Pitch iGB 2025 Q&A

Last week, I got the chance to pitch on stage at the iGB L!VE to get in front of an investor audience as well as 4 judges. Those 4 being Karolina Pelc, Adam Rosenberg, Robert Duboff and Justin Paul Anastasi. Of course with MC duties from michael caselli. Also thanks to Jamie Coles for the work behind the scenes for the event.

After the pitch, I got asked tough questions from the judges so I thought I’d do a deeper dive into some of the answers. 

All the questions presented I’m shortening and paraphrasing and you’ll have to wait for iGB Affiliate to publish the recordings.

Just a quick shoutout to newsletter supporters in StatsDrone and FTDx.

That said, let’s dive in!

Karolina Pelc (Founder of HerPlay): AI is disrupting everything including the affiliate space. How are you going to ensure that you’re not out of place if affiliate marketing becomes less viable.

I probably jumped the gun and answered this question 2 points ahead without setting this up. 

Let me start with the first point. 

I don’t think affiliate marketing will ever disappear. I do think there is a possibility that it could be disrupted but I’m not sure I see less money flowing through this ecosystem. What I do envision happening is that conversion rates and efficiencies will be improved where, if Google as a channel is delivering less traffic, us affiliate marketers will learn to optimize for performance/conversions. 

I’m already seeing that with some of our StatsDrone customers where they know their traffic has dropped but now they are working hard to make the most out of those clicks. That is, optimizing for player values and conversion rates.

Another way I could have answered this was with an email exchange I had with one of the industry’s biggest iGaming affiliates.

They shared that they will be putting more emphasis not just on SEO but on first party data. They want to own more of that player journey and be able to tap into it repeatedly in the future. 

So how does StatsDrone fit into this new ecosystem of first party data?

With our dynamic variables service. This allows for click ID level tracking where you can now send your VIPs individual tracking links and be able to follow not just their deposit history but revenue history as well. 

So if I had more time, I would have opened with that.

Now what I did answer that was jumping a few steps ahead was how we could be part of sharing of industry data (with consent) to help operators understand player values. Not their own player values, but how they rank against their competition.

Affiliates will want this data and what we all want as an industry is knowledge of the products and services that contribute to better player values.

StatsDrone likely won’t have any significant influence on player values but we will be part of the feedback loop to help affiliates and operators.

So that is a long winded way of saying how do we ensure that we stay an important part of the affiliate marketing ecosystem.

As of today, it looks like Google traffic is dropping drastically but players are still wanting online casinos and the way in which they find them will change a bit but to a limit.

Demand gen versus demand capture

Historically, affiliates have been the businesses that sit back and capture demand. That demand typically looked like a bunch of keywords in Google “best online casinos for Canada”, “Lottofy review”, “casino reviews” and “is Betway safe to play at?”.

I think we will now see more of a shift where affiliates will be part of demand gen. 

These might be buzzwords you hear more in the SaaS world but the affiliate marketing world needs to start thinking about … actual marketing!

Rob Duboff (Director at Velo Partners): For your smaller affiliates, you are trying to convince them to not use Excel, Power BI, Tableau and use your product instead? Because I guess if they're only spending 15, 20 minutes a month actually doing this kind of work, why should they be using your product instead?

We are saving affiliates far more time than 15 to 20 minutes a month.

To check your stats for a single program could take anywhere from 1 to 5 minutes, depending on what you’re looking for. 

Now if you decided to record monthly or daily totals, you’re adding even more time on top of this. 

Some of our customers have said the data reconciliation has saved them significant time—what once took weeks now takes hours.

This also depends on the affiliate that works with 5 brands, versus 50 versus 500 but the time saved is compounding.

We have launched freemium which has been a great way to capture more affiliates. Some of them are small and they are happy with freemium and others realize they are missing more features and upgrade. 

On Tableau, we actually build custom dashboards for affiliates in Tableau as we have found it is challenging to standardize dataviz for the different types of affiliates and personas. Personas being SEO affiliate, PPC affiliate, affiliate agency and affiliate networks. 

Time vs value

When we launched 4 years ago, we were pitching to affiliates we’ll save you a significant amount of time.

However, the reason why we built the app was to help affiliates identify and solve revenue leak. 

We are now pitching to affiliates about the value part and less on the time part. We think this will sell more and the response from affiliates is more emotionally charged when we talk about how we have found a few ways in which they are leaking revenue.

Going back to freemium, this gives affiliates a chance to discover who we are. We are pushing hard to change the mindset of affiliates where many out there use spreadsheets or don’t even record their data at all. 

This is our number one challenge and without going into explicit detail of how we will do it, we believe we have an amazing plan to achieve it. 

Adam Rosenberg (Senior advisor to Blackstone): There's a natural tension between how much money you're gonna raise and therefore how much of the company you're giving away versus how much you really need to achieve milestones to demonstrate product market fit, and then launch into raising more capital. Why 500,000? Why is that the right amount?

This is a great question for any startup.

I’ll start with a quick reality check that I have a Co-Founder and business partner in Darrell Helyar that is more fiscally responsible. We have a weird balance of him keeping me in check whereas sometimes I get our company to take some risks in investing in products and innovation. It just works for us.

Now we have another responsible person on our team in Jeffrey Haas who has recently joined us as an advisor. He believes we are making the right choices. Jeffrey is the founder of ID8 Global Gaming Business Accelerator.

Now what I answered on stage is our reality. We actually only need perhaps $200k to $250k. An extra $250k on top of that might give us the ability to invest a bit into marketing and save for a rainy day. 

At least for the $500k at $7.5M pre-money valuation, I don’t think we are sacrificing too much equity in the process. 

To share a few insights into our current stage of our company, our revenue is still growing steadily and the way in which we want to invest is with a few more developers and a little bit on marketing. I’d say it would be something like 60% to 70% more on devs and the remaining on marketing.

Last but not least, we do have Dmitry Belianin as an investor and he thinks it would be better to have a bit of extra money in the bank in case we need it. 

Now I ate up all the time with the first 3 questions and Justin pointed to his watch and said time.

Thankfully, I got a chance to catch up with him the day after. 

Justin Paul Anastasi (Group CEO of VentureMax): Betpass has great traction, how are you two different?

I did have some people asking about the differences between StatsDrone and BetPass so this question is very valid. 

To be fair, I watched Bruno Candido Barroso's pitch video and their presentation and communication is spot on. I already know I got to work a bit more on our pitch deck. 

I think they are a very worthy winner and this question is a tough one to get but I think this is going to help us in our messaging.

This is what I know about Betpass in comparing them to StatsDrone

Betpass is both an affiliate network and provides a white-label solution to launch your network on their platform. 

I do believe Betpass is doing the things needed for the next iteration of an affiliate network. This is something I’ve written in explicit detail late last year as to what I see in the so-called sub-affiliation space. 

You can read that article here:

https://statsdrone.com/blog/affiliate-network-2-0/

StatsDrone is a supplier of stats with CRM and Business Intelligence tools. 

We could choose to become a network or we can stay in a single lane as a technology provider.

For the short term, our focus is on being a tech company as we believe, running a network is an entirely different business and it isn’t easy to run 2 businesses at the same time, even if they are closely supporting each other. 

Now we might choose to build software for affiliate networks because we get asked all the time for this. 

Our competitors VOONIX.NET have Affhut which is the MatchingVisions.com™ platform and Routy have announced on LinkedIn recently they have a sub-affiliation platform too. Sub-affiliation being basically an affiliate network. 

In my research this is what I believe to be true based on asking pros in the affiliate marketing and software space:

• There are 5000 affiliate networks in existence, and likely more

• There are probably 100+ companies offering affiliate network software

• There are likely less than 20 companies offering stats aggregation and analytics

Not everyone wants to use an affiliate network.

As much as I think affiliate networks are going to capture more business as a growing segment within affiliate marketing, not everyone wants to a network. Not everyone trusts a network as well as they basically own your players and data. 

If you look at the top 25 EGR affiliates, most of them would never want to use a network as they want to own and manage all their deals and their data.

That is why they either have in-house stats or will use StatsDrone, Voonix or Routy. 

On the flip side, many of the smaller affiliates might be interested in joining a network. 

At least with a tool like StatsDrone, we have freemium so we can capture this audience better. If they want to join a network, we could facilitate that whether it would be our own network or we offer them a menu of networks that want their business. 

So with Betpass and StatsDrone, there is quite a bit of overlap but we are also not the same companies either. If anything, there is a potential for collaboration.

My last comment about Betpass, if you had asked me what are some things any affiliate network must do to not be just another affiliate network. I’d consider them a great example of doing more than the average affiliate network. 

Our mission statement

We do want to automate and optimize affiliate marketing not just for affiliates, but we want to make life easier for affiliate managers and operators too. 

Just imagine if we could help all affiliates keep their data and offers up to date. It would save a lot of money on compliance and the conversion rates would be substantially higher. 

I can’t think of many companies that are aiming to solve the problem we are looking to solve.