By the way, someone involved with the project told me that they were completely perplexed that the site had zero marketing budget. They told me that Phil believed that the site would basically market itself. There was no marketing budget or marketing plan, which was frustrating for this person because they believed in the project, but knew it would fail without a marketing plan/budget.

"I really don’t think they appreciated the competitiveness of the industry they were in", was a direct quote from this person.

I didn't touch much upon the marketing aspect in my writeup, but yeah, that was another huge blunder. Phil's blog seems to imply that the money wasted on that first failed dev team blew their marketing budget, but from what I'm hearing, there was no plan to ever have a marketing budget.

The attitude was, "If we build it, they will come", which is never the case for online poker, especially in 2019-21.