After all the setup costs I have around 350-400k of risk left for marketing and taking bets. To keep risk control in check we will create specific max bets for certain games adjusted to their payout structure. It's pretty straight forward for games like blackjack, roulette and other games. For slots with ultra high potential payouts (100,000x for example) we will have to drastically cap the maximum bet. It's gonna be a bit of pain in the ass, but better safe than sorry. Being able to payout legit winners is the only fair way to do it.

You can run simulations of variance for each game and bet sizing so it's fairly easy to know where the risk of busting is close to zero. And in the worst case I can always inject some more capital if required (I just want to avoid having a million dollar winner right after launch).

On top of that you can put a weekly max withdrawal into the T&C, which is a good compromise in case someone hits a really big win right at the start.



Yes I've known them all personally for a very long time. However, operations will be managed remote as no one is tied to a specific place.




1. Thank you this is very well noted. Since the platform providers have hundreds if not thousands of clients, I do believe it should fairly safe. However, I will ask them again.

2. Correct, they have multiple providers that we can plug in from a third party.

3. I still didn't make up my mind how to manage welcome bonuses, as there's obviously a lot of abusers. Good point mentioning to rather spend capital and rakeback on existing players. It is very aligned with my goal of retaining users. We just need to make sure to find a good way to actually get them in the first place. Welcome bonuses are a great way to get SEO traffic and affiliates from all the bonus sites.

4. It's certainly an option as I see many others are doing it. However, I didn't check about the legal implications of that yet. Something that we have to explore in the future.




With the industry I mean the iGaming industry, specifically people who actually operate the casinos. I have plenty of exposure and contacts from being a professional poker player and poker/casino affiliate. I also invest in crypto since 2017 and have been trading fulltime since 2020. Thats why I said all the knowledge and experience from all my past adventures matches up, I am just lacking contacts to actual casino owners. I have no one to ask or guide me through how to launch and run a casino. I am just doing it, will probably make a lot of mistakes and figure it out along the way.




You can incorporate a company there and get a license from there, but I think you can also incorporate in another jurisdiction. (I didn't apply for Curacao so I can't say this with 100% certainty). However, the way it works is that you are required to have an address there, a potential nominee director, secretary etc). Those people are local and do everything to meet the local regulation standards. The rest of the team who manages the day to day operation, marketing and customer support are not required to be there. This can be done all remote or outsourced if you want to. You don't have to live and work there, if thats what you're asking.

I think its pretty reasonable to say I don't want to dox my whole identity on the internet. Especially not in such a sensitive topic. Therefore I won't provide any invoices or payment receipts. The reason I mentioned the current spend is to give people a realistic idea of how much it takes to even get started.

You will need to form a main company that operates the casino, a payment company that will receive payments and manage banking on behalf of that company. Then you will need a license.

Curacao used to be the most common license, but a couple years ago a lot of things changed. The price, compliance and turnaround changed a lot, so a lot of people are moving to Anjouan or Tobique. Anjouan is the cheapest and fastest one. Tobique is something in between Anjouan and Curacao, in terms of pricing and speed. I won't talk about the tier-1 licenses as those are not my target for now. Many of them alone cost hundreds of thousands (up to millions), take at least 6-12 months to obtain and serve only specific countries and markets.



I just created the x profile alongside this account. I didn't get to make a post there yet, but will do shorter form updates there as well. The goal is to connect with other operators.

There isn't much that I can do now while waiting for all the legal stuff to get done. Company formations takes 2-4 weeks, banking another 4 weeks. Obtaining the license another 4-8 weeks.

I just wanted to start this thread already to share my experience so far. I think this way people get a realistic insight of how long things actually take to get one of the "fast and cheap" licenses.




Great of you pointing out. I am currently traveling for my summer vacation as I had this trip planned already last year, otherwise I might have been already at the Sigma Asia this weekend to get my first industry insights.

Either way, I do plan to attend major conferences as I had a great experiences and made impactful connections on affiliate conferences and events earlier in my life.

And yes, of course I did read SirJohnVonSlottys AMA and it seems very reaonsable, howeer his estimated budget of 3.5m - 5.5m seem fairly high. I am not comfortable to risk anywhere near this amount unless it's proven to show it works. Once I found a good marketing startegy (either paid promos, affiliates, agents, seo or ads), I think the budget can be increased just to scale.

He also mentioned that you need a team of  20 people to start with. I will keep it very lean and outsource or manage things on my own for now until we start acquiring players.

Currently the team consists of 1 VIP manager, 1 Operations manager and 2 Marketing experts. Before we launch we will setup our own customer support team (which will easily scale to 10-30 people), as this is one of the things we could do much better compared to the competition. (Most outsource it and get crappy service, our goal is to be top notch in terms of customer support and VIP/relations management).

It costs a lot of money to acquire a player. And rather than churning them, our most important objective is to KEEP the players we have. This works only if they get treated best and have no reason to go anywhere else.

The thing that makes sense to outsource now it the platform provider itself. There's no need to build your own games and tech stack from scratch if you have no experience. The cost for this is in the ball park of 20-50k and a % of your ggr. (it does range between 10-20% in most cases, depending on the game providers). You want to avoid the cheap ones that sell you a dream of your own software for 5-10k. I rather pick one thats established and trustworthy in the industry (has booths at all the major conferences, interviews online are available etc. - Not some random script seller on the forum for sure).



For advertising the plan is mostly organic content creation, paid posts for influencers and streamers that don't promote gambling yet, but have an audience that could receive it well (Theres edge as the cost is cheaper, but you have to find them). Buying ads on multiple platforms to generate attractive ROI fast, that allows us to scale. Affiliates (direct and through networks) are the backbone of any casino.

In my previous affiliate life, I generated over 50k FTDs in Tier 1-2 countries. This is where I made first million from. I stopped a long time ago, but am always wondering what would've happened if I sent those players to my own casino. All of those FTD's were based on CPA (cost per acquisition), no revenue share. So I don't know how much those players were worth to the casinos. But given the fact they couldn't get enough of my traffic, I'm sure they were very happy.

Those strategies might not work anymore as the environment and social media, ads cost changed drastically. But I am confident in my ability to figure it out (again).


Regarding the niche/target market I mean that it makes most sense to start in one country or at best a few similar countries.

This way you can focus your branding tailored to your target market (In terms of name, domain, colors, language and games they like to play).

For example you could run a crypto casino and target everyone that has crypto. But those will be people from all continents and they all do like something different. The name, domain and design would be something generic as it has to appeal to EVERYONE on the world. Customer support will be shitty due to language barriers and translations. The game selection is scattered (some countries like live games, other like slots, another loves card games or crash games.

Now imagine you tailor it for 1 specific country. You get a domain and brand name that makes sense for their language. You do market research and see what games they like the most (some countries play 50% only crash games for example), what slangs they use. Ideally hire customer support in their native language so they can relate and understand the person at a much deeper level.

If you can build a place thats tailored exactly for this player, offer them the games they want to play, treat them well and resolve issues immediately, always honor payments fast and easy (as long as they don't break T&C), then why would they leave and play somewhere else?

Of course this strategy isn't proven to myself yet, but intuitively this makes perfect sense and thats what I am trying to pursue.


The overall budget I'm willing to put on the line, and be completely fine if I lose it and things never gain traction is 500k USD (lets say no players and no potential profit in sight).

I thought a long time about, and as trader I put money on the line so often for much less r/r. This is such an easy asymmetric trade if you're willing to put in the work and deal with the extra headaches. A bet that Im happy to take.

However, if things gain traction, I am willing to put in much more capital to accelerate the scale. I have a decent war chest to work with, so no outside capital is required.

Regarding offering Sportsbook and/or casino, we made the decision to offer casino only for now. However, market research is still ongoing and we might change it if the data says we should do so. (it's not easy to find the data, mostly you have to read reports of publicly traded casinos to get more insights about each market)

I hope this answers some of your questions and I had a lot of fun discussing them. If theres anything else, please ask. I enjoy this very much as it makes me think through all the stuff a little bit more.

Gm my friends.

Over the recent years I did many business ventures. It always revolved around gambling or putting up risk. From professional online poker, to gambling affiliate marketing, to full-time crypto trader.

This year I started to get very bored from trading and the market in general. I spent a lot of time thinking what to do next. However, nothing really caught my interest for long.

Until I came to the realization that the next big challenge would be to run my own online casino.

The crossover from all the acquired skills in the past makes perfect sense.

After doing a bunch of research, I realized it's not illegal as long as you do it right and don't run a bucket-shop (without a license in a crazy jurisdiction).

So I decided to go all in with it.

Currently I am setting up companies, applying for a license and recruiting a team to make this happen (Please don't apply, I only work with people I know).

It's all very early in the process and updates will be slow until we're up and running, but I thought it would be a fun way to document the journey and share a "behind the scenes" of a crypto casino startup.

I spent a lot of time looking for something exactly like this, but I couldn't find anything apart from a few AMAs. There really isn't much information out there from the operator side of view. So I hope this might be useful to people who also want to start an online casino.

Another reason is also that I don't know anyone from this industry. I hope to eventually connect to like minded people who are in the same situation or walked the walk already.

While I'm waiting for all the legal stuff to complete,  I will keep working building the marketing strategy, update this thread and hopefully connect with a few people to bounce around ideas.

If you have any questions or suggestions, just send them here and I'll get to them asap.


Whats happening so far:

• Incorporation of companies and application for a license
• Recruiting a trusted team
• Choosing a platform provider
• Picked a target market (niched down)
• Around $100k to be spend on all of the above so far

PS: I'm also gonna post on X about my journey. You can follow me there as well if you want: https://x.com/CasinoBuilderX