How I Started A 500K Month Website About Online Casinos - Starter

How I Started A $500K/Month Website About Online Casinos

Casino Guru is a website with all kinds of information about online casinos.

Business model: Organic revenue generation through affiliate business model - our visitors tend to play at online casinos and follow our recommendations, and the majority of casinos have affiliate programs.

We have about $500, 000 in monthly revenue and more than 50 full-time employees.

We are currently ranked #3 in the world in this category, aiming to be #1.

Our customers are visitors to online casinos, but they don't pay us directly.

It's better to double 70% of your traffic than to double 95% of your traffic.

Take us through the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing your first product.

Our product is a website. Its design and development process is very similar to the design and development of any website or information system. This part was very simple, since myself and the other founder were software developers. But still, we got some things right and some things wrong.

The funny thing about a business that relies on SEO is that you can't actually do decent programming. Are you going to improve and grow some parts of your site? Well, that's lucky. The almighty G might have a totally different plan for you.

What we did right was the decision to create a system that models all the relationships and information about online casinos as structured data. For example, almost every online casino has a list of countries that they don't allow their residents to play in. To collect this information, we created a casino_restricted_country database table and populated it with one record for each casino and country on its restricted list.

This allowed us to separate not only the information but also the way it was displayed to visitors on the site. As a result, we were able to make very flexible and agile changes to how the site looked and ran. Most of the changes were software changes, not data changes. If we had chosen an HTML-based page-by-page system like WordPress, we would have been much less flexible.

On the other hand, it took a lot of analytical skill and expertise, and a lot of software development, to build such a system properly. I consider myself a very experienced software analyst, but without that experience, it's easy to fall into analytical pitfalls (such as over-generalizing when it's not necessary).

Despite all our skills and experience with software, it took us 10 months from concept to launch, working a few afternoons and a few weekends. A delayed release would have risked us running out of willpower before the project started to generate revenue.

Actually, what we did wrong was the initial design of the website. It was pretty sparse and not visually appealing. Neither I nor the other founder are web designers, nor did we have a good understanding of what a real user experience is. Luckily, that was about to change. And the design flexibility of the structured data approach saved us from the redesign.

Describe the process of launching the business.

At some point, I decided to quit my engineering job at SW and work full time at Casino Guru. The final push took a few weeks, and the product was released in late April 2016.

Note: this is the design, not the actual website. I haven't found a screenshot of the website since then.

Honestly, launching a product with SEO as the main channel is not a spectacular event. Have a system in place that allows search engine robots, set up essential tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics, make sure everything is working, and keep working on improving your product.

It takes days or weeks for the first real visitor to land on your site, and months or years for your product to get decent traffic.

This was indeed our case. To put it in numbers, even 6 months after the product launch, we were only getting about 50 organic visitors per week.

Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?

As I said, launching a product based on SEO is not a glamorous event. And that's exactly what we did:

Our strategy from the beginning was to launch a setup for multiple local languages, so we looked on Upwork for people who could translate the site and do other tasks necessary to make the site successful in search engines.
We hired our first people to work on casino databases and other content-related tasks.
I learned a lot about SEO and was constantly improving the front end.

But now I realize that while all of the above was crucial to our success, we would have failed if we hadn't fundamentally changed the design of our site. And there we have to admit we were just lucky.

I hated working from home because I missed the social aspect. So I joined a very small co-working space here in Bratislava. And the person collaborating in the space happened to be a very talented graphic designer. We casually discussed our work and he thought that our website should be more colorful considering our niche.

In the end, we agreed to give it a try and decided to take on a complete redesign. A software engineer with good structural and analytical thinking and a photoshop wizard with a good visual sense and a lot of UX experience worked very well together and in two weeks we were able to design a website that had the potential to evolve into the casino we know today.

Bonus section design - the first page that attracted attention Casino list - the most important page

And in November 2016, after three months of very intensive planning, we finally launched this new front-end and continued to move forward without any immediate traffic increase, as is typical for SEO-based projects.

I think the next few months will be the most challenging in my career. The funding for the project consisted of about 30k euros of my savings and the salary of two senior SW engineers. The other co-founder didn't stop working full time, so at this point we knew we needed to find a full time job to pay the salaries of everyone who was already working for us.

So I got a full time job, working 8 hours at the company and 3-4 hours at the casino. Every weekend I worked at least one day. Then for a few months I didn't earn a penny and put all my free time and everything I did (in addition to living expenses) into the project. From one day we set a deadline that if we don't earn X euros a month in 6 months, we'll give up on the project. After all, at one point the company owed us 130k euros in both salary and our direct expenses.

Don't push your opinion, ask a lot of questions and listen to the answers. Be open-minded to change your mind any time if you think it's wrong.

Luckily we didn't have to face such a decision. After a few months, our site began to grow into a marketplace and we made our first 13 cents. Some people say it's harder to make your first million dollars, but I say making your first 13 cents is the hardest.

As we increased the traction, the income grew rapidly every month and became realistic in a few months. If my memory was correct, our deadmance (not counting) was in June 2017. It was when the struggle turned into a growth journey. We were still crazy work, but at least we were making money. Hiring new employees and subcontractors was meaningful. And after a few years of effort, improvement, and growth, we are today.

How are you doing today and what does the future look like?

As I mentioned today, we are probably the third most visitor online casino site in the world. We are a company where more than 50 employees are working ful l-time and are making money comfortably. Our site is actively translated into 17 languages. There is room to invest a lot of resources, what is basically worth trying, such as development, improvement, new products, and no n-profit projects.

For example, in 2019, a unique mediation service between casinos and players was launched, and within a year and a half, it was clearly the world's second largest in the niche. In 2020, he launched his own forum and achieved the same engagement activities as the major competitors in less than a year.

The main plan in the future is to diversify the risk by launching various brands without focusing on a very wide range (focusing on specific subcategors and specific countries). At the beginning of the establishment, he invested in the casino guru brand. This was a great strategy at that stage because I was able to focus on understanding one brand correctly. However, it was easy to be affected by Google's mood, and theoretically disappointed. It is worth saying that this kind of site cannot survive without Google ranking.

Thus, a portfolio of brands for specific countries and niche companies is a method of distributing this risk, but also building products that perfectly fit this niche.

In addition to creating more brands, we have started, that is, to create products that have the potential to become the world's No. 1 by constantly improving and doing their best. I will continue.

"Google's way is strange

The funny thing about a business that relies on SEO is that you can't actually do any decent programming. Are you going to improve and grow some part of your site? Well, good luck with that. The almighty G may have a totally different plan for you. That's why we don't have a detailed development plan, but rather focus on improving our product in a fast and efficient way. Fortunately, our performance allows us to take such a laid-back attitude.

Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

The journey from starting a business to growing into a successful company has been a truly valuable experience. Being in the position of the final decision maker in every area that the company touches has forced me to gain knowledge in most areas that the company has ever been involved in: recruiting, UX research and product design, software design, internal processes, translation, corporate structure, talent brokerage, leadership, data analysis, etc.

Over the past year, I have of course made hundreds of small decisions, good and not so good. But among those decisions, there are probably no exceptional ones worth mentioning in this interview. On the other hand, there are some principles that I have gleaned and have used in our business that I would advise aspiring entrepreneurs to consider following:

We came into a position established for 20 years, with a turnover of 1 billion USD per year. We knew that this would be a profitable business, and our success depended primarily on our execution, not on the viability of the idea itself. I do not recommend starting a completely new idea or business model as your first business.

Avoid businesses with chicken-and-egg problems. If the quality of your service is essentially dependent on the number of users, it is extremely difficult and costly to beat today's established competitors. Don't try to build a better Craiglist or Facebook.

Become an expert in all major fields handled by your company. You don't need to be the best expert in all of them, but you need to verify everything i n-house and to disagree. Even intermediate experience can avoid disasters by combining with powerful common sense. Experts often have a narrow field of view, and often make mistakes from the top. There are also many snak e-like salesmen, which can help them avoid them. It's much easier to ask a question than to answer a question. So, if someone claims to be an ancient expert but can't tell who Cleopatra was, he would probably not be that much.

To be fair, protect morals, and do not exploit the situation for your own interests. You have a name and reputation, which accumulates over time. If it is faithful to its values, the reputation will increase. Good reputation is useful for recruitment and future partnerships, but bad reputation will drive you into a severe situation.

Instead of pushing your opinion, ask a lot of questions and listen to the answer. If you think your thoughts are wrong, be sure to change your mind. Also, even if you have different opinions from others, you don't want to fully understand your position, the strengths and weaknesses compared to your position, and change your thoughts. Others will make more different decisions if you make a decision after getting enough information, rather than sticking to your previous position.

What platform/tools do you use for your business?

We use very wide standard tools related to SEO and website tracking, such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google Keyword Scheduling, Semrush, Majestic. There is, but the former is very important I think the latter is not well known, so there are two tools I want to emphasize:

MOUSEFLO W-This tool records user behavior on your site. I think it's an indispensable tool for new online projects because you can easily identify the major UX defects on the site. By analyzing the first 100 visitors, you can detect all the serious flaws of the site and learn a lot about visitors. Without such tools, even serious bugs and defects will remain unnoticed for months.

ALLPOSITION S-A tool for tracking positions in Serps (search engine results page). As far as I can see, if you need to track multiple keywords in multiple markets, the market is overwhelmingly offering the highest price. A little disappointing is that the UI has not been translated into English, so you have to learn the Russian word to use.

What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?

To be honest, I'm not an enthusiastic reader, I spend my free time with my family or sports outside. So the most influential book of the three books I've read so far is Ash Mauriya's Running Lean. I read this book in 2013 and learned some rudimentary principles from there.

Avoid accurate quotes, but innovative business should be done as a series of small experiments. Whether the experiment succeeds or fails, in both cases, you will learn important things from it. So I'm not afraid to bet on resources in experiments that may act on positive and negative, and I'm sorry if something is stalled.

In terms of current information sources, Glen Gave is regularly followed on Twitter to get the latest information on all SE O-related things (despite having only Twitter).

Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?

I'm just looking for a new SEO. It's time to play this important role. We are looking for a true expert in this field, which has long experience in various projects.