The Art of Failing: Increasing Income Through Personal Growth
By: Mike Hunter
Tags: Casino, Personal Growth, Gambling, Online Business

Having built my own business by addressing specific needs and pains, I can instantly recognize a business not rooted in genuine client needs and wants. It looms for me, as soon as I dig into the services offered. I believe most people can also relate to this. When the business takes care of their customers, it can be felt.

Many businesses start with great and bright ideas, but mine was rooted in failure and watered with bitter tears (in a manner of speaking). And now I know that no successful business from scratch, and no scaling, is possible, without personal growth. Unfortunately, this is a bumpy road everyone would like to avoid. However, failing is inevitable; the question is whether the entrepreneur’s personal worldview and vision will allow him/her to digest the failure, and grow on it. This is perhaps the most valuable feature of a successful entrepreneur.

Background for Business

I have always been into the culture of gambling, from my childhood. I was taught to play chess early in life, and enjoyed that strategic game a lot, but I lacked the aspect of gamble, and the aspect of reward. Purely a noble win was not enough; I felt the stakes should be higher. This is what I looked for in movies about casinos and playing casino games. Until today, I am fascinated by movies about casinos or gambling — like James Bond movies, or Ocean’s Eleven. I loved casinos and the very concept behind them since the time I was allowed to watch TV.

Little surprise that, eventually, I started gambling as soon as I was legally allowed in my jurisdiction. The monetary reward, although obviously desired by all gamblers, was not really that important for me. Rather, I enjoyed the elegant strategy and the complexity of the game; I was fascinated by the chance of getting a lot by betting a little. As a result, I became quite a skilled poker player.

When online casinos started to arrive, I immediately jumped in, believing my online experience would not be much different from offline casino houses. Yet, I was so very wrong.

I thought I had taken a smart approach to choosing casino platforms; I read reviews, watched the scores, and checked what people said. I chose only casino sites with the most positive reviews and high scores; claimed bonuses, and played wisely, but failed to win anything again and again. Casinos have literally taken my money, promised me a pie in the sky, and then told me I had violated the rules, and my winnings were void. After this pattern has repeated itself several times, I thought maybe it was me doing something wrong.

Fails Leading to Insights

I actually had lots of problems with those online casinos, besides losing some deposits. My data was stolen once; my deposits failed; my account was freezed with no reason multiple times; my withdrawal requests were rejected; my winnings were forfeited. This had nothing to do with my gambling experience or playing skills; it was something I did wrong when choosing an online casino to play at.

I have read reviews with positive scores and believed the casino sites were safe, reliable, and decent, since people said good things about the sites. However, as I have afterwards realized, the niche of online reviews was rotten to the core, misleading the potential customers into trusting low quality casinos.

I was extremely frustrated and angry, until due to a twist of fate, I became an employee to a SEO team in the online gambling niche project. Besides actually getting really good at SEO methods and techniques, and enhancing my knowledge as an expert in the field, I had eventually realized how online casinos worked, and how to assess and analyze them in order to tell good from bad ones.

To be honest, actually being an employee in a company that run an online gambling project was a challenge for me at the beginning; despite really cool perks and the possibility to grow as a professional, I was still too angry because of my online gambling failures. I thought that each and every online gambling business was in essence a fraud. But on mature deliberation, I decided to give it all a chance, and try to understand the niche from the inside. This step was an important milestone for me as an entrepreneur, and demanded considerable personal growth motivation. In the end, I could not allow my previous online gambling fails to prevent me from getting a good job and growing even more.

Turning Weakness Into Strength

As soon as I have learned more about online gambling niche from the inside, and understood how it all really works, I have realized how inexperienced and naive I was as a gambler when I made my first tries with online casinos. I lacked proper knowledge about how casinos worked, and as a result was not able to objectively assess a platform that offered me games, wins, and entertainment. I constantly needed a second opinion, and looked for it in online casino reviews, but reviews have been mostly random, generic, and not objective (to say the least).

After I realized there were decent, reliable casino sites, I wanted to give them a try again. This time, however, I started analyzing and assessing them on my own, using new knowledge and skills acquired.

I have to confess that, when I really started to look at online gambling platforms, paying attention to the aspects that really matter, I was very ashamed of myself from the past. I used to miss the most important points, preferred reading a quick review on a third party site to thorough reading of Terms and Conditions on the actual gambling site, and was too lazy to assess whether this or that rule was advantageous for me as a player. My older and more experienced self had to live through a series of facepalms, to be honest.

After I became able to assess online casinos properly, and choose reputable and reliable ones for real money play, a thought struck me. Now, my new skills not only allow me to choose safe sites to gamble online. I can actually teach other wannabe gamblers to choose the safest and most reliable online casinos on my website.

Moreover, I have realized that, in the long term, I could have an influence on the whole industry, and become a game-changer for many gamblers in the world.

Building a Business

Having considered all my previous experience, and my new skills, I decided to actually make the CasinosHunter casino reviewing platform. There are several reasons why. Firstly, I wanted to spot the most reliable and trusted online casino sites, and making thorough reviews is the most efficient way to do that. Secondly, I wanted to bring down those scammy and unfair casinos that took my deposits and froze my accounts. It was not exactly a revenge, rather, I wanted bad service to be exposed. Thirdly, I wanted to help my fellow gamblers who were looking for safe and reliable real money gambling platforms, but were lured into registering with unsafe or fraudulent platforms. And eventually, I wanted to stimulate a long term valuable change in the niche.

Having been a failure as an online gambler myself, I have learned my lessons, and wanted to make my pains a reliable groundwork for future generations’ success. I believed — and I still do — that only demand for high quality product/service is able to stimulate healthy competition in any niche, and demand for higher quality can only be grown through education. By educating my gambling readers about high quality casino sites and services, I could teach them demand a decent service, and leave online casinos that don’t care about their customers. Eventually, low quality online casinos, together with generic low quality online casino reviewing platforms, will become uncompetitive, and the whole industry will be pushed for upgrade.

One of the first rules I have developed for myself as a reviewer is that I don’t accept payments for positive reviews. While this seems tempting, and I have to say that today, I am often offered good money for a perfect review, I don’t accept such offers. I also believe that an entrepreneur who hopes to provide high quality service in the long term, and win their customers’ trust, should be mature enough to avoid such deals.

Enhancing User Experience and Happiness

To make sure my online casino reviews are truly useful for the readers, and will educate the gamblers to tell good casinos from bad ones, I made a list of my own misconceptions and failures in my early online gambling era. I had to be really honest with myself, recall not only what happened, but also why, recalling all the stupid things I did.

Being aware of my lack of knowledge as a gambler, I could realize what essential points and nuances I had to discuss in the reviews. Being already an experienced poker player, both offline and online, I had to step out of my “successful image”, and start explaining from the very beginning, for gamblers with zero experience and zero understanding. The need to do that taught me to look at things from various points of view, and what is more important — from different levels of experience and awareness.

As soon as I have figured out the most sensitive spots and the most crucial nuances, I became able to address the most essential needs and wants of my readers. Instead of imagining what they could need or want, I was not shy to ask, but I was also ready to recall myself and my mistakes, and how much I had to pay to grow over them. The goal of meeting my readers’ most important needs — even those they were not yet aware of — became the value of my business.

Final Thoughts

Personal growth is essential for business, especially if we are talking about newbie entrepreneurs. The art of failing is the most important skill they have to develop, because, as the saying goes, a successful entrepreneur is the one who manages to get up just one more time. But one has to be humble in order to manage these failures. On the other hand, I believe that every business, big or small, must have a goal to change the world. Even a tiny business should be created with the goal of changing the world in mind. This approach helps to manage the inevitable failures, and keep the focus on bigger missions when the times get tough.