Internet Vikings Founder: How to make a successful entry into the US

Could you explain exactly what Internet Vikings does?  

We provide servers. There are a lot of marketeers, from Amazon to Microsoft to Google, that have a trillion different ways of marketing servers, cloud capacity, infrastructure as a service, etc. It’s all buzzwords. What we all provide is a server that you can host your application on. An application could be a casino, eCommerce, blog. The server can be used for anything, but we specifically target gaming.  

Is it 100% gaming clients? Do you have one or two in other areas?  

I would say 80% gaming. We host the biggest card payment service provider for retail shops. Not for online, but for the wireless terminals customers pay with in restaurants and so on. I designed the system that communicates with the bank 18 years ago in 2006. We still run it. It’s high-quality resilient hosting.   

Talk me through your aims in the US. There are so many people leaving the US.

You have Betsson and SuperBook’s withdrawal, Betway etc. But, there are two sides to that coin: there are a lot of people withdrawing, but there are still a ton of people making a crazy amount of money in the US. My view on it; let’s focus on both. At Internet Vikings, today, 75% of our revenues are in the US. We have increased 280% in the last two years just because of our US growth. It’s been phenomenal. Not only for us, because we have helped Hacksaw Gaming, Greentube, Aristocrat etc. So many players are going into the US – they have somewhere to host their application. That’s the story I want to tell. We’re a small company from a small country that no one knew about three years ago – and we believe we have managed to become one of the most important players in the US gaming industry.  

So, in short, despite the growing list of companies that are leaving the US (especially those based in Europe), you believe the US is still worth targeting?

It can work, but it’s not a walk in the park… If you are Volvo and try to sell Volvo cars in the US, it can work. It’s not a walk in the park because there’s a lot of other car manufacturers like Ford that are quite big in the US. As Volvo, you need to find an audience for your product. In gaming, it’s the same thing here. You need to find your audience. 

To challenge that thesis, at Internet Vikings you run hosting servers. But do you think there are less barriers doing that in the US than, for example, coming in as an operator, up against FanDuel and DraftKings? 

Yes and no. As a supplier, I would say no. Roughly, you have 10 times more slot titles in Asia and Europe than you have in the US – because the labs haven’t been able to certify more games than that. We need to produce a lot more slots in the US for that market to grow. Looking at the European market, the reason why it has grown for the last decade is because you had companies like Play’n Go. You had companies like NetEnt with Starburst, which became one of the most successful games. That’s what grew the Scandinavian gaming market. There were games that people actually wanted to play. So, I think that’s what we need to have in the US as well. More games and more content to appeal to different players.  There’s no danger, you feel, of flooding the market? Let’s say a consumer jumps onto a casino site and they see 100 titles, but they’re all very similar. How do they choose their favorite? 

Isn’t that the same problem in Europe? But it is a problem in the industry, that a game’s lifetime is a few months and then it goes on the back burner. Still, there are so many more games that need to be created for the American market. Because, again, what many have been doing for the last five years is just taking their brick-and-mortar titles and putting them online. 

That’s what they did in Europe 15 years ago and it’s amazing that it’s still their go-to market strategy in the US. But if you look at Pragmatic Play, Play’n Go, NetEnt, that didn’t have the legacy of physical but did everything online – they’ve seen success. So, I think there’s a lot of room for game developers in game providers in the US in the coming years. 

If you were to give a European firm like yourselves going into the US advice on what will succeed, what will work? What are the main bullet points?  

To start off with, as a CEO you should take your own time, a few hours a week, and look into the market. Start researching, start working with it as the leader of your business. Don’t start six months from now, because it takes so much time to find a lawyer, find this, find that. You start with these things because you can’t expedite it… Just start. Do it slowly. Maybe don’t go to New Jersey, maybe start with Connecticut, West Virginia, Pennsylvania. Don’t say, “May next year, we’re going to spend $2m on going into the US” and then try to expedite it. They will burn $1.5m. If they’d done it half a year earlier, they would have saved $1.5m because of all those mistakes.  

Looking at our entry three and a half years ago, I was probably the most naive person in the world thinking that I could do it. We were a small hosting company in Europe. That summer of 2021, there was so much trial and error, trying to figure out what we should do.  

That’s not something you hear every day! Your first point, about being smart and strategic with which states you pick… On the B2C side, bet365 has pretty much done that and they’re seeing success for that reason. 

Another, PlayStar, is doing a very good job because they have no budget to speak of compared to everyone else. But I’m impressed by their persistence, their willingness and that they, with a very small team based in Europe, dared to go into the US. And second of all, that they’ve managed to grow in a market that, on paper, they should not be able to grow that fast in.   

I also found it interesting when you discussed just a few hours a week with the CEO on a Sunday afternoon. That’s quite a manageable process…

Exactly. But then a lot of people get to the US and “Oh, we need to hire a Country Manager. We need to do this and that.” Then they spend, say, a million on that person for two years, which they shouldn’t  have needed. We have no one in the US, which is also against the rule book.  

You could say that’s unusual to start with, right? And that you’ve potentially proven otherwise… 

Everyone asked me, why are you not in the US? I said, “It costs me to go to the US, to live there, to work there. It probably costs Internet Vikings an extra $300,000 a year in that range with work visas, insurance, daycare for my kid. Whatever it is, it’s just so expensive in that country. For that $300,000, I can fly back and forth to the US every week and still have money left. The flight is just eight hours to the East Coast, so I can be anywhere in the US in 15 hours. You don’t need to start with building a presence in the US. Just do it from Europe.  

Venturing back, tell us more about Internet Vikings and its history.

Internet Vikings, going back to naivety, started when I was 21-22 with Victor Jerlin, the other Founder. We were naive, thinking we should build a hosting company. I was working at a shared hosting company. Victor was working at Tain operations. He was 18-19 when he moved to Malta and started working for them. Two years later, we started what became Internet Vikings with one focus: We wanted to build a domain register, and a hosting company tailored for Internet marketeers. 

You need a lot of IPs. You need a lot of domains. You can’t just go in and say, “I’m going to build SEO” and have no budget to build. You need some bricks to build SEO and all other internet marketing. We’ve fixed domain names, fixed hosting, tailored for such marketeers. We did that from 2008 for 10 years with some not-so-successful projects, some successful projects. We also started an email security company. We became the largest anti-spam company in Sweden. We sold that in 2014, together with the two other partners of that company, so it was the four founders. In 2015, that made us accelerate Internet Vikings. We did that in 2016-2019; by then, we were generating $4m-$5m in revenue, $1m in profit. We said ‘this is boring, we need to grow even quicker. Let’s redo everything.’ So, we broke apart the group because it was several different companies… We took Internet Vikings. Some things work, some things don’t. I probably have 10 things me and Victor have done that never worked! [Laughs]  

I have spoken to Gustaf Hagman about this, who has had great success with LeoVegas, but is it as important to fail as it is to succeed?  

Absolutely. Also, talk to others. Listen to why they failed and what they have done differently. One thing I should have learned many years ago is to focus better. In 2020, 2021, Internet Vikings was in four verticals. I managed to sell all four of them, but it was quite obvious after a while that I was the only one that could sell all four verticals because I created them. But trying to replicate that with new people that could sell hosting, domain names and data analysis in the same way? It was impossible. It was time to focus – and specialize.

David Thompson

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