What do you get when “crazy geniuses” build tools for ambitious operators? As iGP scales beyond its platform origins, Michael Baker-Mosley, Chief Marketing Officer, reflects on the challenges of brand transformation, client fit, and the bold ambition driving the next phase of growth.
iGP has roots within the platform space, but the portfolio now spans an aggregator, crypto, turnkey, and retail solutions. What are the challenges of communicating this product breath to existing and potential clients?
It’s a complex undertaking and I think sometimes it’s worth remembering that iGP has been around since 2016. We have a pedigree, and the core of the business has always been platform. We have some brilliant people like our CTO, Grzegorz Skurjat, who’s built some of the leading platforms in the industry. What this gives us is an amazing foundation. It enables us to expand our offering into retail and build tools within the platform.
For operators our solutions represent ambition – where they want to expand and who they want to be. It’s not unusual for our partners to start out with a sportsbook or with a casino, but then once they’ve captured that demographic, they then want to start expanding their offering. The goal becomes getting additional wallet value, getting higher percentages, and cross-selling. Now, that’s not super simple because the risk management in casino versus risk management in sportsbook is vastly different. Trying to explain to a casino that with a sportsbook you might lose is challenging, but it doesn’t have to be difficult.
What kind of operator client is iGP after?
At iGP, we’ve brought in a lot of experience from tier-one B2B suppliers, but we don’t limit ourselves to tier-one operator clients. For us, mindset is super important. We’ve got grand ambitions. We assess the market, looking at other platforms (and operators on those platforms) and ascertain what they can’t do. We try to base ourselves around flexibility.
Flexibility is a wonderful thing, but in the wrong hands you have a poor product, so you’ve got to know what you’re doing. This is why having that experience is incredibly important to us. If you want to be a start-up without that experience, go work with a white-label business. We don’t do that. We want clients with bold ambitions to increase their market share.
Does iGP pick up a lot of business from clients transitioning from white label solutions?
Historically, yes. Operators would outgrow those solutions and want a platform. We used to take those clients on quite happily but now we’re getting much narrower on who we onboard. Although they might come with good experience and pedigree, the size of our platform and level of functionality necessitates an operator being at a certain scale for a partnership to make sense. Our ideal customer is multi-market – either a single market hero or with ambitions in multiple markets. In the grand scheme of things, we’re two years into the big brand iGP project and we’re starting to build traction with those tier ones. For iGP to be having conversations with household iGaming industry operators is so exciting.
How has the rebrand changed the industry’s perception of iGP?
From a practical point of view, iGaming Platform as a brand didn’t fully capture our growing multi-product vision as soon as we launched the second product, iGaming Deck, our aggregator. A major reasoning behind the rebrand was to try and educate people we have more than one product. And iGaming Platform is too prescriptive, albeit it was great for SEO. Regarding iGaming Deck, we’ve done a lot of work this year from a product, marketing and sales perspective. We’ve got a good pipeline, and our aggregator will be the star of 2025 hands down.
iGaming Platform comprised what I’d describe as “crazy geniuses” – the tech team would tinker away building cool products, a salesperson would come along and say they’ve had a conversation with a potential client about a new product, and the tech team would go and build that for them. At the time it worked, and the business was fine until ambitions grew to take this technology out to a wider market. From a marketer’s point of view, this means getting these talented tinkerers who’ve been building wonderful things a little bit recognition for what they’ve done.
Are brand ambassadors something iGP would consider?
I don’t think so. We’re a growing brand and we’re not going to spend for the sake of spend, especially when that money could go towards a developer, a new product person, improving client communication, onboarding, customer success, and so on. We don’t want to be a 200 deals a year kind of business. If having an ambassador aligns with our competitors’ brand, their audience and market then that’s great, but I don’t think we need one at iGP. It’s not for us. We want to put our people, those crazy guys tinkering away who are passionate about the product, at the forefront – despite their reluctance to do any media!
Where does your role sit in the grander scheme of iGP’s ambitions?
It’s my role to align our marketing efforts with the ambitions of the brand. I’d love to say iGP write me a blank check for marketing, but like any smart business, we’re focused on being strategic with our resources.
We are a product and tech business building something. We don’t have a B2C brand behind us like some of our B2B competitors. This means we need to be intelligent in our approach, and I think, for us, industry events are somewhere you convert all your marketing activity.
Personally, I love media – banners, content, editorial – because the lead-up to an event begins months before. Trust me – those tier-ones don’t just walk up to your stand and buy a platform. Everything from realising the vision, the ambition of the people within iGP, what the product can do and is capable of – we’ve got such a long way to go as a business to realise all that potential. It feels like we understand what we can do and where we’re going now. We’ve got momentum – the job now is to go and do it.
Link: https://content.yudu.com/web/1tjv7/0A1tjv8/G3Sept25/html/index.html?page=66&origin=reader
