Jan Kovac

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Jan Kovac is a Slovak entrepreneur. Jan started Casino Guru in 2015.^[1]

Career

Early Career

No early career info added yet...

Casino Guru

Jan started Casino Guru in 2015. They detail the beginnings of their company in their Starter Story interview: ^[1]

Q: How did you get started on Casino Guru?

Our product is a website. The process of designing and developing it was very similar to designing and developing any website or an information system. As both I and the other main founder were software developers, this part was pretty straightforward for us. However, we still did some things pretty right and some things pretty wrong.

The funny part about any SEO-based business is that you can’t really make decent planning. Do you plan to improve some parts of your website and grow? Well, good luck with that, almighty G can have completely different plans for you.

What we made right was a decision to create a system that models all the relations and information about online casinos as structured data. As an example: almost every online casino has a list of countries from which it doesn’t allow residents to play. To capture this information we have created a database table casino_restricted_country and fill it with 1 record for every casino and every country that is on its restricted list.

This helped us to separate the information alone from the way how it is displayed on our website to our visitors. As a result, we have been very flexible and agile in changing how our website looks and works. Most of the changes are changes in the software and not in the data. If we would have chosen an HTML-per-page-based system like WordPress we would have been much much less flexible.

On the other hand, creating such a system right required significant analytical skills and expertise and a lot of software development. I consider myself a very experienced software analyst and without this experience, there are many analytical traps you can fall into (like excessive generalization when not needed, etc.).

Despite all the software skills and experience, it took us 10 months of working some afternoons and some weekends from idea to launch. So it wasn’t without a cost, because the delay in launch put us at risk of exhausting our will to continue this project before it started making money.

What we actually made wrong was the first design of our website. It was quite poor in terms of informativeness and it wasn’t very visually appealing neither. Neither I nor the other founder aren’t web designers and didn’t have the right knowledge of what is a real user experience about. Fortunately, this was about to change. And the design flexibility due to the structured data approach saved us when overcoming design changes.

Source ^[1]

References

Contributors

Contributors to this article:

• Pat Walls, Founder @ Starter Story