Building Adrenaline: A Business Intelligence Platform for the iGaming Industry

Some projects get assigned to you. Adrenaline is the one I picked a fight with the status quo to build. It's a business-intelligence platform tailored to the iGaming industry — and it's fully operational today, with a public demo you can explore.

Here's how it came together, and what I'd tell anyone building an internal data product.

The problem: the truth lived in a dozen tools

After years inside Playtronix, I kept hitting the same wall. The data that mattered lived in silos: the CRM, the analytics tools, the affiliate-management platform, and more. Each tool told a part of the story, none told the whole thing, and there was no single place to see it.

Reporting meant stitching exports together by hand. That's slow, it's error-prone, and worst of all it means decisions get made on yesterday's numbers — or on whichever spreadsheet someone happened to open.

One person, every hat

Adrenaline was my idea end to end. I wore every hat:

• Founder — I decided the company needed this layer and made the case for it.
• Product Owner — I owned the vision, the roadmap and the priorities.
• Developer — I built it.
• Go-to-market — I took it to the partners who would use it.

Doing all four is not something I'd recommend for every project, but for a 0-to-1 internal product it had one big advantage: no hand-offs. The person deciding what to build was the person building it, and the person hearing partner feedback.

The approach: one pipeline, one source of truth

Over roughly seven months I connected every tool Playtronix runs — CRM, analytics, the affiliate platform and the rest — into a single pipeline.

The hard part wasn't connecting APIs. It was the data itself: fragmented, inconsistent, and named differently in every system. The same partner, player or campaign could exist under three identifiers. So the core work was modelling — designing the data around the questions partners actually ask, rather than around how each source system happened to store it.

The stack was deliberately boring: PostgreSQL as the backbone and Power BI as the decision-making surface. Boring is good when the goal is trust.

The outcome

Adrenaline replaced scattered, manual reporting with one live decision-making surface that partners rely on. It's fully operational, and it became the single source of truth for the people who use it.

Lessons I'd keep

Start from the questions, not the data

Before writing a single pipeline, list the ten questions your users ask every week. Model the data to answer those. Everything else is optional.

Naming is a product decision

Half of BI is agreeing what a word means. "Active player", "conversion", "revenue" — decide the definitions with the business, write them down, and make the dashboard use exactly those.

Trust beats features

A dashboard with three numbers everyone believes is worth more than one with fifty numbers nobody trusts. Reconcile against the source systems early and often, and show your users that you did.

Owning the outcome speeds everything up

When one person owns the vision, the build and the feedback loop, decisions that take weeks in a committee take an afternoon. That's the part of this project I carry into every product role, including my current one as a Technical Product Owner for CRM & MarTech.

See it for yourself

Explore the Adrenaline demo, or read more about me and my work. If you're planning a data or BI product and want to compare notes, get in touch.