Ep309: Marcus Luer – Do Not Go Global Before You Test Your Product Locally

Andrew Stotz 00:02
Hello fellow risk takers and welcome to my worst investment ever stories of loss to keep you winning. In our community we know that to win in investing you must take risk but to win big, you've got to reduce it. This episode is sponsored by a stocks Academy's online course how to start building your wealth investing in the stock market. I wrote this course for those who want to go from feeling frustrated, intimidated or overwhelmed by the stock market to becoming confident and in control of their financial future. Go to my worst investment ever.com slash deals to claim your discount now. Fellow risk takers This is your worst podcast host Andrew Stotz and I'm here with featured guests. Marcus lewer. Marcus, are you ready to rock?

Marcus Luer 00:49
Yes. Good morning, Andrew. And

00:51
I'm ready to go.

Andrew Stotz 00:54
All right. Well, let me introduce you to the audience. Marcus lewer is Asia's number one sports marketing entrepreneur, and the group CEO of total sports Asia, which is Asia's global sports marketing agency, which he founded 23 years ago in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Marcus is a sought after industry expert and speaker and has been featured on CNBC, BBC News. Bloomberg Asia, regularly presents at major global sports conferences, and has contributed to many international newspapers and industry magazine articles, is recently launched to sports entrepreneurs podcasts series, and just type that in and you'll be able to pull it up. I was just listening to it this morning, featuring top sports executives and entrepreneurs from around the world. Markets take a moment. And Phil any further tidbits about your life.

Marcus Luer 01:51
Yeah, thank you. Well, I'm excited to be here and then sharing a bit of my stories. As I said, normally, I do it the other way around, I do the hosting. But it's always fun to share some of my stories too. And maybe the short summary is originally from Germany, I grew up in Cologne, I ended up studying in the United States, my MBA there, and was fortunate enough to be around in the US during the Football World Cup, the 1994 FIFA World Cup, which us hosted. And the city I was studying was in was in Fort Worth and Dallas, Texas, which is nearby, which was one of the main venues. And so I volunteered ended up with a job there. And you know, as you do it, when you do an MBA, you do internships, etc. So during those times, I landed in the world of sports with American Airlines and a few other companies then. And so I got in this and I think once you once you taste the the sort of the amazing world of sports, the energy, it brings being a sports man, I've always been a sports guy and my whole life, I realized this was my calling, because I realized I would be doing this for free, if it's possible, you know, without having to get paid. Or I was always amazed that someone would pay me even for what I was doing. So that's how that's how really I got into the industry. And then interesting enough, my first job ended up here in Asia as a first job after the Football World Cup where I did work at. I landed a job in Hong Kong. So I got on a boat, so to speak, and arrived in Hong Kong in 1994, later part of 94 and have never left. I've been in Asia for 26 years, the majority of that is been based out of Malaysia, whereas my was the head office of the company and say my first home a little now we're here a fellow Banco Aachen here sitting with you, just around the corner from you. And so that's the short version of what I've done there.

Andrew Stotz 03:51
I came to Asia in 1992. So we both arrived on the shores of Asia, you know, in those early days, and I never left also

04:01
direct. So

Andrew Stotz 04:04
one, one of the things I was thinking about, you know, about sports that's interesting is that I'm a passionate guy about finance. And I've studied everything I could about it, I've read everything I could about it. I taught everything I could about it, and I worked in the industry, and I just threw my life into it because I just found it so fascinating in so many things. And, you know, I have a friend of mine, and she was a ballerina at a young age and has devoted a lot of her youth to that. And one time she said to me, and you're a workaholic and I said you're a ballerina Holic. She's like Why? I'm like, you know, when you pursue your passion in sports, and you push yourself hard and you do the training and you go through it. People really admire that. The discipline struggle, the pain But when you're pursuing your passion in another field, like the field of business, and you're truly doing it, because you're passionate, you're not just working long hours, because boss told you, you got to get this done. But I was pursuing my passion, they would call me a workaholic. And I just found that offensive. So I'm gonna say to all the listeners out there who love what they're doing, let's call ourselves sports men and women.

Marcus Luer 05:23
That's true. And no, and I absolutely I mean, I, I have a huge passion for what I do. And I don't feel I'm working. Yes, it is work many times, of course, you know, there's never, nothing always works perfectly right. You know, so Business is business. But in terms of being in a business, where you have a passion for and your case, if it's finance, in my case, it's sports, or an owl, and also the world of gaming and eSports, which we really, you know, aggressively going after. Those are things which is that, you know, it's fun, you're having fun, while you know, obviously building a business and making money, and then everything in between.

Andrew Stotz 06:04
Well, now it's time to share your worst investment ever. And since no one ever goes into their worst investment thinking will be tell us a bit about the circumstances leading up to it. And then tell

Marcus Luer 06:14
us your story. Yeah, sure. Yeah. And worse, let's call it in brackets. Right? It is. It's, I think it's a painful investment. And, or, and, and a painful learning on the back of it. That's probably how I would describe it. And that is a company called sports fix, which was our Ott platform, we launched in the sort of later part of 2017. What is Ott? Yeah, Ott stands for over the top, delivery over the top. So it's a technical term in the internet space, or in the digital space. And Ott, really, a few years ago, the best Ott example is Netflix, which probably most people would recognize, right, that's means it's delivered to your device, whatever it is, with, over the internet. So that's what Ott means now that it now people use it in multiple levels, but at the time, really, it was always kind of referred to the television side of it rather than Europe, you know, you have a setup box at home or you, you get a you know, whatever old television signal from a terrestrial network through your antenna, this is now delivered. So in when Netflix started, they went around the world everyone was looking at, how would that impact sports and where would be the next Netflix of sports. That's really and this is what most of us call it, we call ourselves that. And others of course, because it was easy for someone to get their head around. Okay, so I watch movies. So now I can watch sports. But I same thing, it's streamed and I can be on any device and on any platform out there. So this is sort of where, where we started, right. To me, being an a, a broker, a trader, in the world of sports and sports, TV rights, this was very obvious was the next big thing. And for us, it was an opportunity to get away from just again being the trading side of it, where it's just a pure arbitrage game, right? I buy something for $1, I sell for $1 20, or I represent a rights holder and would sell it to a broadcaster. So he has the option to say hey, you know what, we can be a broadcaster, we can be the guy who puts the content out there. But instead of having to find $100 million to do this, which is what you would need if you try to build a traditional broadcast platform, you can do it for single digits, right. And that's the opportunity because the cost of building an odd platform is a fraction of a let's call it you know, building a full on TV station. So that's how it all started right at it. I felt this was the place I knew the industry. I know where to buy content, I knew where to you know, I knew what the audience was looking for. Because we've been selling to of course, the industry for 20 years at that time. So all seem to be coming together with you right now. Exactly. Exactly. So I you know it, you know, as I said, so we've ticked every box, you can somewhat think of it was the hot thing, and, and everything in between. So this is how it started. And this is why it was clearly a good idea. And until today, I think it is a good idea. But it also as usual, we've all learned a few things, which I'll come to maybe later why or what went wrong and what maybe what, what, what we did wrong there, right. So but so we did launch the platform, we put a team together, we threw some of our own money at it. And we also started to do some fundraising of external parties. So you know, we brought some external investors into it because it was a great story. It wasn't that complicated for somebody to get their head around that. Okay. If you can be the Netflix of sports in Asia, even forget about the rest of the world. Why wouldn't that work? Right? So we got up to up and running, build a team up very quickly. It will be up to 2030 people at one point in time. based out of KL, and we launched the platform somewhat late, sort of early 2018, I think, within Malaysia first and then sort of another v 678 months later in Indonesia, so, but when it's coming back to you know, what, what then happened is that, you know, as much as the concept in the idea of made all the sense in the world, we probably didn't know a few things yet at that time. And that's part of the learnings I guess, coming out of it. Number one, we didn't really understand the consumption habit gets in Asia, or in our part of the world here, of how people actually consume online content. And there is a huge difference. The consumer who buys a setup box and watches their you know, which is whatever at home, whether you're in Thailand, you have true or in Malaysia, you have, you know, Astro and whatever. You, you're committing whatever it is X dollars every month, right? And you and you kind of used to that idea, right? And that's our generation who we were brought up with pay TV being a cool thing, meaning, Hey, I got 200 channels now, right? Before I just add a few, whatever, free to air channels. And you know, half the time, it never showed what I wanted to

Andrew Stotz 11:17
know, we only watched one or two of those most

Marcus Luer 11:19
Exactly, exactly. That's that's the sort of, you know, that's where it's heading now. But uh, at the when you come from a free to air world, which was a few channels, and always all this little random stuff, right? Now you have a channel, you can only watch movies only sports or only Discovery Channel, only CNN or whatever. That made a lot of sense at that time. Right? This is 20 years ago, when that industry started and took off. In many parts around the world. Thailand is probably not such a good example. Because true never really launched in a big way here. Or never get out of the starting block, in my view. But so that was the industry you're coming from now, it was very clear. The world was unbundling people weren't that interested anymore and saying I have 200 channels, because I'm only watching two of them. Why am I spending $100 on it? Right? So the concept of it's $1 a channel and therefore Okay, not that much. But if you only watch two or three, then it gets that $100 gets expensive, right? for two or three channels. So that's where Netflix and of course, everyone that came into play. The challenge with Asia was that most people, when it comes to online, they expect things to be for free. Because it's on the internet. Right? You know, so yes, if they have a box and have this and that fine. They still pirated boxes out there. And that's part of the challenge actually true had here in Thailand that too many pirated boxes were here. But the internet is full of pirates, just about every single stream, you can find in some fashion, right. And so that was killer number one, that we didn't realize there was a huge amount of piracy out there, which we weren't able to stop. And if you if you bid clever, you might be able to find it, even though of course, you know, we had it, you know, for us, it was just a click away thing. That's one second was, again, yeah, that people as I said, you know, we're in quite as ready to, you know, sign up and pay for things because there is just so much free content out there, right? YouTube is full of it and, and Twitch, and God knows, oh, these platforms there were they were they that generation is right. So. So that is I think, where we realized, okay, we had to shift the model away from subscription model, which is what we initially thought was, that was a trick to a more we would call ad driven model, right? So and that, to some degree can work. But it's a very different model, because the numbers, you know, automatically, you know, become very different. So, we had to, you know, so we are constantly pivoting and changing the model. And if you look at other platforms, similar here in Asia, like iflix, which is probably the largest was one of the largest at one point of time, not in sports, but you know, they obviously were trying to be the Netflix of Asia. They did the same, right, they were constantly changing. You know, Patrick, a good friend of mine, who launched it, and is one of the founders there, they raised 360 million US dollars and sort of burned most of it. Right? We raised about 1% of that. But we burned that as well. And, and so and so, but the story is very similar, right. So we were constantly changing and rejigging the business model. While we are looking for, you know, the concept work, it's not that we were in attracting large audiences, but we weren't able to monetize it, you know, that is probably one of the bigger learnings of it is that it took us too long to get to the point where you know, investors and others were saying, you know, I can see the model working you know, and and so on in the short sense and we ran out of money basically right? In the process there that,

14:46
you know,

Marcus Luer 14:47
but the learnings I would say, you know of how did we run out of money, we're a couple of things. One is think we got distracted. And the distraction unfortunately was, again, if you If you listen to it, you go. Okay, that made sense. But in hindsight, maybe it didn't. If you recall, 2018 was the craze of blockchain and Icos around the world, right? So everyone was all of a sudden in this sort of concept of Wow, there's a lot of money out there, you can raise a lot of money through an Ico initial coin offering. And, and so we went, you know what, let's have a look at this, right? You know, because all of our buddies were going, Hey, I'm running and doing an Ico and I've raised 10 million a year and 20 million or whatever. So it just seemed to be an obvious one. So we said, okay, let's how do we integrate blockchain technology into an Ott platform? That is, there is some logic to it. And but it wasn't the most obvious right away either. So we spent a good six months, drafting this incredible white paper, you know, sunk a lot of resources and time and energy into it. Because we eventually we convinced, of course, ourselves that this was the place in though we call ourselves the first Ott platform on blockchain. Until today, we probably had one of the better white papers out there, which had a chance of, I think, to actually succeed. But what happened, it took too long, by the time we actually wrote it, we were in the middle of 2018, and the block chain bubble had burst, or the Ico bubble at least had burst, right? They, you know, if you go the numbers that were raised, billions of dollars were being raised, and all of a sudden, it literally just tanked, you know, nothing, no one was raising anymore, and the only ones who were raising so were existing Icos where people just topping up and, you know, trying to sort of save, save themselves, you know, or hoping that, you know, by doubling up on one thing, it would work, right. So we never raised pretty much $1 on the back of it, but in the process have taken off, I think are is too much of a traditional fundraising as in bringing, you know, that's called traditional equity investor or other sort of investors in one and two of the product a bit as well, because we're the whole tech team was now cracking how we would integrate blockchain into an Ott platform. The part which then came out of it, which was really interesting is that it will again, it's not we needed blockchain. But it added an interesting component. And that was actually the tokenization part of it right and tokenizing. And acid is, it's a very clever thing to do. And so we learned a ton of things on in that area, which which I think in, in a future business, still, it will come back to it because tokenization, I think is a is really an incredible area of a generate generating new revenue streams, or generate, you know, raising money, I guess, if you can tokenize something that's one arm. And, you know, so I have tons of ideas coming out of that. And that's, I think, you know, we all always do, I think when you learn, when you have a painful lesson, you learn something, of course, wait, and maybe we missed out.

Andrew Stotz 17:59
I bet if we go through what did you learn from this experience?

Marcus Luer 18:02
Yeah, so So I think the couple of key learnings will be, first of all, as I alluded towards, you know, not taking your eye too far off the ball and sticking, you know, through maybe pivoting is important, but I think you also got to watch you don't distract yourself too much, probably. And that's sort of would be one thing. Secondly, the sort of, you know, I think we were a bit too aggressive in our growth strategy, you know, instead of maybe we're making it work in a couple of territories first, or you have one territory. So I've seen now over the years and in my own business, no and, and others as well is that you do need a strong foundation, right. And I always look at if you take successful platforms, like the UFC, or the Premier League, or whatever pickin major event in the world, they always very strong in their home market, right, that's where they grow from. If you have your home market is weak, and you haven't really cracked the home market is trying to go global right away, it's very hard to do. And then there's other investments that have in a similar fashion where I realized that was one of the big mistakes we made is that we always have this sort of global view or a very Asian regional view on a lot of things. And that makes sense when you do it well in one country, and then you multiply it. So every time I did that, where I've you know, was successful with one with a particular product or with a concept was an idea in one country. And it worked, and then we multiply it that makes sense, because then you have the leverage there. But if you are, if you haven't cracked the first one yet, and then you going, Oh, but let's see whether this might work regionally better. I think that's where the challenge comes from. Right. And so that is where we're, I would say, is the lesson here as well. We will were too quick, too fast. We didn't have that opportunity to, you know, to really learn it maybe in one or two countries First, we were already off to the next thing, you know. And again, in partially it was because we were watching others. That's what I flicked. Let's do it. Right, they were always doubling up doubling up running to the next place, always with the assumption, hey, then there is new viewers, are there more customers out there rather than? Yeah, just just focusing on the first market first. So those are, I think, a few things too aggressive, you know, loss of least losing a bit focus. And then of course, the entity if you don't have enough funding, and or you don't have enough? Well, I guess if your runway isn't long enough, then you are going to run out of time and or resources eventually, right? Yep.

Andrew Stotz 20:53
So let me summarize what I took away. I mean, I in fact, I wrote down a lot of things from your story. And I'm just gonna run through them really quickly. And the first one is pivot, I think the best way to think about pivoting in a business is think about a compass. Remember, in school, when we put down a compass, and then we twisted it around to make a circle, a compass pivots on a point, it compass doesn't the pivot. So in other words, keep one foot in what you're doing, and pivot a little bit. But a lot of times, what happens is that we start off a business and we chase the revenue. And next thing, you know, we're in a completely different space. So be careful about pivoting. pivoting is just usually mildly altering your idea. And it could just be that your idea is bad, and therefore you shouldn't really pivot from it, you should go get another idea. And the second one is the idea of resource allocation. And you know, it's the biggest challenge of any entrepreneur is you have very limited resources, where are you going to put them, and your ultimate success or failure is going to be dependent on you at the top, and how you allocate those resources. And that's such a challenge. The next one is the idea of test the market. You know, it's just the best, best bit of information that comes out of this discussion, as well as many others is, test your product, and just test and work with the market work with the market, you know, make a small group of people super satisfied, and then then start to expand on the next one is, it's actually similar to a failure that I had, which was that I was a stockbroker, as an analyst at a stock brokerage house. And I did that for years as a head of research. And I had fans around the world of fund managers who read my research, talk to me, and I gave them advice. And my advice was good. So I thought I'll set up my own company, and I'll sell my research to them, you know, and what I learned is that when there is a firehose of free research coming from all these different sources, which are brokers and investment banks, you can't get somebody to pay a reasonable amount that you can build a reasonable business out of that very hard. So competing against free, is hard, very hard. And, you know, I would say the other thing that reminds me of is my worst investment ever was an investment in a startup also. And what realized, was it Okay, there was a point in time where I realized, holy crap, we have to go big, or go home. Yep. And not what I meant by going big is we need to raise three to 5 million bucks minimum, to go to the next stage. And are we ready to do that? And the answer, my point at that point was no, we're not ready, and we shut it down. And then the last thing, you know, you talked about is runway. And I always say that there's two runways. Runway number one is a financial runway that you had the funds to execute your idea. And run a number two is a confidence runway, where the people who bet on you initially, eventually if you don't turn it into something valuable, they will lose confidence. And it doesn't matter if you have money, if you don't have confidence. But if you have confidence and you don't have money, you can probably work something out. So anyways, a lot that I took away from your ads or anything you'd add for that,

Marcus Luer 24:24
though, I think you covered Well, it's that it's really always a combo of things. And when you're right in the middle of it, of course, that's the hardest part right now this is you know, a couple of years back when all this unfolded, and so the company as is that we had to shut it down and sort of beginning of 219 so it's now almost, you know, good over two or close to two years. Back since we've since it all happened. But when I was really in the middle of it, it was painful. It was you know, and you not focusing on the lessons you just, you know, dealing with the damage and putting out the fires. You know, and so only I think we as sort of a year or two later, I think is when you then really have the opportunity. hindsight. 2022. Totally, totally, totally.

Andrew Stotz 25:09
So that leads into the next question, which is based on what you learned from this story and what you continue to learn, what one action would you recommend our listeners take to avoid suffering the same fate? Let's go back in time, what would have helped you?

Marcus Luer 25:24
Well, because it, you know, I've, I've started many companies in some sense, or a business project within our own company, right. So it's not always that it was a standalone business as this one was on most of time, it would be in a project within the company itself, right. And so within it, the company was always existing, we were just investing some money in a particular project. If that didn't work, we shut the project down. And we moved on, right? The business continued, maybe that just knocked the profitability for the year a bit, but I wasn't killing the company, right. So I guess I've never had that type of experience of what it means to really go through a business, which then looks like it's going to fail. And we can keep bailing it out, right? Because we were just throwing more money at it. And we draining the mothership, in a sense, right. So the mother started to catch fire from the, from the house next door. And so you know, and so that was an interesting one, which again, you know, here's an analogy, which I used, and I had to really switch it in my head. And that is, I called sports, it was my baby. Okay? Whoo. That's a bad analogy, if you tried to separate yourself from something or hit. You know, as an entrepreneur, if you call your business, your baby, I think you're in trouble already. Right? Because it means you're going to do whatever it takes to save it as you would with a real child. Now, that's again, it's a good thing, in many ways, when we can all see the positive or that but you can also see the negative, right? Because you're gonna just try to hang on to it right and, and you drowning theoretically with it. And that's sort of then what I you know, I have to kind of switch the analogy sent, okay, we tried, we need to rescue our baby, to Okay, you know, we have a we had a, whatever, there's a next door, you know, we had we created another house, but that house is on fire, and we don't put that fire out, we got to catch the main house is going to catch fire, which was you know, TSA as as a group, which to some degree, actually what happened, right, so we, you know, we were draining the resources there. And all the money we're making here, we were throwing it at the next thing, right. So, but I said, that was an interesting mind, I had a really stop calling things and putting these more emotions to it, then you already have, as any business entrepreneur has with their idea, or with a concept to say, look, you know what, it isn't working, and we will have to go that more brutal route of shutting things down.

Andrew Stotz 27:53
Hey, baby, it's not your baby. Yeah. So last question, what's your number one goal for the next 12 months?

Marcus Luer 28:00
number one goal, ah, for the next 12 months? Well, look, we know we've all coming out of incredible crazy, you know, 2020, I don't see 2021. Being that different. In many ways, I do believe we're going to see continuous restrictions on travel, and many other things. So again, without overusing the word pivoting here, but as a company, we've very heavily focused on the world of sport eSports, or gaming, which is growing dramatically. And all this sort of trajectory you already had in before COVID is just accelerated because you have more people at home. So there is a whole lot more folks playing games now. In between, or even that is more focused on the industry, right? So we're now bringing this 25 years of experience in sports into the world of Esports and gaming. And there's some amazing new things we're doing in the Middle East and here in Asia. So that's probably my big focus. I think that's the space I love, again, very natural progression of what we're doing already in the you know, we've always been our job has always been to generate revenue streams for sports. That's what we've done, you know, half a billion dollars worth of those. So my goal is, and I've declared that publicly to try to find the next billion in the next 10 years. So we took it took us 20 years to find a half a billion revenue for sports. So the goal is to find a billion dollars the next 10. So to exit on both ends, beautiful.

Andrew Stotz 29:34
All right, listeners, there you have it another story of laws to keep you winning. Remember to go to my worst investment ever.com slash deals to claim your discount on how to start building your wealth investing in the stock market course. As we conclude blog is I want to thank you again for coming on the show. And on behalf of a Stotz Academy I hereby award you alumni status, returning investment In your best teaching moment, do you have any parting words for the audience?

Marcus Luer 30:04
Now look that thanks for being on here. And it's always good to reflect on you know, it forces you to think about what happened really in a different way. And you have to explain it to others. And I've done it a few times now to myself, but yeah, it was good and appreciate it. And hopefully there's some learning for everyone.

Andrew Stotz 30:20
I think we all learn and just looking at the notes that I've taken down, you definitely helped me so I appreciate that. And that's a wrap on another great story to help us create, grow and most importantly, protect our well fellow risk takers. This is your worst podcast host Andrew Stotz St. I'll see you on the upside.