There’s a particular kind of busy that operators love. Competitor dashboards. Market quadrants. Intelligence reports on what Competitor X launched last Tuesday and what Competitor Y is rumoured to be building. It feels like strategy. It has the aesthetic of strategy… the screenshots, the slide decks, the “here’s where we sit in the market” presentations.
But it isn’t strategy. It’s comfort.
Looking sideways is easy. Your competitor’s product is observable. Their marketing is trackable. Their moves are documentable. You can build an entire department around watching them, and for a while, it even feels productive.
The problem is where all that attention isn’t going. While you’re obsessing over the neighbouring lane, there’s a player on your platform right now, in the three seconds between pressing the spin button and watching the reels land, experiencing something you may not know enough about..
Is he excited? Anxious? Does he actually believe you’ll pay out if he hits a 1000x multiplier? Does he trust you at all?
You don’t know. Because you haven’t asked. Because you’ve been busy watching competitors.
Understanding human psychology is messier than reading a market report. Players don’t fit neatly into quadrants. They’re irrational, emotional, contradictory. They’ll tell you one thing and do another.
Getting inside their heads takes real time, real curiosity, and a genuine interest in people… not just numbers. And in an industry obsessed with scale and margin, “talking to players” doesn’t make it onto the strategic agenda enough.
But this is the fundamental mistake. At scale, a $50 bet feels insignificant. The maths says so. The dashboard says so. But to the player placing it? That might be a meaningful amount of money. It comes with real emotions attached. Real stakes. And if you don’t understand that, if you’ve never stopped to actually feel what your product feels like to the person using it, then you’re building blind.
Coming from marketing, this has always been obvious to me. Psychology is the core fundamental in marketing. The why behind the behaviour. Why does someone click? Why do they convert? Why do they churn?
The difference between a marketing strategy that works and one that doesn’t is almost always your depth of understanding of the person you’re trying to reach. The operators and leaders I’ve seen struggle most are the ones who treat players as a cohort in a spreadsheet rather than a human being with a specific set of motivations, fears, and expectations.
I speak to players. Not in the abstract sense of reading feedback reports or reviewing NPS scores. Actually speaking to them.
Since launching Menace I’m deeply embedded into the community. Finding out what they feel. What they trust. What frustrates them. What makes them come back. It’s time-consuming. It doesn’t produce a clean deliverable. But it produces something more valuable than any competitor report I’ve ever read: genuine understanding.
And here’s the thing, most of your competitors aren’t doing this. They’re watching you. Which means the field is wide open for anyone willing to do the actual work of understanding their players at a human level.
Look, competitive intelligence is really useful, I have Blask afterall. But it’s one very important piece of the pie, not the entire pie. And if you want to know your players better than anyone else in the market, you won’t find that in a dashboard.
You need to see the whites of their eyes. Then it’s time to listen, and that’s when you earn real trust, not just a smooth UI and a welcome bonus.
The only person who actually determines whether you win or lose is already on your platform.
Have you spoken to them yet?
