Building a Career in iGaming: John Wright’s Path from Professional Gambler to Industry Leader

With over 20 years in the iGaming industry, John’s story is one of unlikely beginnings and consistent innovation. In this interview, he recounts his unexpected entry into the world of professional gambling and how it set the stage for a successful career in affiliate marketing and software development. Now at the helm of StatsDrone, John opens up about the challenges, risks, and rewards of his journey. From mastering SEO to designing affiliate tools, his insights shed light on what it takes to thrive in the fast-paced iGaming world — and where the industry is headed next.

Q: Hello, John! It’s a pleasure to have the chance to speak with someone as experienced and interesting as you! We’re eager to hear more about your journey in the iGaming industry, learn about who you are, and find out more details about the project you’re leading right now. Shall we get started?

Your career in iGaming spans over two decades, which is remarkable! What sparked your interest in this industry, and can you share a bit about what your first role was like? Did you begin from the online or offline side of the business?

A: I actually had zero interest in the gambling industry. None!

One of my highschool friends started getting into card counting and he wanted to recruit me for his team. We had both gone to university for engineering and so he knew I had an analytical mind. 

After 2 years of him telling me how much money he was making, I was still in disbelief. His ridiculous story got more crazier when he told me he was bonus hunting. I had thought he was taking crazy to a whole new level. Despite him showing me real cheques of money he was getting in the mail, I kept saying the same thing. You can’t make money with gambling and it is stupid. 

One day he told me he bought a new luxury car and I said ok, enough. I gotta visit him and see what this is about. Sure enough, I saw that he was making good money and he was in the process of dropping out of university.

By this time, I was wrapping up my degree in engineering and thought why not. I’ll give this gambling thing a try. I’m already in a lot of student debt and what’s another $500 on my credit card going to do. I’ll get a real engineering job of this doesn’t work out.

Sure enough, it did work and out and worked out really well. 

So my first foray into the gambling industry was all online. I ended up doing this for 6 or 7 years before getting an opportunity to run a few casinos as an affiliate manager and player and VIP manager. 

Q: How would you compare a typical workday from when you started to now? And how has the balance between work hours changed over the years?

A: I can break down my career into 4 main categories:

• Professional gambling.
• Affiliate managemen.
• Affiliate sites.
• Affiliate software.

Professional gambling I had some fun doing it. It allowed me to travel the world and I could work online anytime. I just needed a laptop with internet. The work itself wasn’t entertaining but the money was good. I tended to do good work in the mornings and later at night.

With affiliate management, this was a whole new role for me. I got to work with a lot of affiliates and understand how they got started and how they run their business. My work life tended to mimic the work life of the affiliates I managed. When you manage an online casino, the casino never sleeps and many of the affiliates I worked with, were not taking any weekends off. 

Affiliate sites were a bit different. Within this experience, I also did SEO consulting and UX design building affiliate sites for others. I greatly value all of the experience I did here. I got to learn the fundamentals of SEO and design. The affiliate space can look easy at times but it can be hard. All the skills were very valuable to me and my work life balance was off. Off in the sense that I was busy all the time but I didn’t feel as productive as I did doing professional gambling or affiliate or player management. 

When I pivoted to creating StatsDrone with a friend, I think I had to change how I worked all over again. I never thought of myself as an early bird but I felt that I needed to get up early and be there for all my affiliates as customers where many of them were based in europe. My 2 main competitors are also based in Europe so I need to show up.

I’ve put a lot of responsibility on myself so it has changed how I work completely. I’m more focused than I have ever been and I attribute that to working on a project I should have been doing since day 1. 

Q: Can you think of three key decisions that helped you reach where you are today? If so, could you share them with us?

A: The first one was to skip getting a job right after finishing university and trying professional gambling. I had a degree in engineering and I can say that my friends and family were not just disappointed with me, but actually disgusted. It is like I desecrated my engineering degree from a reputable school.

My thought process was if it doesn’t work out, I’m risking $500 on my credit card which I had $40k in school debt so what was the big deal. If it doesn’t work out, I’ll get a real job.

I will stack 2 more decisions into 1 which is the first to take on the operator role managing a few casinos including player and affiliate management. This happened in 2007. In 2010 I started to build affiliate sites and made a transition into this space. At first it was uncomfortable but I would have only regretted not trying it. This time also includes learning SEO and UX design.

Those 2 experiences gave me all the experience I needed to start StatsDrone. My background is engineering and I made a very uncomfortable decision to sell my affiliate sites so I could focus on one project. The sites helped build the start of the software. A few times I didn’t think it was going to work out and I’d have to start all over.

I’m glad I took the risks because there’s only one way to find things out. 

Q: You’re seen as a guru in Affiliate Marketing. What led you to provide tools for affiliates rather than working as one yourself?

A: Haha thanks!  

Well I do have experience being an affiliate manager then building affiliate sites. I’ve seen problems on the operator and affiliate side that were not getting solved and I felt more passionate about solving this problem then I did building another affiliate site. 

For me, I learned what I’m good at and what I like to do. I like building things and solving problems. I can build an affiliate site but running it is the part I don’t enjoy, I’d rather build again and again and again. 

Overall I think I’m over qualified as an affiliate software creator. I know design, SEO, affiliate data, the operations side. As much as I feel I have a better skillset at SEO now than I did in the past, I don’t feel the urge to start another affiliate site.

On top of all of that, I’m not sure if my customers would want me competing against them. We built an app that cannot see our customer’s data and I want to earn their trust. 

Q: StatsDrone is a well-known name in the iGaming world. What sets this product apart, and who do you see as your main competitors?

A: It took me a few years to build up the name with my team. As much as I might get most of the credit as CEO, I’m lucky to have a business partner that lives and breathes the app too. I sometimes hate to admit it, but if you had to hire someone to build one of these apps, you should pick him over me. He’s that good and he’s not even a tech person.

Next I think where we have an edge is our developers have built our affiliate sites before so they understand the industry already.

My main competitors are Voonix and Routy. Voonix is the most well known app in the iGaming space and in the global affiliate marketing space, Nifty Stats is the most well known one.

If you ask all of us individually, we will all likely say we are the best stats app. What I like to say is that we all attack the problem at different angles. We’re all trying to solve the same pain point for affiliates but we all have our USPs. 

For us, we try to focus on the most program coverage and accurate data. I feel sometimes we do this at the expense of marketing or sales but we are a product-led growth company. 

Q: With the rise of AI, how has demand for your service changed?

A: I actually think Covid put more of a spotlight on our service and our competitors than AI has. 

I see AI in a different light than most. AI needs data and all of us as stats apps we can choose to get into AI or we can simply become a facilitator of data including data accuracy. I mean what good is AI analysis on your affiliate data if the data isn’t accurate.

Also I’ve been asking these questions to AI specialists for the past year and a half and I’m hearing similar answers.

Right now, many AI tools will give you the power to ask AI for analysis of your data and to give it insights. I find that most of the time, these insights aren’t very special.

I don’t think we should be asking AI for the insights, we need better analytics that have the tools to get these powerful insights. Maybe one day AI will be a part of this but I think AI will increase the speed of generating these reports but we will always need better analysts.

I think AI can help people become better analysts and this will be an important use of AI in the world of Business Intelligence. 

Q: On that note, have you incorporated any AI tools into StatsDrone?

A: My answer is either not yet or we just don’t know. We are getting approached my many companies offering to run the AI analysis part of the business. We know that in our position, they can’t do their job without stats tools like us. So we are not in a rush to go all-in on AI yet. Of course we do tests with Chat GPT but I’ve yet to see any of these AI reports come up with better ideas for analysis. 

Q: What challenges in the market does StatsDrone solve?

A: We are trying to solve more than one challenge. The first challenge was getting your data from affiliate programs.

The real reason why I wanted to go all-in on a stats app was because the ones that existed in the market, I don’t think focused on revenue leak.

Examples:

• when programs close, they don’t email you to tell you to change your links;
• when programs change affiliate software, your old links are invalidated;
• when programs are not paying, affiliates need feedback and don’t have time to spend all day in forums;
• new offers and new brands launching;
• drop or increase in conversion rates that change over time.

You can see here that affiliates can optimize their business but they need the tools and data to make this happen.

There are other pain points that we are trying to solve but I think it will take us a few years to keep pushing for improvements in affiliate marketing. 

Q: And lastly, regarding StatsDrone, how big is your team, how many projects are you currently supporting, and what are your future plans?

A: Our team is currently 11 people. We are 100% focused on our stats app with the small exception of some data research projects. 

Our future plans involve going deeper into data and creating a better ‘done for you’ service for affiliates. I’m not thinking about big money and profits, I’m thinking about how we can keep improving the app so we have a product that affiliates recommend to everyone. 

Q: We noticed you were part of the early development of Betblocker. We just recently published an interview with Duncan 🙂 What are your thoughts on that project?

A: BetBlocker was spearheaded by Duncan. I simply encouraged him to pursue the project as he was the most qualified person to consider it and he would do the best job. I gave support as the main designer behind the app and some of the web pages. 

I’d like to consider myself one of the biggest supporters of BetBlocker and I’m proud to have helped in any way possible even if in a small capacity. 

I think the project is a great one and I wish more people would take some inspiration from it and do something that has a purpose. I mean building affiliate sites is nice and fun. We create jobs and all but it isn’t every day you can build a project that transforms people’s lives.

I just want the industry to know more of what BetBlocker is and I hope it inspires more people in iGaming to support responsible gambling initiatives.

Q: A couple of personal questions: how do you like to spend your downtime? What are your hobbies?

A: I hate to admit this sometimes but work for me is now like a hobby. This project I’m doing with StatsDrone took me nearly 20 years of working on different projects to realize where I belong.

That said, let’s get real and serious.

2 of my biggest passions are cooking and houseboating.

I’ve always had an interest in cooking and around 2013 I got a bit more serious about it. I started making anything and everything. I’ve bought almost every appliance you can think of for cooking. I am an absolute pro at making cheesecake. See the pumpkin cheesecake I made last year. 

The next hobby of mine is houseboating.

Back in 2015, I wanted a break as I was constantly busy but not feeling like work was moving forward. I was ending a business partnership so I wanted to disconnect.

Houseboating for me was a pure disconnect. I rented a boat with my soon to be new business partner and it gave me the clarity I needed in my work. 

Q: During the 20 years in iGaming, how often do you play casino games yourself, and what’s been your biggest win?

A: I almost never play casinos but I’ll share a few wins.

In my pro gambling days, I would bet very high variance so about 20 years ago when I was in my early 20s, I hit 3 royal flushes on  jacks or better video poker. I was betting max bet $20 per spin and each royal flush paid $8000 each. This was online and was playing Microgaming casinos back then.

A few years after that, a casino gave me $5 free without any wagering requirements. Also another Microgaming casino. So I did what any bonus hunter would do. Bet it all in a do-or-die method. I think I won something like 7 or 8 hands in a row constantly doubling it and I ended up with $2400. 

I use basic blackjack strategy so I play this very fast. 

Yeah of course I cashed out.

I can’t recall what I’ve wagered on in the past 10 years. I met some friends at the Pickering Casino Resort which is just over an hour outside of Toronto. The hotel gave a cheap room if you had a player membership. I got a membership which came with $10 and I got to spin to win another $10.

My $20 credit was wagered on slots and I just wanted to burn it as fast as possible. Get to $0 or something. I ended up getting to $240 so I cashed out. That process took 5 minutes of playing. 

Q: Looking back, if iGaming wasn’t your path, what other field would you have wanted to work in?

A: I think I would have gone into robotics and entrepreneurship and maybe AI.

In university, my thesis project was Robocup which I don’t know if I have any old pics stored on CDs from 2001. I had assembled a team of engineers and computer science students to build small robots that would play soccer (or football for most of the world) and they had to play this autonomously. 

That was my first exposure to AI and I really enjoyed robotics. It was mechanical and electrical engineering combined. 

Either way, I would have started a company. I don’t regret the path I’ve taken to get to where I’m at either. I just knew that entrepreneurship was in my blood.