Exploring main stages of iGaming startup launch

iGaming has been a hot topic for several years now, and more investors are paying attention to this industry as a profitable long-term investment. However, it would be wrong to assume that simply creating a gaming website will bring profit, as competition in this industry is incredibly crazy. New websites appear almost on daily basis, each trying to impress players with new approaches, bonuses, and engaging content. This means that gaming business cannot be treated as a side hustle; success can only be achieved by fully immersing yourself in the process and understanding your consumer.

Today, we invite you to dive into launching a new iGaming product with Monoup. Let's take a closer look at the key steps to launch your own gaming project and nuances you will encounter at each stage.

Market research and legal structuring

As with any other business, we believe it’s essential to start by defining your target markets and the value of your product in those markets. The uniqueness of your offer, player engagement, and regulatory aspects will play a significant role in market selection and, ultimately, in potential success of your endeavor. Selecting markets is a complex analytical task, as you have to choose not just a country you like, but one with a stable and promising iGaming market and favorable conditions for operating under desired license. An increasing number of startups are choosing Anjouan license due to its low cost and ease of obtaining, but it does not allow global operations and has several restrictions.

All of this should be considered before taking significant steps to establish the business, as it is undoubtedly cheaper and more effective to create right structure from the start than to re-structure everything later when new facts emerge. Legal support for operations and business competitiveness are two aspects to start with and should not be overlooked.

Budget and Marketing

Next, you need to evaluate your financial expectations from investments and expected return on these investments. Although gaming business is considered high-margin, it also brings significant expenses to owners. Therefore, calculate your budget: both initial and for maintaining the project throughout the first year, as gaming websites often start to pay off in the second year of operation. Rarely this happens earlier.

When starting a new business, assess the costs required to stabilize and make it profitable. Marketing, as one of the main expenses, should be considered first.

There are different ways to attract players, and their costs can also vary. The cost of attracting player will depend on market you chose earlier and traffic source you will primarily focus on. Among gaming products, affiliate traffic, attracted by third-party partners — affiliates — is particularly popular. These are often other companies that specialize in attracting audiences for iGaming sites, knowing all the nuances of this process, and do so for a fixed cost or revenue share from these players.

Creation of own affiliate program is something you should also consider if you plan to work extensively with affiliates. This is specialized software and even a separate sub-brand that will develop partner relationships and attract new affiliates. Besides, there are other advertising and promotion methods that should not be ignored: advertising in search engines, apps, third-party resources, referral programs for current players, and more. All of this will shape your launch budget, which is why we recommend noting these details and creating a promotion plan in advance.

Platform and Software

Next, consider gaming software options you will use. Here, you need to decide whether you will work with an existing software provider for gaming sites or develop your own system that will serve you exclusively. Both approaches have their pros and cons.

Third-party software offers a ready-made structure that has already been tested by the market and many of your competitors. It launches from scratch in a few months and includes a set of pre-configured settings that you can use. If you lack experience in product development, this option will be an excellent choice for you. You will be able to study the ready-made solution and understand whether this option is generally interesting for you. However, such software can bring limitations and difficulties in long-term use, as it requires coordination with developer’s team and constant communication with third-parties.

If you are a more experienced startup owner, you will appreciate benefits of your own software, despite quite long development time. Here, we won't go into much detail, as your own software means unlimited possibilities for any implementations and improvements. You will be able to create bonus mechanics, tournaments, and entertainment that no one else can. This cannot be said about a standardized software system that initially offers the same functions to all its clients.

Besides the differences in use, these two solutions also differ by the cost. Developing your own software for gaming website can take years and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. In contrast, a ready-made software can be rented for a few tens of thousands and used immediately, but with all the limitations from its developer.

Dream team

Of course, the next step (or perhaps done in the same time with previous ones) is hiring employees and forming the team for your future business. An online casino is a complex structure that requires several vital departments to function.

These include acquisition and retention departments, financial and payment departments, product, user support department, analytics, and management.

We highlight management because, in our opinion, it is a very important part of your team. In today's iGaming market, it is not an easy task to find experienced managers who will take responsibility for entire product. Under their leadership, structure will be operating daily. Despite the obvious fact that each employee brings incredibly valuable contributions, management reflects the culture and drives company's growth constantly, without weekends and breaks. Therefore, we recommend paying special attention to hiring top and middle management in your future startup.

Payment Systems

One of the most important stages in forming a new gaming product is connecting payment systems, as without them, it is obviously impossible to accept deposits and make payouts of winnings.

Although we do not place this stage first, in reality, it often needs to be addressed simultaneously with market selection and legal structuring. Sometimes it is easier to start with payment analytics and select markets that allow working with a good set of payment systems and avoid constant difficulties. Within offshore licenses like Curaçao and Anjouan, it is not possible to unequivocally choose perfect markets from the perspective of payment systems. However, it is possible to outline simpler and more complex markets for operation and measure these complexities in exact figures.

Monoup offers payment analytics service for new projects and assistance in market selection from perspective of payment systems. Since we know how difficult it can be to navigate this issue, especially if you come from another industry and are just beginning in iGaming. Text us for details and to order this service!

And if we briefly summarize this stage, once you have a license and a website, you can confidently proceed with connecting payment systems, opening accounts, and adjusting cashier on the website. After this, you are closer to release than ever.

Finances

Despite already touching on the budget and expenses, we still highlight financial aspect separately and formation of financial department in your company. At the launch stages, you already need at least a small team that will handle settlements with partners, payouts to players, and control cash flows.

In the startup day-to-day hustle, you can easily miss something and get confused in your own expenses. To prevent this, hire a responsible manager or CFO who will keep up with all money movements. Excel spreadsheets are the eternal engine of accounting, but sometimes they fail or cannot handle strong volumes.

Retention

The final stage in our list is forming player retention strategy and loaylty department. Retention is a set of activities and rules that your project will apply to engage existing audience in active play.

Attracting a user is not enough to make money, to be honest. Since you spend much more on attracting them than they bring you profit initially. Therefore, main task of any business (even outside of gaming industry) is to learn how to be interesting to your user and maintain long-lasting relationships. For this, you will need serious analytics, studying habits and preferences of your audience, setting up cooperation with marketing and other departments of the company. All this will allow you to better understand the needs of your audience and "hit the target," meeting these needs.

In conclusion, we would like to highlight that today we have discussed plan for launching a gaming niche business project superficially. Detailed discussion is always available to you in consultation with us. Regardless of market or type of product you choose, this scheme can be applied and serve as a guide or tip for you. Nevertheless, individual features may exist, and we always recommend consulting with professionals on relevant issues.