Building a Poker Site

If you want to play in a good game, there aren't many of them. If you want to play in several games, they won't be good. I want to make a poker site that has many, good, games.

My general strategy is to keep a similar retention plan to Unibet, add a deeper understanding of what liquidity is, automate away a lot of the work that B2C sites normally carry out, and invest the remainder into marketing.

As well as this account, I was also UnibetAndrew. I've worked in gambling, mostly poker, for 19 years. I know how to make a poker site, I've done so in the past. I know how to project/product manage it, how to hire/manage a team, etc: basically, how to get it all done.

But what I don't know how to do is raise the money to start. I need: 10 people (mostly developers), 12 months to reach beta, and a little under €700k. After that, I'd need about €2.4m for a 3 month open beta, and as low a risk launch as I can model. I'd break even in month +2, and be overall in the green by month +11 (running at about 30% margin, though I'd want to spend that on marketing, there's no need to stop at that size).

I figure I'd 'sell' some percentage of the company for that initial dev cost, then some more for the launch cost - it's easier to sell something that exists, rather than something I've only modelled/written the specs for.

I've built a pitch. I have a CTO (as long as he doesn't find anything else meanwhile), and we have good ideas of who we'd like to hire first.

I've approached a couple of people who might be interested in investing, but no luck so far. Ideally, I'd talk to people who know gambling and poker, and would be interested in investing on a longer term basis than e.g. a VC firm would (from my understanding of them, anyway).

Does anyone have any leads or advice?

I'd obviously love to get started, and I'd like to be as open as possible about what we're doing/how it's going, as that's the kind of thread I'd be interested in reading myself. If and until there's any funding, I'd prefer not to talk about my precise strategy in this thread, but I'm happy to discuss basically anything else related to this.