FANDUEL co-founder Lesley Eccles has taken her new product to market, with relationship app Relish launching in the US earlier this week.
Dubbed “the personal trainer for your relationships", Relish, which is backed by $2.2 million of seed investment from California-based Trinity Ventures and Bullpen Capital, combines user data with input from a panel of psychologists to offer relationship advice on a daily basis.
Ms Eccles said she was inspired to create a business that focuses on relationships in part due to what she and her fellow co-founders had experienced at FanDuel.
READ MORE: FanDuel cofounder Lesley Eccles secures $2.2m of backing for new firm
Though she had set up the daily fantasy sports business with her husband Nigel Eccles and three other co-founders, ultimately all five were pushed out by private equity investors Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR) and Shamrock Capital Advisors. When FanDuel was sold to Paddy Power Betfair (now Flutter Entertainment) last year, KKR and Shamrock used their majority shareholder status to wipe out the co-founders’ shareholdings, meaning the five received nothing from the sale.
“We spent 10 years building FanDuel and it was quite a rollercoaster,” Ms Eccles said.
“With the way that things turned out, most of us who were involved from the early days came out not really knowing which way was up, but we came out of it feeling like blood brothers. Those relationships kept us going, they kept us sane.
“A few things have happened to me that made me realise that life’s too short to be unhappy in a relationship and I started to think about how we could use technology to help people.”
A panel of psychologists made up of Stony Brook University professor Joanne Davilla, Binghampton University psychology chair Matthew Johnson and Brigham Young University associate professor Scott Braithwaite are acting as advisers to Relish, helping the business create an online tool that assesses users when they sign up.
READ MORE: FanDuel cofounder Lesley Eccles gears up for new tech launch
“People can sign up on their own or they can also invite their partner to join them and [the assessment tool] lets them see how secure they are in their relationship,” Ms Eccles said.
“We take all those points of data and customise a relationship improvement plan with access to a relationship coach who can keep you motivated.
“It’s a blend of technology and human interaction; it’s not just relying on the algorithm.”
Like FanDuel, Relish has bases on both sides of the Atlantic, with Ms Eccles based in New York alongside the business’s marketing and coaching teams. The tech team that built and is developing the product is based in Edinburgh.
Although Relish is only currently available to users in the US, where the company is also registered, Ms Eccles said the intention is to bring it to the UK by the end of this year before looking at other target markets.
“We’re at the point where we’re ready to start scaling this – I’ve done it before,” she said.
“What worked for FanDuel probably won’t work for Relish but some of it will. I don’t have a recipe I can follow but I’ll spend the next 12 months figuring out what that recipe should be.”
Noting that “a lot of people make the mistake of adding more features” when looking to scale up an app business, Ms Eccles said the next stage of development for Relish is likely to focus instead on making the current iteration of the product suitable for other markets.
READ MORE: FanDuel founders sue company for $120m
While that could involve setting up different panels of psychologists to the one being used in the US, Ms Eccles said as the issues the app hopes to resolve are universal she has not yet decided whether that will be necessary or not.
“Humans are humans,” she explained.
“Obviously we would need to think about localisation of language and that kind of thing, but honestly I do think what’s relevant to someone who lives in Philadelphia will be relevant to someone who lives in Glasgow.”
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here