Savvas Fellas launched MrQ in August 2018, funded entirely by revenue from his affiliate and white-label operations — no external investment.
Snapshot · The iGaming Leader
Savvas Fellas launched MrQ in August 2018, funded entirely by revenue from his affiliate and white-label operations — no external investment.
Where this was said
At 4:00 · chapter starts 2:50
Savvas opens with frank context: no strong educational background, grew up on a council estate in Birmingham, arrived in London after graduating and set up an affiliate site to practise SEO, PPC, and retargeting. A bingo comparison site evolved into a white-label operator, giving him both sides of the publisher-advertiser equation and real data without full CPA exposure. But the frustrations accumulated — staging environments, clunky back offices, poor real-time data, and a system that only listened to operators doing serious revenue. The meritocracy wasn't there. Savvas's response was characteristic: 'How hard can it be? I'll build it.' He used the revenues from his affiliate business to fund MrQ's development in the background, went live in August 2018, and then gradually wound down everything else. The rest, he says with understatement, is history. The founder's fingerprints — fairness, transparency, stubbornness toward the status quo — are visible on every aspect of what MrQ became.
Savvas grew up on a council estate in Birmingham and stumbled into iGaming through an affiliate bingo site. When white-label software providers refused to build features he needed, he stopped asking and started building — funding MrQ's development entirely from affiliate revenues until launch in August 2018.
Savvas accidentally acquired 20,000 square feet in Queen's House, St Albans, needing only 5,000 for MrQ — and converted the rest into a co-working space.
Despite months of meticulous preparation, Starter Story's initial launch attracted zero users — a humbling reminder that building alone guarantees nothing.
A single Reddit link post quickly drove 100 visitors to the Starter Story website, igniting the founder's belief in social traffic.
After reformatting content as a native self-post (no direct link spam), the post exploded with hundreds of upvotes and thousands of readers.
By posting again and again with the native-content strategy, the founder's posts repeatedly hit Reddit's front page, reaching millions of readers.
Before Reddit banned his domain, the founder converted his viral traffic into an email list of tens of thousands — a self-owned audience independent of Reddit.
Redditors eventually organized a petition to ban starterstory.com posts, effectively ending the Reddit growth channel — but the email list was already built.
The Reddit attention strategy ultimately served as the foundation for a million-dollar business, proving that free distribution channels can replace paid marketing.
The key tactic was keeping content fully on-platform (no direct link spam), then adding a small link at the post's end for users who wanted more.
With a thriving email list and a self-owned audience, the founder quit his six-figure New York City salary job to go all-in on Starter Story.
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