WeFlop — Exclusive Online Poker Rooms

The Problem

The online poker industry is strange because the size of its market depends on how good users are at playing poker. In the early 2000s, online poker experienced the “moneymaker poker boom.” During this period, millions of recreational players flooded the market. Importantly, this influx of recreational players was a self-fulfilling prophecy. As more recreational players entered, the games became more inviting and profitable to prospective recreational players, which only made more recreational players enter and so on. Since then, however, the online poker market has shrunk significantly. People like to blame botting, legal constraints, and advances in poker theory for this decline, but the real reason is that as soon as the games started to lose recreational players, the games became less inviting, leading more recreational players to stop playing. Thus, if online poker does not become more accessible to recreational players, it will never draw in new players and will continue to lose ground.

What The Company Does

Conventional online poker rooms are non-exclusive. This means that they can’t stop strong players from joining their games and ruining the experience for recreational players. On WeFlop, in addition to being able to create these non-exclusive rooms, hosts are able to create exclusive rooms. In one of these exclusive rooms, the host would be able to select the room’s members, and can therefore cater the room to specific skill levels or social groups, allowing for the possibility of controlled and recreational poker communities.

The Market

Online poker is a $5B market, composed of a dozen or so large, centralized websites. WeFlop has the potential not only to make this market larger, but also to monopolize the market entirely. By giving hosts customizability over promotional and game structures, WeFlop gives its hosts the ability to create a carbon copy of any existing poker website. Because WeFlop benefits from agglomeration effects, a carbon copy of Pokerstars created by a host on WeFlop would theoretically be able to charge lower fees and offer better promotions than a centralized site like Pokerstars as long as the WeFlop platform could get to scale. By controlling a substantial portion of the online poker market, WeFlop will have opportunities to expand into other forms of online gambling such as sports and e-sports betting, prediction markets, as well as other casino games. As such, WeFlop believes it could make an amount on the order of $10b per year.

Business Model

Whenever a host on WeFlop charges one of its users a fee, the host keeps a majority, but WeFlop takes a percentage.

Traction

The WeFlop team is currently building a poker platform that lets people play home games with their friends that is set to launch in November. It recently participated in an eight week accelerator program run through Brown University’s Nelson Center, called “Breakthrough Lab.”

Founding Team Background

Co-Founder Glenn Yu graduated from Brown University last year with degrees in english and economics. He is an experienced poker player. Co-Founder Toly Brevnov is a senior studying computer science at Brown University. He has spent the past two summers interning at Salesforce.

What They Need Help With

WeFlop will never say no to top technical talent. Right now, it is looking specifically for front-end engineers. Although WeFlop is not currently raising, potential investors should feel free to reach out, as the team plans to begin raising a round within the next six months. The WeFlop team is also looking for advisers who are familiar with or interested in the online poker space. Connect with the WeFlop team.

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