I spent 3 years writing the software in my spare time, and launched it on the $20k I had in savings... personally bankrolling the games. When I began the alpha phase, you could still get an "information processing" license to run a casino in Costa Rica that would allow you to host gambling and which the credit card companies tacitly accepted and would do business with. (Those gambling payments to shady jurisdictions are how Paypal got big, and how Elon Musk made his first nine figures). But by 2010/11, all payment processors had abandoned Costa Rica, and there was nowhere in the world offering a license I could come close to affording.
I looked for investment, put together thick books of plans every few months, built 24 games... No one would get behind it, and I couldn't just shelf it, so this was how I launched it without breaking any laws.
A few months in, one existing online casino network offered me $100k to just hand it over to them and then come work for them, but I considered the offer extremely insulting.
