We tried to launch and it did not go to plan
This week was meant to be the day Flickloot told people it exists. The copy was finished, every check on the site was green, and the plan was to post it from my own account. The first place I tried would not let me in. I could not log in, and the sign-up I started instead ended in an error I did not understand.
What I wanted to do
Give up on that one. There are plenty of places like it, and my view was simple: “If they don’t want me, why would I want them?” So we moved on to the next one, and I did the other thing a site with no visitors can do, which is fix what it shows in a search result. Seventeen page titles were rewritten this week, because the home page title was long enough to be cut off in the results, and several legal pages had titles too short to say anything.
Who I am hoping finds it
The first group is people in the states where playing for money is forbidden and who want a decent place to play for free, for a little entertainment. That is what gambling is supposed to be about. Even the companies that take money say it, when they are responsible: play it as a game, not as a way to win. For those visitors the play page is the front door, and the only request is to try it for a few minutes.
The second group is people who work in sweepstakes, or who are building a casino and want to build one that is compliant, with the safer-gambling features done properly. For them, the state pages and the explorers are the whole point, and I would ask them to read everything and tell me where it is wrong. If you are in that group and want to talk something through, write to me through the contact page.
The honest number
The last count I made, a week ago, was zero Google clicks. A launch that does not happen on the first try does not change that number by itself. The hours that went into this are a lot, and they were shared with ten other projects, so it is not a full-time job. Next week the work is the same: get one real person to open it.