Setting up an online casino

Before you spend a penny on building this business, spend some time researching the pitfalls of it.

You did hear that online Casinos are a frequent target for cyber attacks, right? And I'm not talking some teenagers probing your server for security holes. I'm talking about teams of pros, from academic towns in Siberia, bringing your site on its knees, until you make a ransom bank transfer, while your inbox is swelling with hate mail from users that think you ran with their money.

As stated by slatecaster, there are many challenges with online casinos:

1. Finding an online payment gateway that accepts dealing with what is considered a high risk business.
2. Making sure everything is legal. Most countries have very strict regulations regarding casinos. For instance, online poker is outlawed in the US.
3. Most of all, getting the critical mass to attract users.

The online casino business is very lucrative but at the same time very competitive, not to say shady. I would strongly recommend that you don't build this in-house unless you are willing to take an enormous risk. You will most likely have to get your software inspected by a third party that will make sure your Random Number Generators really are random.

I would say the biggest challenge is to get critical mass. One option I believe is to join a network of independent sites that share their network in exchange for a commission. I believe the way this is working is each site has its own front-end but they all share the same underlying infrastructure.

Anyways, my personal opinion is that you're a bit late on the online casino bandwagon unless you have a killer, innovative idea.

There is a mixergy podcast with an online casino owner. You should listen to it.

Please find answers to your questions herein:

How do market to a global user-base?

Well there are a variety of ways. In my 14 years experience in the online gambling / e-gaming field the most successful of operations use multiple methods such as; press releases, affiliates, sponsorships, social media, purchased ads just to name a few

Any ideas on how much capital is needed to get started?

This is a more complicated question. The expenses to keep in mind are; legal structure such as corporation, banking, cc processing, ewallet accounts, servers, software systems and most importantly marketing.

Are turnkey solutions better alternatives to in-house?

If you are referring to software I would say yes. The biggest benefit of obtaining software from a well established company is the amount of testing and real world use testing that the system has undergone. This will usually ferret our bugs, security holes and the like. So you get the benefit of this instead of having to undergo the time and risk yourself.

What are the infrastructure needs?

Again depends on a variety of factors.

I used to read forum about starting casino business before (mb.startcasino.com/list/1) It is mostly online-casino related. Try to ask you question here, there are a lot of knowledgeable people. You should consider a lot of factors like, local laws, taxes etc.

In addition to what the others have said, you also need to look at the product and its value prop - what will your online casino do that the thousands of existing ones don't do? Why would the user of an existing online casino switch to yours? It's a saturated product space to be entering, not to mention a regulatory nightmare...