Watch us on Revpanda LIVE as we uncover “The BROFIST Story” with Artem Kirillov, CEO of BROFIST. Artem will share his journey from developer to CEO, revealing the strategies behind Brofist’s explosive growth and its unique approach to building strong, long-term partnerships. From scaling BROFIST in hyper-competitive Tier 1 markets to pioneering the integration of crypto and blockchain, he’ll break down what it takes to stand out, adapt, and drive sustainable growth in the iGaming space. We’ll also explore how Brofist approaches player acquisition and retention, as well as the future of affiliate partnerships in an industry where regulations are tightening and innovation is more crucial than ever.
Artem, you’ve had a fascinating journey, going from a developer to the CEO of BROFIST. Could you please tell us more about your background, career and journey into the iGaming industry?
Started as a backend developer and system administrator in large retail holding. Quickly moved up by the career ladder and 3 years later became a CIO in large construction holding company with 22 companies under one roof. The company had lots of government contracts, so I was invited to join a government company to lead all automatization and digitalization initiatives. Accepted, as I thought it could be really interesting to do the same job, but on a different level. At the company I led a team of 150 ppl engineers. I didn’t like it though, too slow, too many politics and restrictions.
It was a pivotal moment for my career. I was a bit tired of corporate job, and in search of something new — and one of my friends invited me to join a company that did crypto — in 2012. I started as COO at a BTC mining pool. And a bit later, the company started one of the first crypto CEX / non-custodial exchanges, and I became a product owner for the payment part.It was a game-changer, I understood that actually building something, working on an actual product is way more interesting, than just automating stuff: ALOL, Several projects for sale, Guarda, Smplr.
Brofist — it was an exciting experiment, and a big challenge — a completely new industry I had zero knowledge of. Guys were specifically looking for a management professional with a clear sighted vision. We share the same values, so I decided to give this industry a try. Going a bit upfront — It is completely different comparing to my initial expectations.
You must have such a motivation to have such a career leap. What drives you every day as a leader? And what excites you at this stage?
I have three higher degrees — and the first one is applied mathematics. I love to see how the system is being built from the chaos, and works efficiently, with every piece of a puzzle in its place. I prefer the servant leadership approach, where I set clear goals and provide resources and guidance when it’s needed, allowing my team to make their own mistakes along the way and unlock their potential. Wrapping this up — I love building efficient teams and it’s heartwarming to see my team succeed. And of course — I love to build something that people need .I guess any guy 20+ years of experience has a whole graveyard of projects that do not make it — and all that is left is to tell cool stories about them. I keep learning and I love to learn from my customers, real people to build not what I think they need,but what they actually need.
What inspires you the most? I’m curious to know what fuels your passion as a leader in a super dynamic industry like iGaming.
Small improvements that make a big difference at the end of the day. Small tweaks here, new processes there, additions in crm that help to save a minute of every operation, new dashboard that helps us to see something new — no stone should remain unturned. Of course some things require top attention as they impact business the most, but I’m sure — when you’re running a company in an insanely competitive market like the igaming — to stand out from the competition, you should pay attention to everything. And of course — I love being successful in a broad sense. When you’re a CEO — sometimes it’s hard to understand if you’re doing the right thing, because of a gap between you taking action and making some decision and the actual result. So I’m trying to find a balance between strategic initiatives and everyday work with the team.
Looking back at your first days at Brofist, what were your initial impressions of the company, and what priorities did you set to scale it up?
I was shocked that the company that had close to zero processes is doing that good and is actually profitable. It was because of the team, they put a heart into what they do. But — my goal was to prepare a company for scale, so I started with the due diligence across all verticals. I identified around 80 things that were missing or in a bad shape. I made a plan but I wanted the managers to be directly involved in the strategy and were really owning these goals — so made the first company-level strategic session to set up company level goals for the year, that involved all managers.
I’m sure you faced some challenges while driving improvements in the company, but were there any turning points worth mentioning?
We started with an analytics layer that combined everyone’s effort on a single dashboard, to have the full clarity of how every department is doing.We built a whole new ETL process, integrating all of our data sources into a single pipeline. We built a whole new approach to CRM management, started with RFM user cohort management and started our own retention department. Fixed financial planning and execution, to have full clarity in finance, etc. Now our point of attention is internal media buying.
Let’s talk about BROFIST today. Can you share a bit about your values, your team, and what your company culture is like?
Our values are honesty, transparency and proactivity. All these values are deeply linked in company everyday operations — we honest with expectations, feedback, results. We’re not making excuses — we fix our mistakes and adapt our processes, so the company keeps working in endless HADI cycle. We’re fully transparent with our partners in terms and our actions, so they can always predict what to expect from our side.
We know that there are many affiliate programs available to partners. Everyone says their affiliate program is the best. Let’s talk about your affiliate program first, and please tell us what you do differently?
We’re applying the same value as we do internally — to our partners. It means that:
- We’re transparent — no surprises on our part. We’re communicating our rules clearly and transparently.
- We’re professional — we’ll guide you through everything, provide our insights on the traffic, approaches that work or not, detailed info about the players etc — everything we can help to get a win-win on every cap
- We run our own analytics, game management, retention, support and VIP management teams, to deliver best possible results with the players
- And of course we’re looking for a long-lasting relationship with our partners.
Aside from that — we have several brands in partnership with leading platform solution providers like SS and igate, under different licenses, with multiple geos available. We work with almost any source of traffic with multiple models — so any partner can pick the best offer according to their needs.
So, let’s talk about your casino brands. You’ve got Dazard, Billy Billion, and Dazardbet, and maybe you’re cooking up some new ones — if you’re up for it, we can definitely touch on those too. I’m particularly interested in understanding what makes these brands stand out to players, and in which markets you’re seeing the most action, like, which countries are your top performers?
First of all, brands are differentiated by the visuals and communication strategy — brands target specific geos, we know our audience in these geo — like age, gender, what visuals they prefer, tone of voice, days and specific time within the days when they’re active — and adapt our actions accordingly. We do our game management internally — we’re constantly doing deep research about player preferences, type of games, providers, tournaments etc. We’re trying our best to make all new trending games available to our audience. We’re handling retention — we use both internal platform tools and advanced external CRMs like Solitics and Fasttrack to contact and engage players on site and after they left the brands — via email, push and sms. And our new approach we’re testing now is at the moment a marketing mix, where we use display ads and influence for general brand awareness and retargeting to return registrations that were not converted into FTDs. All these actions allow us to boost conversion rates c2r/r2d significantly. Our top geos are CH, DE, AT, AU, CZ, PL. We also make our first steps with PL, HU, ES, FR — and have high expectations on these. For CH last year we we top1-3 for CH w/ SS (DZ).
How does BROFIST approach partner relationships, especially with a focus on building those strong, long-term business relationships?
We’re always aiming to get a win-win long term relationship, because basically the same amount of effort is required to set up a deal with the partner, who’ll bring us 20 FTDs or 1000 FTDs. But – this requires a good will from both sides. As I mentioned above – we’re fully transparent, so we explicitly state our expectations for the test caps before we start and communicate them in great detail. For example we don’t accept traffic from crash games, celebs, fake bonuses – it’s all forbidden. Any type of motivated or missleaded traffic, one team trying to get a cap from multiple accounts. From our side – if there were no forbidden stuff, no matter the quality – we pay for the test in full – because we’re interested in getting the result asap to learn and extend the cap. Most of the partners understand thousand act accordingly, but time to time we still have to handle conflicts – even in case we have 100% proof of broken rules, we’re trying to negotiate for some neutral-neutral solution.
I know you’re really into data, Artem! How does BROFIST leverage data and analytics to not only execute smarter strategies, but also to proactively eliminate potential issues with tracking or transparency problems?
We have a full ETL process -combining data from multiple sources in a single seamless pipeline. We use clickhouse + metabase/PowerBI to run analytics and constantly improve our tools. We track everything about the traffic, payments, player behaviour, retention metrics etc – more than 50 metrics in total. E.g. for the traffic we track c2d, FTD_depsum, 1-2-3–4-5 dep %, avg. amount of deps/player, depsum/player, dep. Frequency, depsum/income, ngr/income and many others. We know exactly what a good traffic looks like for every day in w1-w2-w4-etc, how long it takes to have a positive ROI on NGR in every geo.
You’re clearly passionate about crypto. So, with crypto casinos becoming more common, what’s your view on their long-term impact? And are you seeing any distinct differences in how players behave in that space compared to traditional online casinos?
People usually mix crypto and blockchain casinos. Crypto is only a matter of deposit, everything else is just a regular online casino. However blockchain casinos are something else, every spin you make ends up written on the blockchain, so it requires extra cheap blockchain with insane speed of transaction mining – i don’t believe in them much, low liquidity, small amount of players, tech obstacles. Player behaviour with crypto casinos is something completely different
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- Depsum
- Only high volatile games w/ high RTP
- Deposit-withdraw
- Sportbook
Artem, looking ahead, I’m curious about how you see BROFIST’s growth strategy. What are your long-term goals and vision for the company?
We’re on a mission to build a vertically aligned igaming holding company. We have casinos and a successful game provider. We started internal media buying with plans to scale it and make it an independent company. Our long term goal is to build our own internal platform, to be able to scale faster, run experiments faster, and make our ideas go live faster. So the next obvious way is to start a turnkey casino brand, to get a mutual exp running psps, compliance, dev team.
