“Time is money”, as the saying goes, and it’s a sentiment matched bettors know all too well. Every minute spent searching the internet for bookmaker offers and trying to find and calculate the best odds is time that could be spent actually doing offers and – as everyone knows – the more offers you do, the more money you make! This is exactly how the idea for OddsMonkey first came about. Software developer (and creator of OddsMonkey) Paul, knew that he could build something which would automate the process, saving time and effort, and ultimately helping matched bettors to increase their profits.

I sat down with Paul to find out how OddsMonkey was born and how it’s changed over the years. I also found out what the team got up to at their first Christmas party.

Interview with the creator of OddsMonkey

Jenna: Hi Paul – When and why did you start OddsMonkey?

Paul: It feels like such a long time ago! I came up with the idea for OddsMonkey and started the company in August 2011. Well, that’s over 5 years ago, which I guess is a long time…

For the first 4.5 years, I ran OddsMonkey in my spare time. The focus was on creating software that made matched betting easy for everyone. I didn’t invent the concept of matched betting – I’d heard about it online. But I’d found it quite a manual, time-consuming process. I knew that software could make it easier for more people to beat the bookmakers.

J: What made you start matched betting in the first place?

P: I heard about it on the Martin Lewis MoneySavingExpert website. I read up on it loads, but I have to admit that I was a little skeptical at first – it just seemed a little bit too good to be true. Turning free bets into actual money without risking a penny? I shelved it for a while with a plan to come back to it when I had more time.

I then got to the top of the waiting list for a season ticket for my football club but it was going to cost me around £1,000. I’d just moved house with my young family and really didn’t have a spare £1,000 lying around that I could justify spending on watching my favourite team. That was when I decided to revisit this matched betting thing I kept hearing about. I sat and spent a couple of hours reading through some really helpful posts on MoneySavingExpert and the penny dropped! I understood how the maths behind it worked and (more importantly) how I could turn all these free bets from the bookies into cash that I could treat myself to a season ticket with.

Within two months of starting matched betting, I’d earned around £1300, so I even had enough to pay for travel to the games.

J: So, come on then, which football team was it? Or did you deliberately not say?

P: It was deliberate actually! I know how seriously some people take their football. I’ve always been a bit worried that the supporters of my team’s arch rivals may cancel their OddsMonkey membership if they knew it was founded by ‘the enemy’!

(J: You’re really not going to say? Ok guys, answers on a postcard, please! (Or leave your guesses in the comment section).)

J: You said that OddsMonkey was a software company that you ran in your spare time, when did that change?

P: At the start of 2016. It was a long journey to get to that stage though. It took around a year to build the OddsMatcher software. I had lots of help from some early testers who provided invaluable feedback on early versions of the software. That feedback helped me create something that was as helpful as possible.

For the next few years, my wife and I provided support to our customers and I kept improving the software and maintaining all the data that we were collecting and processing.

During this time, we were approached by some other matched betting websites (including Profit Maximiser and Profit Accumulator who you might have heard of) who wanted to use our software on their own sites and add even more value by training and supporting people on how to matched bet. This support to users was something that I didn’t have time to do myself, so we licensed out our software to them to use it to complement their own services. We still provide our OddsMatcher software to a number of other websites today.

At the start of 2016, one of these partner sites (OddsToIncome) asked if we could meet up to discuss ways we could turn OddsMonkey into a website that offered a full matched betting service. They felt we could all work together to offer something special that no other sites had managed yet. A company that created even more software to help our customers make extra money and also provide awesome customer service and training. I loved the idea and the new OddsMonkey was born!

J: So, the website was relaunched as a full service in April 2016. What changed?

P: Everything! At least in terms of the scale, output and audience of OddsMonkey, anyway. Our ambition to make matched betting easy and accessible for everyone is still there; we’ve just changed how we intend to make that happen.

In April, we went from being solely a software provider to a full matched betting service. We now offer a whole range of tools, dedicated technical and customer support and a growing online forum. April was our deadline to get the new website ready from a functional perspective. But we also took the opportunity to refresh the look and feel of the brand too.

We started to expand the OddsMonkey team too, identify people who would help us become the best matched betting service. Since then, we’ve welcomed a number of matched betting experts and top quality computer programmers. We’re always working to build more tools and improve the ones we already have.

For the launch, we had developed a brand new training system that included categorised guides for all the current offers, along with a Daily Offer Calendar that would be constantly updated by our team. We produced new software like the RacingMatcher, which makes it really easy for our customers to earn money from the daily horse racing bookmaker offers.

We also introduced something that has quickly become one of the most valuable parts of the website: the OddsMonkey Community. The forum is where our Premium members discuss what they’re doing to earn extra money. It’s used for discussions on the best way to approach offers. It’s also a great place to connect with our staff and ask any questions that you may have about the site. There are staff members available on the forum between 9am-9pm, 7 days a week, so you’ll always have expert assistance available within minutes. That’s something that I think is really important, especially for beginners. We know there’s a lot of information to digest and we’ll always work hard to ensure that the Community is a friendly place where there’s no such thing as a stupid question.

Find out what lies in store for OddsMonkey in part 2 of our interview with Paul.

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