Wishmaker Q&A: A dream come true

Wishmaker Casino announced its launch during the hustle and bustle of ICE 2019. The Malta-based start-up soon cut through the noise by promising players money-can’t-buy prizes, including the chance to appear in a personalised episode of cult TV show Family Guy and a three-day VIP access-all-areas trip to Maranello, the home of luxury carmaker Ferrari.

The brains behind the brand is former affiliate marketer Mihail Todorov, who founded the hugely-successful casino comparison website, Casino Tops Online. The affiliate domain soon sold to Gaming Innovation Group (GiG) for €11.5m, and Todorov reinvested the cash into the creation of Wishmaker, as it had long been his own dream to create a truly standalone casino brand.

Todorov started in the egaming industry in 2009 and leveraged his experience from his affiliate marketing days, as well as his relationships with B2B and B2C operators, to build Wishmaker from scratch. Here he talks to EGR Marketing about keeping the journey as simple as possible, targeting a new generation of players and how gamification was a key element right from the very start.

EGR Marketing: Are you based in Malta?

Mihail Todorov (MT): Yes I live here and spend most of my time here in Malta. Wishmaker plans to do an expansion at some point but our starting place will be Malta.

EGR Marketing: How did Wishmaker begin?

MT: Well, it is a long story how we ended up with Wishmaker. It is an inspiration and an aspiration that I had for a very long time. My background is in affiliate marketing and you can learn a lot about the industry in that area. I got in at the early stage where the industry was growing extensively and there were many things that have changed since then. I always wanted to create an industry brand that would stand out from the crowd. With that in mind I spent over a year researching for the right branding and another year into building Wishmaker.

EGR Marketing: Is the product built from scratch or from a white label supplier?

MT: I prefer to do things from scratch. You are free to do much more and you don’t have to be compliant with a third party. In our case we had to start with a really good reliable platform so we chose GiG’s igaming cloud for our casino platform. We have a great relationship with them and built great trust with this company so this was our choice of platform to start with.

EGR Marketing: What is your background in affiliate marketing?

MT: I started back in 2009 and I wanted to learn more about digital marketing. I also had family members with a penchant for online marketing and digital marketing but back in the day they showed me how to convert online casino customers and gambling sites. I saw these sites and thought about the future of egaming and how I could start my own casino site which I did – Casino Tops Online. My idea was to focus on quality rather than quantity so I wanted to build one quality brand rather than a big number of weak brands. I got to know the payment providers and the gaming providers as well as the operators as I really wanted to find out what was missing in the industry. I wanted to come up with something new that would be appreciated by not only the players but also the individuals involved in the egaming industry.

Wishmaker Casino founder Mihail Todorov

EGR Marketing: Why was Casino Tops Online such a success?

MT: It has been very successful. On mobile we did a search for a lot of keywords which wasn’t very popular back in the day. I have always had a huge focus on branding and also the needs of the customer. I think that brought us success and was very important for the foundations in the beginning.

EGR Marketing: How does Wishmaker stand out from the crowd of casino operators?

MT: We started with all the branding in the first place. Like my previous project, this one has a strong focus on the branding. This is something that is dismissed by a lot of emerging brands in our industry but we wanted to make the foundations very strong from the very beginning to have a really good niche. The branding says Wishmaker is fast and responsive and safe and fun. Simplicity is the core of everything that we do. We don’t want to over-complicate things so that everyone can understand it. Not just the design but the whole playing experience.

EGR Marketing: When did you start to build the Wishmaker brand?

MT: Wishmaker started as a project from scratch. We spent probably a year settling on the right brand name. At the current stage we have so many domain names that are taken or are not giving any exclusivity or uniqueness so we wanted to make sure we found the right one. We then started on the branding and then on the product development and how we can tweak it to make it unique in the industry. We have a strong product, it is something I enjoyed. I am not feeling scared about trying new things, this is what makes me happy because it is open to innovation and you can try different things and at the end of the day, we are going to be the first brand to think about you, the customer. No offence to the rest of the industry.

We are currently working on a new version called Wishfactory to make sure that we can add a lot more unique prizes and different competitions at all player levels – not just for VIPs. Everyone will be able to win these prizes but I don’t want to reveal too much right now as we are preparing a nice campaign for it. I won’t give away all the details of the prizes but we are trying to cater more to the individual to make them even more exclusive.

EGR Marketing: Which markets are you targeting?

MT: Well at the moment we are a very new and young brand. Experience tells us that a new brand should be trying out different markets and there are some basic markets for our industry. Unfortunately we are limited to some markets but we need more time to operate in more markets. Currently we are active in the UK, Germany, Finland, Norway, Sweden and Canada. They are the main ones. Having said that, these are core markets that we want to establish our brand in over the first month of up to a year but then we can keep a close eye on all markets that we can try to identify and move into.

EGR Marketing: What are the key marketing strategies you intend to use?

MT: That is a very interesting topic and this is also where we are trying to be different. Everything we believe in is top of the list of our marketing strategies. My background is in affiliate marketing and our audience is going to be the next generation of players so I would say that we want to keep everything digital – that is our primary focus. TV and radio is great for brand awareness but you don’t win any prizes for this type of marketing.

EGR Marketing: What appeals to the new generation if they are your target audience?

MT: We focus on optimising the devices that are coming into the market so we can make sure that our product is fast and responsive across all devices that are enjoyed by the new generation. We also use gamification and social aspects that the new generation enjoys but at the same time we are trying to be as clean and as simple as possible because this is at the very top of what we are trying to achieve. We want to be very clever and simplistic and modern.

Wishmaker players can win luxury prizes including a trip to Ferrari’s Maranello factory

EGR Marketing: How will the in-game currency Wishcoins work?

MT: Wishcoins is the currency of our gamification basically. Any time you place a wager, you are collecting Wishcoins and these are the key to unlocking any kind of bonus or unique rewards. They can be used on competitions or redeem everything with Wishcoins. This is the key to our gamification but we have also designed some side games which are very important to us because they can bridge the social gap between the customer and the brand. It is not really there to be played on a daily basis because we want them to focus on the actual offering. We also have the Wishfactory where the prizes can be acquired by Wishcoins and also some trophies for the social aspect of the site.

The idea was to make gamification part of the product from the very beginning. That way you avoid stuff like trying to come up with new campaigns on a monthly or weekly basis or even seasonally. Our customers love us to be consistent and simple so rewards were a good way to do that. The biggest challenge we faced was how to make it as simple as possible. Whenever we face a problem we go back to our guidelines from the very beginning. If any aspect is over-complicated, we will do it again and again until it fits in with the brand guidelines.

EGR Marketing: Can customers talk to each other on the site?

MT: Not at the moment. We haven’t considered integrating this type of feature because it would make it very easy for our customers to be distracted by adding too many social features. Again, we don’t want to overcomplicate things. The customer could be more on the social side than playing games which is not what we want but we do want the experience to be well-balanced.

EGR Marketing: Was it easy transitioning between the affiliate side of the industry and B2C?

MT: Initially I thought it was going to be very challenging. But in affiliate marketing you work alongside so many operators that you learn quite a lot of things, although in my opinion there is no other field like affiliate marketing. You learn quickly and efficiently about the industry as a whole because you are always reading news about the latest developments in egaming and you get an insight into operator data, as well as positive and negative feedback from players. You learn what they want. B2C is more challenging due to product development – it is more complex than a traditional content project like an affiliate site.

EGR Marketing: Your affiliate site sold to GiG for €11.5m. Is the plan to sell Wishmaker too?

MT: No. I made that sale because I really felt I needed to go a step further to get the budget to invest in something bigger. In our industry, projects don’t come cheap if you want to make it professionally.