
Setting the Standard for Responsible and Sustainable Growth in the iGaming Industry with Chetan Pandya, Chief Product Officer at Pragmatic Solutions
Product Leaders Podcast · 2023-04-18 · 36 min
Substance score
50 / 100
Five dimensions, 20 points each
What our scoring noted
Our reviewer’s read on each dimension, with quotes from the episode.
Insight Density
The episode contains a useful cluster of operational specifics - KYC provider stack, onboarding team composition, affordability threshold mechanics, and the 80-90%/10% revenue concentration stat - but these are diluted by extended passages of general platform analogy, motivational leadership reflection, and filler conversation. The net yield of actionable insight per minute is moderate.
almost 80 to 90% of revenues which are generated on all these gaming companies are from less than 10% of the customers
within this we are able to close the scope, close the requirement. It's always the first step. This is what we have, this is what you need. Let's close the gap. Once the gap is scoped out, by and large it takes us less than a month to actually get a client live
Originality
The episode leans heavily on recycled frameworks - Lean Canvas name-drop, Airbnb/Uber platform analogies, 'ask why three times,' customer-needs-holes-not-drills. The Zynga conversion failure anecdote and Spain/Bingo product-market fit surprise are genuinely original first-person examples, but they are isolated bright spots in otherwise well-worn territory.
Take Airbnb for example, doesn't own a single house, but it's connected. It's a platform that connects everybody. Take Uber for example
Lean Canvas is a slight modification to Business Model Canvas by Alex Osterwalder
Guest Caliber
Chetan Pandya is a genuine 20-year domain practitioner - PartyGaming from 2003 through its £4-12 billion LSE listing, a UNICEF lottery product, and now CPO of a B2B iGaming platform - giving him real operational credibility. He is a practitioner, not a thought-leader, but his seniority and domain depth are solid rather than exceptional for a C-suite podcast.
I joined party Gaming. Party Gaming was at one point in time world's largest online gaming organization. In 2005 it listed in London Stock Exchange with the valuation of around £4 billion
three years back when I joined, we had roughly 20, 25 people in the team. Now we are hitting 120, 150 plus
Specificity & Evidence
The transcript delivers a meaningful number of named data points: specific companies (PartyGaming, Zynga, GBG, Comply Advantage, Nectone), concrete metrics (£10 daily threshold, 5 KYC checks, 3-month-to-1-month onboarding reduction, 8-9M Zynga users yielding only 50-60 conversions), and named jurisdictions. This is above average specificity for this episode length, though some claims remain unverified and context-light.
we signed a deal with Zynga and our analytics team said that, Listen, Chetan, 8 million customers, Zynga has... We didn't get more than 50, 60 customers
we've been able to reduce the time to market from almost three months, which is when I joined in, to almost a month
Conversational Craft
The host occasionally produces a sharp follow-up - notably the 'new whale/Arabian prince' affordability challenge - but frequently asks vague openers ('how it was, how it's been so far'), self-inserts with anecdotes about his own agency, and never meaningfully pushes back on claims. The host even misnames the guest 'Justin' in the introduction, signalling preparation gaps.
how do you determine whether he can afford it or not? Maybe it's a new whale, new VIP because it's Arabian prince and £10 for this person is nothing
I worked in gambling a little bit far, far away, I mean 10 years maybe ago and I remember the operations. It was a nightmare
Conversation analysis
Computed from the transcript - who did the talking, and the verbal tics along the way.
Share of words spoken
- Speaker B82%
- Speaker A18%
Filler words
Episode notes
A big shoutout to all product leaders. Welcome to the Product Leaders Podcast by Fireart with your hosts, Dima Venglinski and Tolik Nguyen. Every episode is a deep dive into different aspects of product leadership to enhance the end-user experience. In this episode, Dima is joined by Chetan Pandya , Chief Product Officer at Pragmatic Solutions , an iGaming platform that provides proprietary core technology solutions for regulated gambling business operations. They explore the iGaming industry, including Pragmatic Solutions' proprietary core technology for business operations, responsible scaling without exploitation, and regulated versus unregulated markets. Topics we discuss: Taking the iGaming industry to the next level How to assess and tailor the needs of each operator Responsible scaling without exploitation The differences between regulated and unregulated markets in the gaming industry Hot Takes and Key Highlights: Revolutionizing iGaming Pragmatic Solutions aims to provide a modern, open, and adaptable microservices platform based on APIs for the iGaming industry, catering to the requirements of even the most extensive iGaming operators.
Full transcript
36 minTranscribed and scored by The B2B Podcast Index.
Welcome to Product Leaders Podcast, a podcast by Fire Art Studio. We delve into the world of product leadership to help empower you to improve end user experience. I'm your host, Bimovan Glinsky. Hello ladies and gentlemen, my name is Nimo Magnski. I'm host at Product Leaders Podcast Today. Our guest is Chitan Pandya. He is passionate about creating value for customers in B2C and B2B space. He's experienced in building and scaling startups and managing large scale organizations. His main focus is the customer journey and KPIs to drive continuous innovation. He's Chief Product Officer at Pragmatic Solutions. He's also the founder of Product Pundit. Hello Justin, how are you doing today? Good. Thank you for having me here. Thank you for joining us. Tell me a little bit about your background, your experience and your current position. So my journey started at a very early age when my father was an entrepreneur in a small village in India called Kundia. He would send me out on bicycle with a couple of bags full of products and then he would ask me to go village to village and sell these products and as part of that exchange, have conversations, learn marketing and this is where the foundation were built. Moving forward 2003, I joined party Gaming. Party Gaming was at one point in time world's largest online gaming organization. In 2005 it listed in London Stock Exchange with the valuation of around £4 billion. I think within a couple of months the valuation went from 4 to 12 billion. And this was the place that essentially set the ground rules on how online gaming should operate. We had casinos, we had sportsbook, we had poker, we had Baccarat. And this is where the foundation in terms of product management was set in. Moving on from there, I had a very exciting startup at unicef, Lotoria. It was the first lottery product with UNICEF in Norway. We ran that for a couple of years. And my current job with Product Pundit and with Pragmatic Solutions is where I'm working in this iGaming, we call it PAM. PAM is essentially Player Account Management where I'm leading a team of talented product managers and technology developers. Interesting foundation, interesting experience. You joined gambling business being pretty young, right? Pretty young, yes. By accident. Sheer accident. Yeah. It's usually that case. But it's interesting that you have very solid experience in this particular domain. Probably you know everything about everything. Yes, yeah. You have to be jacked of all trades. And it's an interesting and it's a fascinating business as well, of course. What brought you to Pragmatic Solutions? The reason I joined Pragmatic Solutions was this was a conversation I had with one of the founders of Pragmatic Solutions. And at any point in time I've experienced that when you're dealing directly with the founders, founders that are much more invested, and they're invested out of sheer passion to build something really great. And that was the key reason why I joined, because I had the opportunity to work directly with the people who had built the organization. And also quite a lot of colleagues that I have in Pragmatic Solutions were also my friends at party gaming, which made the transition a lot easier. You've been working there for two years, three years now, right? Almost three years, yes. Cool. And how it was, how it's been so far. Yeah, it's been challenging. It's been fantastic. In fact, three years back when I joined, we had roughly 20, 25 people in the team. Now we are hitting 120, 150 plus. So the growth has been pretty quick. Yes. Helped by Pandemic because during those days, quite a lot of people had moved or turned towards online activities, including online gaming. So it has grown and along with it, challenges have grown as well. And that's exactly the phase that we are trying to manage within the organization, making sure that the culture isn't lost, making sure that when we go from a small number to a large number, we don't lose what made Pragmatic Solutions unique. So that's the challenging and the exciting phase that we're going through right now. Got it. And tell me about the company a little bit, what it does. Yes. So it's a platform company. The secret is in the name igaming platform. One of the key reasons why we entered into the platform model was if you look at the last decade, or probably even more going back, you have platform organizations that have come up facilitated quite a lot of requirements. Take Airbnb for example, doesn't own a single house, but it's connected. It's a platform that connects everybody. Take Uber for example, doesn't own fleet of cars, but it's provided a platform that connect people and owners with cars and create a system. As we know, Uber has been same with Amazon to large an extent. Although I know that Amazon has started moving towards also having its own mini factories of producing products. But by and large, these are platforms that facilitate and integrate communication. And I think that's where we are unique, that as an iGaming platform provider, we provide a facility where anyone can have an idea for a game. Anybody can have an idea in terms of creating a unique product model for gamification. But every gaming product requires account services, requires deposit and cashier services, requires risk management. So by leveraging all the knowledge that we've had over the last couple of decades, we've created a platform which any game provider can plug into. And once they're plugged into our system, they naturally get the benefit of risk management, of account management, of bonuses and promotions, of all the wealth of knowledge that we've acquired over these years. So yeah, in a nutshell, this is another platform going by the trend of how platform organizations are the ones that are better placed in providing a service that is common across all the other components. So you're in B2B space, your clients and users are businesses. Absolutely. We are in a pure B2B space. Okay, got it. I always curious, because we talk about that with CPOs a lot in different scales of companies. How close are you as a CPO to your end users? How often you talk with them? So this is almost a daily conversation. And it started from the fact that when we started this, when I joined this actually there were handful of people who are dealing with the clients. So by virtue of that fact, the account management ended up reporting into me as well. So even though I was the chief product officer, I also dealt with the clients. I dealt with daily escalations, I've dealt with things like incident management, written documents. So I have a conversation with my clients on a daily basis. And without a direct conversation with the client, it gets even harder to understand where the client has its problem, has its challenges, which has even been made difficult by the COVID Almost everybody had to work remotely. I haven't met some of my clients, which I actually met very recently in the conferences in London. But for the last two years, when we had this pandemic going, we didn't meet anyone face to face. So it was even more important to talk to them on almost a daily basis and have some kind of a health check. So yes, the interaction is very frequent. And the other reason why their interaction is frequent is because the gaming industry is extremely dynamic. It changes almost on a bi weekly or a monthly basis. For example, Sweden decides to implement online regulation and that goes through a major upheaval because a lot of the clients are operating in Sweden and now they need to figure out that if Sweden regulates online gaming, what are the rules and balances I need to follow? Finland can do the same thing. The entire global system is now moving towards more regulated gaming. And that's why you see countries talking more Often about regulation. Some countries have taken phenomenal leap, a lot of lead. For example, ukgc, the United Kingdom Gambling Commission is one of the leaders in terms of implementing these regulatory practices. But every country slowly but surely is moving towards this model. And that means it impacts my operators business model, which means it impacts me, which means we need to have very frequent connection and conversations. Yeah, I heard that ukgc, even now, even after the loot box. Loot boxes of EA Games. Yes, because they treat it as gambling as well because you pay for them and basically you can tell that. And I'm in agreement with ukgc. Loot boxes are and should be regulated. Yes, definitely. It's not safe and maybe we'll cover this during our responsible gaming conversation. But yeah, everybody has a responsibility and accountability to provide a game or a service that doesn't exploit children. Sure, I agree with that. Pragmatic Solutions says on its website delivers a modern, open, scalable and flexible API based microservices platform capable of meeting all the needs of even the largest igaming operators. Question, how do I assess the needs of each operator and tailor the experience to that requirement? Yeah, that's interesting. So we always start with a base template of having X or Y modules that we make available to every operator that we on board. But then as you asked. Right. The assessment of every operator depends on three factors. Which market they are looking to enter, which along with that, which jurisdiction and which rules they want to implement. And finally the size. Between these three elements we can assess whether the operator is going to require a lot of risk rules or is an operator going to require a lot of bonus and promotion functions. And these are all connected to how markets operate, how jurisdictions operate and how the sizes are in terms of the expected revenue from each of these operators. When you sign a new client, I understand there is a team behind this client that tailors the experience for this company that prepares everything because it's different jurisdiction, different context, different companies. So you need to prepare a lot. What is the size of the team that works with each client usually? And how much time do you need to onboard a new experience for new company? All right, so the team, or as we call it onboarding task force, it comprises of two product managers, one tech lead, an account manager that assigned to the client and a customer success manager. And within this we are able to close the scope, close the requirement. It's always the first step. This is what we have, this is what you need. Let's close the gap. Once the gap is scoped out, by and large it takes us less than a month to actually get a client live. Obviously there are other elements in terms of clients wanting to add additional features or client wanting to integrate some new providers. But we have been able to reduce the time to market from almost three months, which is when I joined in, to almost a month, looking at even reducing it even further down so that it becomes a completely standardized service. But just to answer your question, within a month we've had clients go live on our platform. Oh, that sounds really fast. It is fast, yes. Kudos to your company. Thank you. We are proud of the speed with which we operate here. And all credit to my technology team. They're phenomenal. Absolutely phenomenal. Yeah, it sounds really, really fast. No, I worked in gambling a little bit far, far away, I mean 10 years maybe ago and I remember the operations. It was a nightmare. Yes. In terms of responsibility, how does your platform allow for responsible scaling without exploitation? Yeah, I don't want to give tried and tested answer that. We take responsible gaming very seriously. Almost every organization has the same line. But the way we approach responsible gaming is from two areas, right? A, we are all part of the community, we are all part of society. We all have responsibilities we do not need or we should not be. Someone should not have to tell that hey, you need to act responsibility. So that's part of our DNA, that part of our conversation. And the second area where we come from this is that every market that you want to launch has its own set of rules and regulations that you have to follow. So I'll stress more on the first point where you want to understand that when you go live in a particular market, every section of the society, every area, every, every place that we go live in, you'll always find clients that are vulnerable or clients that are susceptible or clients, I wouldn't even call them clients. Or you know, for example, underage children who should not be playing online. In fact, there are age validations on movies, there are age restrictions on games. Even my six year old, I don't let them play certain games on PlayStation because it's not something which they will be able to understand. So we have our own internal risk rules, we have our own internal data sharing and the way it works is say you're a player who signs up A you need to go through all the verification. We have at least 5 KYC know your customer verifications on the platform that check that every single detail that you've entered on the platform is correct, that you're not underage. For that we use third party Integration services. For that we use address lookups and we make sure that you are who you are, you are not underage. That's the first check. The second check is as you start spending money on the game. Our intention is not for you to spend your entire life's income on the game. That's not the idea of having games for fun. The idea that we understand, again this is based on data sharing. This is based on the player behavior that if somebody is depositing, say 10 pounds, has an income of certain amount, that's considered okay. But if the same player starts depositing 10 pounds every day and starts losing, that's an alarm bell. That's something that we do not encourage. So every player, when you create an account, has to set a daily limit, a monthly limit, and then based on these limits, we validate and check that the player is not going beyond the limits that they have set for themselves. And coming from the business point of view, almost 80 to 90% of revenues which are generated on all these gaming companies are from less than 10% of the customers, which we sometimes label as VIPs. Now these are customers who know what they're doing, who have been at it for number of years. Some of these, you may say, are professional gamers and gamblers in their own right. But the rest of the 90% that brings roughly 10% of the revenue include vulnerable individuals that should be protected. So if you look at it, the idea is to make sure that people who are experienced in gaming should be given the right experience in platform. People who are not experienced in gaming should be given support. And also if you identify that somebody is attempting to spend more than their means, we should stop them, we should prevent them. There should be no marketing communication sent to everybody. And I think on this right, ukgc, mga, all the other regulatory bodies have done quite a lot of good work in enforcing these rules so that even by mistake you avoid any of these things happening to the customer. And that's essentially the DNA conversation that we have internally. That for us, responsible gaming is not something that we enforce just because someone asks us, it's because they all have families, right? We all have vulnerable individuals in our lives and it's our responsibility that an experience of game should continue and remain pure in terms of gaming. And just to close off that point, although we look at gaming and other industries in terms of responsible gaming, there are other platforms. So you talk about Instagram and I remember a case few years back when there was a lot of self harm because children could watch self harming. Videos. And this is again a similar example, that there will always be vulnerable individuals in our society. And if you're making money, if you're generating a business, if you're operating profit model, you have to take accountability and you have to show responsibility towards protecting those individuals. Instagram or Facebook cannot wash their hands off saying, not my problem, it's the algorithm doing the job. Or YouTube can't say that. Hate video spreading, not my fault, it's the algorithm doing the work. Similarly, us as a platform or our operators that operate on our platform have a sense of responsibility and we can't just, we shouldn't just be washing our hands off. So I can talk about this topic for hours together because we really, really believe that to be responsible is the key for you to succeed. You're part of the society, you're part of the group, you're part of the community. I can listen it for hours, it's not a problem. Very interesting question. You said that, for example, one person starts spending 10 pounds every day and you flag it as a not okay behavior. But how do you determine whether he can afford it or not? Maybe it's a new whale, new VIP because it's Arabian prince and £10 for this person is nothing. Or maybe £1,000 every day. So how people transist between being flagged as a risk person under a risk of overspending to be in a vip? That's a good question. So we always start with a minimum threshold of 10 pounds. We don't start with a threshold of thousand pounds. So even if you're a prince of Arabia, your first deposit point should be limited to 10. And if you have the capacity to spend more, then you would have to get in touch with the customer service, you would have to have a conversation with the customer service and you would have to convince the investigation team that you are indeed who you are and are capable of spending more money. And only once. All the checks. So there's an affordability test, requires you provide information with regards to the incomes so that the teams can assess whether you are able to spend more than the general threshold of £10. And this is a guideline and a guidance that we work with the UKGC and mga. So every quarter there's an assessment because as you know, affordability changes with time. Today you think 10 pounds are a small amount of money to spend on a daily basis, but maybe six months from now, if the economy starts struggling and people start finding it difficult to make ends meet, this 10 pound can become a major issue. So we work with the gaming commissions, with the gambling commissions to check the threshold. We always validate with them and also we have our our own data points to check that affordability tests are done. The area where they're living in essentially something where it show that they can afford to spend a bit more money. Documents reflect there are conversations with the investigations team and the customer. Because in most of the times you have to have face to face communication. We've also implemented facetime checks. So earlier it used to be okay to just send a document. Right? You scan a document and you can forge a document. But we made it mandatory that it's not just sufficient to send document, you have to actually be on camera, on a live camera, which you can't fake. Plus you have to get validations from your bank and every area. For example, in UK you cannot use credit cards. We stopped accepting credit cards because it's risky. You don't have that threshold with the credit card. So there is external data, there is internal analysis and data, there's gaming commissions. Everybody gets together and creates a model that assesses on a regular basis. And that's how we identify if there are vulnerable individuals within the system. Interesting. And this affordability tests and customer care is on your side or it's on client side with your support. Right. So as a platform we have our own internal rules, we have an extensive rule of risk management linked accounts and on top of that we integrate with multitude of third party providers who actually specialize in this. So there's gbg one of the top in uk this comply advantage, there's Nectone who have real time messaging system to identify trends among players and customers. So there are at least 7 or 8 various KYC providers that we work together to identify and assess the player behavior. Okay, interesting. Another question about jurisdiction. If let's say I want to open a casino in Larnaca, I have to follow the Larnaca jurisdiction. Or if there is a player who came from Europe, so he is European citizen, he is allowed to use GDPR compliant policies. Right. And probably there are more policies that I don't know that are connected to gambling. So I should treat this customer as he's playing in my Larnacas casino or as a European citizen. It's a good question. So by and large there are two regulated markets, unregulated markets. If your country, if a jurisdiction is part of a regulated market, for example UK is part of a regulated market. Volta Gaming Commission has set up countries in Europe. Germany has a regulated market, Spain has a regulated market. Ontario has a regulated market. All these countries which have already a regulated market in jurisdiction, for you to create an account, you would always be directed or redirected to the website which is sitting within your jurisdiction. And from then on there's a real time connection between the platform and these regulatory authorities. So even if you as much as sneeze on the platform, we have to inform the regulator regulatory commission that there was this event that took place. And then depending on the message that we get back from the regulatory authorities, depending on the country, you would be able to proceed. The second is countries that do not have online regulation. And as I said earlier, most countries, or in fact all the countries would eventually start moving towards a regulated market because that gives them not only visibility on who's playing, but also give them visibility on what type of operators they should allow. In order for you to operate in uk, the rules and the requirements are extremely strict. So if you are an organization with say maybe 10 million in funding, you cannot survive in UK. Your funding needs to be much higher to be able to operate in uk. So a regulated market then puts that requirement the non regulated markets. If you are part of a non regulated market and are operators operating in non regulated market, then that's where it depends on how the operator puts the responsible gaming checks and balances. In our case for our platform, we have completely moved towards a regulated market because we do believe that platform, as an operator that is working under a regulated market, under the guidance of Countries Gambling Commission, we are able to provide a better service and we're able to also have a sustainable income because these rules don't change on a daily basis. Whereas in an unregulated market, the countries can decide to pull out, the countries can decide to put a ban and that becomes very difficult for an operator operating in those conditions because suddenly they've lost a chunk of revenue and they don't know how to close that gap. So our goal and our focus has been purely regulated markets. How would you say what would be the ratio between regulated and unregulated market? Currently I think there's a huge unregulated market still out there. In terms of regulated market, I can count them on my fingers, probably around 10. But unregulated, as you can see rest of the world, there hasn't been quite a lot of regulation that has come in. Some of this is also the byproduct of political situations in those countries and some of these are considered taboo. For example, India, one of the biggest gaming and gambling markets. But the reluctance of Garments to regulate it is also because gambling was considered taboo in Indian society or you look at other countries, Russia for example. Russia is in a completely different flux right now. So regulating Russia would be the last thing on their mind. So the factors that govern when a country should be regulated or not regulated are not always dependent on business since they're dependent quite a lot on political situations, stability or if there are other things. South State is still a major chunk of the world which has yet to be regulated. Okay, got it. And what is the speed of transition currently? When do you think approximately that the whole world, or maybe almost the whole world, like 90% of the world would be regulated. From my point of view and I think from everyone's point of view, the sooner the better. The sooner the country regulate, the better it is for all the individuals because then they are able to work with white label solutions or they're able to work with platforms such as ours that provide a cleaner service. But it's anyone's guess how soon this will happen. If I have to put a year, maybe 2025, some of the major economies turning into regulated markets. US as you can see, is already turning towards regulated market. Same with Ontario. I'm sure rest of the region will follow. Germany is there, Spain's there, UK is already there, Romania is there. I think Finland, Sweden are next. So yeah, maybe we can say 2025. Okay. I expected honestly something like 2080 or something, I don't know, it's anyone's guess. For example, I come from India, but I don't know when India is going to regulate the. It's like seesaw, it keeps changing, it keeps fluctuating. So it's hard to predict. I got it. As a cpo, what is your direct influence on organizational growth? So one of the key roles as a Chief Product Officer is to constantly monitor both internal environments and external environments. Because the strategy and the vision that you have decided with the organization structure and you start moving your organization towards that area, it's very important for you to listen to the events. As I said, you know, both internal, external. Two things which I'm really proud of and which have really helped the organizational growth. First is every conversation in the organization is about problem statement. If there's a meeting, if there's a conversation, if there's a new requirement from anyone, the first question we ask is what's the problem that you're trying to solve? And this is fundamental to how we operate because every time you talk to you have any conversation on a new requirement, it's almost always about, I need this, I need you to do this or build me this. And we actually start drilling down into the problem. What is the problem that you're trying to solve? A very unrelated example from the gaming industry is suppose a customer has a car. Customer comes up and says, replace the tire of my car. Now that's what the customer thinks the customer needs. Now I could simply replace the tire of the car, charge the customer and he'll be on his way. Or I could say, what's the problem? These are all probing questions that you ask. You ask why three times or you ask the problem statement and it turns out that the problem is tire is deflated, it doesn't have air. In which case I'm just going to get air, pump, fill the tire with air and the customer will be on his way. As opposed to, you know, the previous one where I just blindly replace the tire. And you can clearly see that the customer would feel cheated if I were to give that solution of just a brand new tire. It would waste my time, my resources, time. And third, it would not send the organization in the right direction. Right. We believe in an organization where you focus on the problem and give the right solution. So that I think is one of the biggest cultural changes and biggest influences that we have in terms of growth. And the second, which is again related, is Lean Canvas. So Lean Canvas is a slight modification to Business Model Canvas by Alex Osterwalder. Lean Canvas was created by Ash Moria and it again starts with the problem statement with key metrics. One of the interesting question is when anyone comes up with a big roadmap item, you say, what's the unfair advantage that we have for doing this as opposed to someone else? So I think all of these elements combined with deciding where and what requirements to pick up depending on which phase or stage of the organization you are in, those are things that have direct influence on the organizational growth. Okay, got it. It's good to example with the car. I used to say that customers usually don't need a machine that make holes. They need holes, right? Yes. And you remember, I think it was Ford who said that if I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have said faster horses when he came up with the food motor. So I'm not discounting the fact that customers never know what they want. They do. But our job is to direct or guide the conversation in the right way. Customer might have a genuine need, why he or she wants something. But by digging into the problem statement, you're able to validate the requirement. Yeah, it happens in our company as well that customers come to us and ask for better design websites, new websites for example. And our UX designers usually ask them, but why you need a new website? I mean, your website is piece of shit. Yes, no offense, but it's probably works because you have money, because your business is running. Right. So why need a new website? Oh, you know, it doesn't look good, good and stuff. So we dig deeper and we dig the data and we understand that it's actually could work better. So we do a redesign. Not because customer says so, but because we know that we could improve the numbers. Right. You get to the problem. Absolutely right. We are crying. Not every customer allows us to do so. It happens quite often that people think that they know exactly what they want, so they are customers. Okay, you want that, all right. But yeah, I understand what you're talking about. What is one mistake you've made that taught you the most? So let me start by saying that I've made plenty of mistakes. Who didn't? Yeah, I've made a lot of mistakes. I've learned quite a lot from my mistakes. One of the mistakes that probably taught me most was when I started my leadership journey. And it probably something that will resonate with everybody who's been in a position of leadership is sometimes you let the constant pressure get the better of you. Right. You're building a team and you're also delivering the mistakes that I've made in terms of that by focusing on the deliverable, by making the conversation transactional. I almost stop treating individuals as humans. You start treating people as a resource chunk. So data. Yeah, as a data point. And I know that by all means, data is key. I believe in empirical evidence before any decision is made. But behind every data point is a human being. And they are unique, their journeys are unique, their requirements are unique. And sometimes when you have this speed which you're growing, you end up treating people as transactional elements. That's one danger. And also the other danger that that creates is you start disconnecting from yourself. Since that mistake, I've been meditating every day. I do yoga most of the days. I even have the Friday, we call it Friday, one and a half hours, catch up with the team. Where we don't talk about work, we just connect. So for example, there are some product managers who are artists, there are some product managers who actually make stuff and sell it on Etsy. And that creates a diversity, that creates the conversation which is not just about work, but it's about bonding with the team. It's about understanding that in order to be a good leader and effectively that it's not just about barking orders, it's also about connecting with them. And somewhere down the line you feel that disconnect was I think one of the mistakes that taught me a lot. And so I really consciously operate any pressure that I face, I prevent it from translating it down into my team. They need to be protected, they need to have their own rhythm of working. So yeah, that I would say is one mistake that taught me the most. Yeah, but it's very good approach of yours. It's also connected to our families. Right. You work hard at work, you go back to home and then you have your mood with you that you created and that thrilled through work. So you need to limit it somehow. Absolutely. You bring it to your house. Right. It's so infectious. And before you know, you turned into this person that you know how we look back at our college life. So when we catch up with our friends at college and say we had fun and this is how we used to lead our lives and slowly, slowly you turn into a completely different individuals that almost unrecognizable. And that's because you allow the pressure to change. And that's I think probably one of the biggest challenges that we all face with increasing pressure on work, increasing pressure on every other aspect of life. Right. And yeah, that's a slippery slope. Yeah, I agree. We are almost run out of time. So last closing question is, do you have any interesting insights about your domain or its customers that you can share with us? Yes, plenty. For example, like I said earlier, almost 80, 90% of our revenue comes from 10 to 20% of our customers. When we launched in Spain, our biggest product was Sputzbook and we signed up some of the football legends in Spain, assuming that the market's going to really go good. But it turned out after a major expense on the campaign. Bingo was the key product that was popular in Spain, which we hadn't thought of. So every country that we went with some hypothesis, with some assumption, we've always learned something interesting or exciting that actually, you know, we thought this is going to work. And I don't know if you remember, this is quite some time back, that's how old I am. Zynga. Do you remember Zynga Poker? So this was the American startup and zynga had about 8 to 9 million customers in UK. We signed a deal with Zynga and our analytics team said that, Listen, Chetan, 8 million customers, Zynga has. If we turn them into playing poker and casino, even if one person convert will be millionaires. And so we signed the deal five years we ran Zynga Casino, Zynga Poker. We didn't get more than 50, 60 customers. The amount of money we spent was just abysmal. Obviously the analyst left the company. So every time, every launch we're learning something. We adopting to these changes. Yeah, I would say these are some of the examples that are really funny and fascinating. Yeah, this is very interesting. Thank you very much. Thank you for your time today. It was very interesting conversation. We learned a lot about your domain. I could listen it for hours again, but we can't. Thanks for the opportunity, Dima. Much appreciated. Product Leaders Podcast is brought to you by Fire Art Studio. I was the host, Dima Venginski. To find out more about Fire Art and how we aim to build a brand that will contribute to the world with useful products that empower people and make their lives easier, visit FireArt Studio. Search for product leaders in Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts Podcasts or anywhere else podcasts are found. Make sure to click subscribe so you never miss any future episodes. On behalf of the team here at firered Studio, thank you very much for listening.
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