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How GNB Agency uses Blask to study competitor retention
Farkhad Gerasimoff, CEO & Founder of GNB Agency, on how Blask replaced the “VPN + Google” approach to competitive analysis and made entering new GEOs faster and sharper.
When GNB Agency enters a new market, the first question is not how to build retention. It’s which brands are actually doing retention well enough to learn from.
That question used to eat hours. Now it takes minutes.
About GNB Agency
GNB Agency is a boutique retention marketing agency specializing in iGaming. The team runs full-cycle retention systems for casino and sportsbook clients — lifecycle flows, CRM setup, email, push, in-app, and SMS — with a focus on LTV growth and churn reduction. With 8+ years in iGaming retention and benchmark data across 15+ brands, GNB works across multiple GEOs and is an official partner of leading ESPs including Customer.io, Klaviyo, and Optimove.
The problem: finding the right brands to study
Competitive retention research only works if you start with the right brands.
Before Blask, that first step was expensive. Finding the real market leaders in an unfamiliar GEO meant VPN sessions, Google searches for “top casinos Argentina,” and sifting through aggregators, SEO clones, and affiliate review sites that reflected SEO rankings, not actual player attention.
The noise was real:
- Brands that ranked well on Google but had little real traction with players
- Outdated data that didn’t reflect the current competitive landscape
- No signal for which operators were actively investing in growth versus coasting
The team would spend hours just deciding which three or four brands deserved their attention — before a single player journey had even started.
The solution: Blask as the entry point
GNB Agency started using Blask to answer the first question faster: who are the real players in this market?
Blask’s market overview provides a ranked view of active brands by country, built on real-time consumer demand data. Each brand’s position reflects actual player interest, not just marketing spend or SEO presence. For a retention researcher, that distinction matters — it means the shortlist contains operators that players are actually choosing, not operators that rank well on Google.
Farkhad Gerasimoff CEO & Founder, GNB Agency 
“Blask is good because it lets you not work blind when you’re entering a new GEO. Instead of turning on an Argentina VPN and googling ‘top casinos Argentina’, you can start from a real picture of the market — see the leaders and begin studying the brands that actually get attention from players.”
The switch from search-based discovery to demand-based discovery changed where the research starts. Not with rankings, but with reality.
📚 Read also: How do iGaming affiliates use Blask?
How it works: the Argentina research project
The most recent project was Argentina. The workflow:
- Open Blask’s market overview for Argentina
- Filter for the most visible, high-demand brands in the country
- Shortlist the top operators based on real player interest and market position
- Register accounts at each brand
- Trigger the key funnel events: registration, first session, abandoned deposit path, first deposit, early inactivity signals
- Document the full retention response: what arrives, through which channel, how fast, and how often
The research goes well beyond the welcome email:
- Welcome sequence structure and timing
- First-deposit push mechanics — offer type, urgency, channel mix
- Abandoned journey response — does the brand even have one?
- Channel stack: email, SMS, WhatsApp, push, in-app
- Offer density and tone over the first 7–14 days
- Whether the retention logic reads like a system — or a set of random messages
CEO”One thing is to look at the market from above. A completely different thing is to get inside and see how top operators actually build their retention.”
Farkhad Gerasimoff
The Blask step takes a few minutes. The manual player journey research that follows takes days. Those days are spent on brands that actually deserve the attention, not whoever surfaced on the first page of search results.
📚 Read also: How 3SNET uses Blask to grow faster and safer
What the research reveals
Farkhad’s observation after running these projects across multiple GEOs: most brands look strong from the outside: “Very many brands look ‘top-tier’ from the outside. You get inside — and the retention is built like it was done on a Friday at 6:47 PM.”
What actually separates strong retention from weak retention, in practice:
- A system, not a sequence. The best operators respond to player behavior, not just the calendar. Inactivity triggers a different message than a completed deposit.
- Channel logic. Top brands match the channel to the message — WhatsApp for urgency, email for detailed offers, push for quick re-engagement. Weaker brands blast the same content everywhere.
- Speed. How fast a brand responds to an abandoned deposit path is one of the clearest signals of retention maturity.
- Offer discipline. The most effective operators don’t just pile on bonuses — they pace offers around player behavior and risk profile.
Blask identifies which brands are worth studying. The player journey research reveals which of them have actually figured it out.
The result
Blask didn’t replace the hard work of retention research. It changed where that work starts.
Before: hours spent identifying which brands to study, with no guarantee the shortlist reflected real market dynamics.
After: a few minutes in Blask to get a demand-based view of the market, followed by focused research on the operators that actually matter.
“This way it’s much easier to understand how to build retention for a new market: not guessing, not copying blind, but watching how the strong players operate — and where their weak spots are too.”
For any team building or auditing retention in a new GEO, the lesson is simple: the market is best understood not through theory, but through what players actually receive after they register.
Conclusion
For GNB Agency, Blask works as a filter. It answers “who should we study?” before the real work begins.
The Argentina project is one example. The same workflow scales to any market: open Blask, see who actually holds player attention in that country, shortlist the brands worth going inside. Then do the research that no dashboard can replace — register, trigger, observe, and map the mechanics.
The market picture is the entry point. What happens at the player level is what you’re actually looking for.
