How you evolved into the entrepreneur you are today?

Prior to taking the plunge, I held senior management roles at two top tier online gaming brands. For many years I wanted to push the innovation boundaries but found that relatively challenging within a large corporate environment. A few years ago, together with former colleagues, we decided to take our ideas seriously and put our money and time where our mouth was.

What constitutes the central innovative aspect of DiscountIF?

Innovation theorists say that true innovation occurs when new intersections are created between industries. When you’re able to capture two mutually exclusive industries together, it’s an interesting and powerful innovation.

We’re putting that theory to the test by bringing the excitement of sports, to the shopping experience in today’s online world.

What were the main challenges you had to face to make the leap into entrepreneurship?

As I had always worked in a large corporate environment, before making the definitive move I was constantly questioning myself whether I was making the right choice. Even though I tend to assess things logically, there was a point where I had to just draw a line and just go with my gut feeling. The ideas I was working on felt right, there was a great potential to learn, the start-up world sounded too exciting and I couldn’t resist.

Would you consider Malta to be a great place for nurturing entrepreneurs? And why did you set up base in London?

In Europe, London is still the largest hub for start-ups. There’s a great mix of experienced talent, an evolving large marketplace, supporting schemes by the UK government, and investment capital. We founded the business in London first as we knew the competitive advantages it had for start-ups, but also knowing that the UK is a great market for ecommerce.

Nonetheless shortly after incorporating the business in the UK, we set up shop in Malta at the University of Malta’s TakeOff incubator. The logistics made sense: we got support by the mentors, and it also allowed us to tap into the growing Maltese market of experienced online gurus.

At present, you’ll find that entrepreneurs based in Malta are incredibly resilient. There isn’t a lot of support offered, especially in comparison to the UK, and the market locally is small. Even given these adversities Malta is still breeding successful global ventures such as Altaro, HotJar and MightyBox. The one thing I spotted in common is hard grit and determination, a lot of which is needed to make your break.

Recently you were featured as one of the companies raising capital on Seedrs. How was your experience?

Our crowdfunding campaign was a successful one, with a key new milestone achieved as the first crowdfunded start-up run by a Maltese team. For us, this was a big high and we were glad to see this heavily promoted by local media.

There is a recipe for success with crowdfunding, which involves a lot of preparation prior to the campaign launch, including reaching out to your network, preparing a communications plan and securing investors prior to launch. We ticked all of those boxes, but I have to say nothing really prepares you until you’re actually in it. It’s busy, stressful and exciting.

Our local crowdfunding platform, Zaar, is still in its early stages. It’s being led by a great guy, Karl Grech, who is keen to assist any local entrepreneurs looking to kick off their ideas. I believe the platform will find its feet initially by combining determined teams with great ideas that have appeal to a sticky and engaged audience.

Besides funding, you also used the power of the crowd to elicit suggestions on your landing pages, value proposition, and support to pitch to Richard Branson. How should other entrepreneurs use the crowd to achieve scale and impact?

The crowd is your market. They are the road on which you drive your business – the more in sync you are with them, the smoother the journey. It’s not as simple as that but it would be a lot wiser to work with and use the crowd to improve your product, rather than have them come back to you with a lot of dissatisfactory comments.

Have you encountered any user suggestions that really took you by surprise?

We’ve been working with the crowd since the start, asking them for feedback and adjusting our product based on their recommendations.

In the early days there was one demand that was repeated so often that we couldn’t refuse to deliver. Customers kept demanding to choose their own offers based on any sport or event. We rolled that out last year with really good feedback.

The other demand that has been recently surfacing is to extend our shopping experience to other stores. This feedback was a great catalyst for us to repackage our technology as a service to other brands and ecommerce sites.

DiscountIF has users in a number of countries, which makes it a very interesting case study for local entrepreneurship. What are – if any –the stumbling blocks afflicting local entrepreneurs to scale?

I think this highly depends on perspective. There is proof of entrepreneurs launching projects at scale without a lot of support. The secret sauce is usually the people and the team behind it, mixed with determination and a tiny bit of luck.

In Malta we can create a better environment with more support similar to other EU countries that can help increase the number of potential success cases. With the online gaming industry we were probably ahead of the curve when it came to legislation and support. In the start-up industry we’re playing catch-up, though it doesn’t take long to at least get on par.

And in your case, what are the main challenges to take DiscountIF to the next level?

We’re constantly growing the reach of end users that benefit from our business’ technology. At present we’re growing exponentially the number of e-commerce sites that will utilise our technology. There is a lot of travelling, networking and closing of deals involved. Our biggest challenge is getting introduced to the right people.

Are you currently looking into working with niche companies and products which users would receive cashback on?

We like brands that have exposure to sports or TV events, which is a very broad category of companies. Just have a look at the brands that sponsor the Olympics or the football World Cup to get an idea. Some actually sell sports products, others want to capitalise on the sports market to increase the exposure of their brand. We’re giving these companies a great tool to monetise and engage with these audiences.

You’ve recently launched a new promotional tool for e-commerce sites to integrate DiscountIF to increase engagement and help you with distribution. How has this been received?

So far it’s been really exciting. We’ve changed our focus from business-to-business to business-to-consumer almost entirely. We still have the discountif.com site, but we’re mainly using it to validate our concept. The widget, which can be integrated into other e-commerce sites to offer an alternative to traditional 10 per cent discounts, is what’s driving us forward. We’ve already got deals in the works with one of the UK’s biggest online sports retailers. We’re in conversations with various companies including some of the world’s largest airlines, food delivery services and online fashion retailers.