good fun for everyone, even Tom, assuming Liverpool win
3. Social Sharing – Our primary channels of sharing are Facebook, WhatsApp, and Twitter.  The difference being that people use them for the reasons listed above. 

With these problems solved and a €15,000 marketing budget, we have grown to have over 50,000 entrants into our Last Man Standing competitions with over 10k entrants for Euro 2016 alone. With entry fees included, this led to €550,000 in transactions.

From every metric we have, we could see we were beating PaddyPower everywhere, engagement on Twitter, Facebook and Whatsapp was through the roof for us and non-existent for them. Google was rewarding us by ranking us first for all searches. We became the location of choice for Last Man Standings, and were all set to beat PaddyPower this week in total number of players for the start of the Premiership.

Then we saw the news that they aren’t running Last Man Standings this year online or through the app!  Perhaps their merger or size is limiting them and they have to refocus, but the Last Man Standing is clearly a growth space.  We expect to get to 1 million players by the end of 2018 following existing growth rates.  That said, it might be higher seeing as our biggest competitor just threw in the towel!

Thanks for the competition PaddyPower, it has been nice beating you.