#49: Become The Best At Getting Better

Sustainable growth isn't sexy.

The companies that truly dominate our space don't succeed because they found the perfect tactic. They win because they've built systems to learn faster than everyone else.

Learning is their competitive advantage, and it can be yours too. When a company can systematically capture insights, share them across teams, and rapidly apply them to future decisions, they compound their advantage.

So today, I will share my thoughts on building a learning and growth machine that gets better at getting better.

The Long Game of Growth

Sections of our industry suffer from severe short-termism and an over-reliance on growth tactics.

I see it everywhere: operators pouring millions into performance marketing without building brand equity, affiliates exploiting short-lived ranking factors without diversifying traffic sources, and B2B companies constantly pivoting to chase the latest trend without perfecting their core offering.

But the iGaming landscape is unforgiving to companies with short-term vision. Regulations evolve, player preferences shift, technologies advance, marketing channels change, and competitors emerge seemingly overnight. The moment you think you've cracked the code, everything changes.

The U.S. Navy SEALs, despite being elite operators, institutionalised a rigorous learning process called the "After-Action Review" where teams dissect every mission in brutal detail: what worked, what failed, and why. This is central to their identity. 

The SEALs understand what great iGaming leaders understand: there are thousands of variables you can't control. What you can control is how your team operates and, critically, how quickly you learn.

The difference between good and great companies extends beyond execution. It's the velocity of learning. When one company learns and improves twice as fast as its competitor, the gap continues until it becomes insurmountable.

So forget the "growth hacking" nonsense. Focus instead on building your learning engine.

Building a Learning Machine

If you're convinced that learning faster than your competitors is the true growth advantage, the next question is obvious: how exactly do you build a system that turns your team into a learning machine?

Based on lots of research and testing, here's a framework that works:

1. Make Experiment Analysis Non-Negotiable

For every growth initiative your team runs, require two critical pieces of analysis:

What Happened

• Did the numbers improve or decline?

• By how much?

• How did the results compare to the predictions?

• What longer-term effects might this have?

Why It Happened

• This is where most teams fail miserably. They report numbers but never dig into causes.

• Without understanding why an experiment succeeded or failed, you're just randomly throwing tactics at the wall.

• Ask: Why did players respond this way? What underlying psychology or behavior pattern does this reveal?

I've seen operators burn millions in emerging markets because they tracked the "what" but never understood the "why".

2. Create Knowledge Sharing Systems

Knowledge trapped in silos is worthless. Make your learning accessible:

• Document all experiment results in a centralised, searchable repository

• Make these documents public to the entire company, not just the growth team

• Ensure new team members can access historical learnings immediately

• Create templates that standardise how learnings are captured and shared

3. Apply Learnings Systematically

Collecting insights is pointless if you don't use them. For each experiment:

• Add new experiment ideas based on learnings to your backlog

• Adjust priorities for existing experiments based on new insights

• Create feedback loops where each learning informs multiple future decisions

This compounds your advantage. Every experiment, regardless of outcome, makes your future decisions smarter.

4. Structure Meetings Around Learnings

Most growth meetings waste time on status updates. Instead:

• Start each meeting with team members sharing what they learned about your customers, channels, or product

• Focus discussion on why you're prioritising certain initiatives based on prior learnings

• Create space for challenging assumptions and spotting patterns across experiments

The beauty of this system is that it works regardless of your business model or growth stage. Whether you're an operator, affiliate, or B2B provider, systematising how you learn creates a compound advantage that becomes nearly impossible for competitors to overcome.

Building a Learning Team

Having the right process isn't enough. The secret sauce of rapid learning lies in the team you build and how they work together. After all, systems don't learn, people do.

(Although these systems will also eventually become supercharged and useful with AI agents, no doubt)

Here's how to create a team that's engineered for learning velocity:

Regular Step-Back Sessions

Every 3-4 months, take a full day away from execution and ask:

• How can we make our process more effective or efficient?

• Are we communicating learnings to each other effectively?

• What skill gaps are limiting our ability to learn?

• Which activities delivered the highest ROI? How can we do more of them?

• Which activities wasted our time? How do we eliminate them?

These sessions are where you question fundamental assumptions about your approach.

Hiring for Learning Capacity

The harsh reality is that not everyone is built for this approach. IMO, when hiring for growth roles, technical skills should be secondary to learning ability.

I look for:

• Natural self-learners with a history of teaching themselves new skills

• People comfortable with the discomfort of being wrong

• Those who ask "why?" reflexively

• Candidates who can articulate what they've learned from past failures

I'd rather have someone with moderate technical skills and exceptional learning ability than a technical genius who can't evolve their thinking when the world moves on without them.

Create Psychological Safety

Here's a counterintuitive truth: to maximise learning, you must remove the stigma from failure.

An experiment that doesn't improve numbers isn't considered a failure. It’'s only a failure if you don't learn something valuable from it. This mindset will fundamentally change how people work.

When your team knows they won't be punished for "failed" experiments, they become bolder, more creative, and more honest about results. The businesses that treat every unsuccessful campaign as a personal failure create teams that hide problems and avoid risks.

Break Down Silos

Learning happens at the intersection of different perspectives. Create deliberate crossover between:

• Marketing and product teams

• Data scientists and creatives

• Customer support and growth specialists

The teams that learn fastest aren't necessarily the smartest or most experienced. I find that they’re the ones designed with learning as their core function. They celebrate questions over answers and prize growth over ego.

Individual Growth Engines

Building systems and teams for learning creates the foundation, but the final piece, arguably the most important, is fostering individual growth. When each person on your team becomes their learning engine, the collective advantage becomes insurmountable.

Here's how to approach individual learning acceleration:

Personal Learning Objectives

Get your team to set quarterly learning goals alongside performance targets:

• "Master regression analysis for player value prediction by completing X course and applying it to Y project"

• "Become proficient in Web3 integrations by implementing three solutions and documenting best practices"

Review these learning objectives with the same rigor as business objectives. The message is clear: your growth as a professional is as important as your immediate contributions.

Invest in Learning Resources

Talk is cheap, but learning requires investment. In my experience, budgets offered by iGaming organisations for learning are too low, especially in an industry where change happens so rapidly.

I personally invested thousands into my personal development over my career. Mainly because I had to if I wanted to bridge the gap between where I was, and where I wanted to be. But a lot of people won’t do that, and need more encouragement. 

The key is to provide the budget to learn so they can apply what they learn to real business problems.

Structured Guidance

Raw learning materials aren't enough, people need direction. Here are some ideas on approaches you can use:

• Weekly curated reading lists with 2-3 high-quality articles on growth topics

• Skills roadmaps that outline development paths for different specialties

• Lunch-and-learn sessions led by team members or external experts

• Pair experimentation where junior and senior team members collaborate

If you want to take that one step further, you can create a skills roadmap. A document that outlines critical capabilities for each role and plots a development path. It transforms vague career ambitions into concrete steps, showing people exactly how to progress from where they are to where they want to be.

Let’s take the first step…

One of the reasons we launched 15M, was to help change the industry’s mindset towards learning, and its importance. We have a very strong, core audience who keep watching, keep reading, and keep providing feedback. This is a good indication to us that we’re providing something valuable.

But if you take a look at the size of the core audience for “learning” content in the industry, podcasts, newsletters, etc. It’s a tiny fraction of how many people work in iGaming.

That tells me that there’s a disconnect. By reading this, you clearly have that “growth” mindset. But I think it’ll do your business, and the wider industry the world of good to spread this mindset further. .

So ask yourself: Is your company the best at getting better? Have you built systems that turn every success and failure into fuel for future growth? Are you hiring, training, and incentivising people to learn faster than your competition?

If there’s room for improvement, as a first step, you can share 15m.com with someone in your team, and let’s make learning contagious. 

P.S. We had a few technical difficulties last week, and it seems that the email landed in the spam folder for many of you.

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