Founders Unfiltered: Martyn Hannah, Co-Founder & CEO of Comparasino

We’re back with the second edition of Founders Unfiltered, our series exploring the real stories behind the people building businesses across the iGaming ecosystem.

For this edition, we sit down with Martyn Hannah, Co-Founder & CEO of Comparasino, to discuss the journey behind building one of the UK’s emerging online casino and bingo comparison brands.

Martyn takes us back to the original idea behind Comparasino, the decision to build a genuine consumer brand and the opportunity that helped fund its launch. He also opens up about the realities of entrepreneurship. From expensive early marketing mistakes and the patience required to build meaningful scale, to navigating industry changes and staying focused when growth doesn’t happen overnight.

From leadership and building a lean team to the role of AI, innovation and understanding what consumers actually want, Martyn offers a refreshingly candid perspective on what it really takes to build and scale an iGaming business.

1. What was the original idea behind your company, and what convinced you to take the leap and build it? 

It was a simple premise: make finding online casinos/bingo sites and bonuses as frictionless as possible for UK players, while tailoring the experience to their actual preferences. To achieve that, we built a smart Recommendation Engine. We also wanted a reason for players to stick around, which led to the Member Zone - a dedicated portal where they can save matches, track new brands landing on Comparasino that hit their preferences and access exclusive promos. 

From day one, we decided Comparasino would be a real consumer brand rather than just another SEO listing site. We wanted a name, logo and product architecture that could naturally transition to TV advertising, which we viewed as the ultimate vehicle to build scale and mass-market trust in the UK. We made our TV debut with ITVX earlier this year and are set to launch a nationwide, multi-channel TV campaign in the coming weeks.  

As for taking the leap, this wasn’t our first rodeo. While mapping out the concept, we were already running a smaller comparison site, originally intending to use its cash flow to fund the Comparasino build. But then a rival came in with an acquisition offer. The timing couldn't have been better; that sale provided the capital injection we needed to build Comparasino right out of the gate and push through to launch. 

2. What has been the hardest part of building the business that nobody warned you about? 

The time it takes to achieve the scale required for the business to stand on its own two feet. The site officially launched in October 2023 and had been 18 months in the making prior to that. I’d say it then took another 12 months for our branding activity and SEO to gain enough momentum to deliver meaningful traffic to Comparasino.  

Then you have the need to continue to reinvest in the business - branding, marketing, product development and the litany of operational costs and expenses you encounter as part of scaling. Just when you think “ah, we are making good money” you need to pump it all back in again.  

Combine this with the ups and downs of running a business - the days when site traffic drops due to the third Google Algorithm update in as many months, an expensive branding campaign that hasn’t delivered or a rival launching a DMCA takedown against your key money pages -  and you often find yourself sat there wondering why the hell you even launched the business in the first instance.  

But in those moments I like to remind myself that it should be hard, and that working through these difficulties is ultimately what leads to success - if it’s hard, most people won’t do it and so pushing on regardless is something of a superpower. As the saying goes, the only way out is through. 

3. What has been your biggest mistake as a founder, and what did it teach you? 

Pushing too hard in the early days. Due to the sale of the prior site, we had a decent marketing budget to launch Comparasino across the UK. Ultimately, we decided to spend that budget on a local radio campaign, ads that ran on hundreds of digital screens nationwide, plus a digi-van campaign that ran outside York Racecourse.  

I was so excited to get a launch campaign live that I didn’t really put much thought into wider strategy, reach, channel, audience, deliverables and tracking. Ultimately, these campaigns ran (at pretty significant expense) and delivered next to nothing.  

It was a hard lesson early on, but one that I’m grateful for. It taught me patience and the need to take a step back and really consider what we are doing - especially when investing significant sums in branding and marketing. Since then, we’ve taken a much more disciplined approach, leaning on experts and specialists to ensure our campaigns actually drive measurable results.  

4. Was there ever a point when you seriously questioned whether the business would succeed? What happened? 

No. I’ve always truly believed the business will succeed (as a founder, you have to), but there have been plenty of moments where that belief has been tested. In most cases, that’s due to external forces - such as the UK Government increasing Remote Gaming Duty for online casino and bingo operators from 21% to 40%. That increase came just as we felt like Comparasino had hit its stride, dealing a pretty big blow to our confidence.  

That said, we let the dust settle - others were quick to claim it was the end of online casinos and comparison sites in the UK - and really analysed the situation, the opportunities it presented and how we thought it would play out moving forward.  

Ultimately, we came to the conclusion that the demand for licensed online casino and bingo sites hadn’t gone away - if anything, it’s a growing market -, that some of our rivals would fall by the wayside, opening up market share for us, and that operators would likely pull back market spend at a time when we were planning to ramp up investment. This gave us a really solid chance of achieving our goal of becoming the number one online casino comparison site in the UK and that if we could do that, we’d have a very successful business on our hands.  

A few months on, and that belief has held firm - our site traffic is at an all time high, we are delivering record FTD numbers and we’ve negotiated enhanced commercial agreements with our top partners. 

5. What is the biggest lesson you have learned about leadership and building the right team? 

The Comparasino team is actually very small - there’s around five of us working on the site. I’ve collaborated with this core group for many years across multiple projects, and over that time I’ve come to implicitly trust their talent and experience. While I set the overarching vision for Comparasino, the team is given the freedom to interpret that direction and execute it how they see fit. I don’t believe in micromanagement. I know my weaknesses just as well as my strengths, and true leadership is about leaning on people who genuinely know what they’re doing rather than letting ego get in the way.  

For us, a small, tight-knit team is the right team, and I’m continually staggered by what we’ve been able to achieve with such a lean crew. 

6. What has been your biggest challenge when it comes to growing and scaling the business? 

Becoming comfortable with the pace at which growth actually happens. We all want to see instant output from our input, but building an online casino comparison brand - well, any brand, really - takes time, and a lot of it.  

I’ve come to view things in six-month blocks. The work we are doing today will be reflected in where the site is at in six months' time. That’s why myself and the team stay motivated to maintain a high level of input, even if the output flatlines at times. Of course, today, we are seeing the benefit of the work we did six months ago, and that’s a good feeling. 

Ultimately, this approach means the business grows at a steady cadence, and in those moments when frustration at a lack of progress creeps in, it makes it easier to take a step back and calmly assess the speed at which we are growing. More importantly, it prevents the knee-jerk reactions to short-term plateaus that can ultimately harm the business. 

7. What do you think the iGaming industry gets wrong about entrepreneurship and innovation? 

That entrepreneurship is easy. There are so many success stories across the industry that there’s an expectation when starting a business that it will blaze a trail and ultimately be acquired for millions of pounds. While that happens for some, the vast majority of businesses struggle to keep afloat, let alone define or revolutionise the market before the founders cash out. Running a business is like going to war for a very long time - I’m talking about Odysseus timescales here - with absolutely no guarantee of victory and glory at the end of it.  

As for innovation, I think there’s a misconception that it’s a prerequisite for a business to succeed. At its core, Comparasino is still just an online casino comparison site. Where we stand out is in the execution. Those that “innovate” for the sake of it are often left with a brand, product or user experience that simply doesn’t resonate with consumers. For example, we realised early on that players don’t really want to spend a lot of time on a comparison site - they just want to find decent casino brands and good bonuses quickly so that they can get on with playing. This is why our UX is all about funneling players to their matches in as few steps as possible. But this is a different approach to a lot of comparison sites, where they’re looking to bring in “innovative” gamification features to keep users engaged for as long as possible. I guess our approach is to innovate iteratively. 

8. Which current iGaming trend do you believe is genuinely transformative, and which is being overhyped? 

I’m not a massive fan of trends as they come and go. Instead, I like to focus on the things that stay the same as it’s in this space where you can usually find the biggest gains. Right now, AI is riding a massive hype train and while we do see use cases for it in the services that Comparasino provides, and in bringing efficiencies to the business, our focus remains on improving our core products and consumer proposition - and that’s simply to match players with online casinos and bingo sites based on their preferences. Getting better at that means more site traffic, more members, more FTDs to our partners and ultimately more revenue coming into the business.  

Of course, we still keep a close eye on trends and emerging technologies, but always through the lens of how they will help players find what they want faster and more effectively.  

9. What has founding a company cost you personally - beyond money? 

This is a great question and one that I’ve taken a bit of time to think about before answering. On reflection, it hasn’t cost me anything. I knew what I was signing up for when I started the business and we launched Comparasino, and while it has thrown up unexpected challenges along the way, I’m obsessed with it and achieving our mission to become the number one online casino and bingo comparison site in the UK.  

Sure, it’s on my mind all the time - at weekends and while taking a rare holiday (especially on holiday, come to think of it) - but it never feels like work to me. It’s a touch cliche, but right now, I couldn’t imagine doing anything else and with the support of my wife and the team we have built, we are unwavering in our determination, commitment and sheer willpower to achieve what we set out to do from the very first moment we put the idea of Comparasino down on paper.  

If you’re sitting there considering what founding a company has cost you, you probably shouldn’t have taken the leap in the first place.  

10. If you could go back to day one, what would you tell yourself — and what would you do differently? 

I’d do nothing differently. Comparasino is where it is today because of every wrong decision made along the way (as well as the ones we got right, of course). Making one small change would have a massive ripple effect when compounded over time and, more importantly, I’m a firm believer in where you are at at any given moment is exactly where you’re supposed to be. As for what I’d tell myself - strap in, hold tight. Things are going to get wild.