Simon Johansson from Spinsify

How would you describe Spinsify to someone who does not know what you are doing?

– It’s always a tough one, to 70+ it’s easier to just say I work with computers, they are happy with that answer and kind of know what I am talking about. Other ages I say search optimizing towards gambling, some know what search optimizing is all about, other people have not heard of it before. 

– In that case, I usually say like” if you search on cheap flights, you choose the sites in the top right?”,” we work on getting our sites in the top on various keywords, in that way you get customers into your site and you have a business”  

How did you end up in the casino industry?

– I started very young at the age of 15 to be honest. We had started to play poker, I really liked it so I started to play some smaller tournaments online via some older friend’s accounts 😊. 

– When we signed up, we came across an old Rakeback site called rakeswap.com. I signed up and he contacted me on MSN. He told me if I bring players signing through his site he would reward me. 

– So, I started to send players, I remember getting 500 dollars which you know for the 15-year-old kid was millions. I helped him a couple of years, got more responsibilities, like talking to brands who wanted to be listed, etc. Through that, I got in contact with a company that offered me my own poker skin.

– It went really well until one day I got an email that they will cap the winnings to 1000€ a month, after that the revenues quickly went down to 0. 

– I took some years of working as a personal assistant for kids who needed extra help in school. It was a pretty rough job, so I logged in to my old MSN which I had not visited in years. I wrote to a guy named Tomas Eliasson who at the time was working for ihreconsulting.com. We took a coffee and the rest is history.

What made you want to start Spinsify? 

– I was working for Ihreconsulting.com helping affiliates find good deals and operators finding affiliates to drive the traffic. It went really well and got closer and closer to the affiliates which helped me understand what they really were doing. 

– Later we started a brand which, to be honest, went bankrupt, it was one of the toughest periods in my life, I got burned out. I never thought it could happen to me,” it’s something you hear other people get” ” and maybe just weak people”? I could not be more wrong, so to everybody that thinks the career is everything, think twice because it’s so not worth it going through a burnout. When I got the energy to come back it was only one thing in my mind, to be my own boss and to work with search optimizing. So, therefore, I started the company. 

What personality traits in you make you a skilled founder? What have been your biggest challenges?

– I think the years helping both sides of the business, affiliates, and operators, gave me a wide network of contacts. I also believe I am a pretty ok boss in terms of never pushing my employees over the edge, to trust the persons working for me doing a great job and so for it been working very well. So maybe to summarize I would say I am a people person 😊  

– The biggest challenge for is the SEO, in all its aspects, to understand it fully,” why did we get a hit when we have a cleaner link profile then them?” things like that. Things I probably never will learn fully, it’s part of the game. 

How have you changed as a person from running Spinsify?

– Hard to say, I think the burnout changed me a bit to say no to stuff and don’t do things to just make other people happy, something I had a hard time with before. But ofc it’s a responsibility, in the end, it lands on me to make the company float and evolve. Even though we really do it as a team I would say. 

What are you most proud of?

– Well I am proud that I dared to take this big step, I know the competition out there and to be honest, we started of being very green in terms of SEO. I hired two of my best friends that didn’t have the knowledge either. So, I am very proud that we manage to learn quickly and get a business out of it. I am also proud that we know are five people within the company who all seem to be happy with their work environments. 

Where do you want to be in 5 years?

– Good question, I think we have sold this company and have started up a new existing project. 

Personal and professional where can people find you online?

– We have various sites, pretty big in Finland with uudetkasinot.com and our new sports site vedonlyontibonukset.com. In Uk, our main focus is now Spinsify.