Interview with Roberto “LORD” López , CEO of Electronic Sports Masters™
RL: Obviously! Currently the worldwide e-sports market is worth 748 million dollars, and estimations show that it can reach 1.9 billion dollars by 2018. These figures are pretty serious and make everyone rigorous with what we do if we do not want to be left behind. Honestly, I do not know the right path to follow to be successful in this type of project, and in our case, it is clearly too early to say anything, as we still have a long way ahead and a lot to learn. What I can say is that the lack of interest, honesty, and passion is not the good way. These qualities are, in my opinion, essential and presented in every one of the ESMTM Team.
BD: You use several of our products on your site. Why did you choose JoomSport?
RL: We have been working for months testing different components. All of them brought some very interesting solutions, but none of them is as complete and easy to use as the ones JoomSport proposed. Recently, we implemented the PayPal add-on for team registration, and it fits our needs perfectly. Regarding the support, I have to say they are fast and resolution-oriented. Each time we came up with an issue, they resolved it quickly and in a satisfactory way.
BD: Great! Thank you very much. Would you please unveil the business benefits brought to the esportsmasters.org backend configuration by our FE management module?
RL: One of the main advantages of the JoomSports FE management module is that teams themselves can manage their team/players profiles as well as the results of games. This allowed us to invest this purely administrative time of our administrators into more productive and gratifying tasks.
BD: How do you particularly arrange the process of player registration and team assembling on your website?
RL: In our case, the process is really simple. The manager of each team, after signing up to the website, may access the team registration section. Once it is done, the manager is able to add players and upload the logo of their team. It is all very easy and intuitive.
BD: Both with our help and independently, you made several adjustments to our native functionality, adapting it to your specific business requirements. The result is pretty excellent. Please, tell our readers how it was made.
RL: The modifications and adaptations to our model were quite easy to implement thanks to the support of JoomSport. We did not have to perform big modifications, as it already came with all the options we were looking for. What we did adapt were the colors and format to make it fit our website.
BD: What is currently the most required functionality you would readily purchase from JoomSports or similar vendors?
RL: Unfortunately, this is something we did not find either in JoomSport or in other similar products, and that, in my opinion, would be very interesting to implement in order to make you pop out among the competitors. Recently, we added a “betting system” to the website, which is giving so far very good results. It is really easy to use even if it takes a lot of work on our administrators’ side, being something so dynamic, but when we see the success it is getting within the community, it seems worth the pain. Thanks to it, we make our visitors and the community in general more than simple spectators by letting them be a part of ESMTM.
BD: The business model you follow is original and uncommon. Would you please explain the roles within your team and management that make it successful?
RL: The ESMTM is a non-profit organization in which we reinvest everything we get to improve our infrastructure. And we are lucky to have the support of Mionix and ArmaHosts, who are really important allies for us.
BD: Thank you very much, Roberto, for your time and an amazing conversation. We wish good luck to you and your company. You are welcome to summarize our interview.
RL: Thank you very much, and as Richard St. John said, “Success is a continuous journey,” so we will try to keep up the good work.