Rohini Sardana: The one-woman band behind Cricket Enthusiast

Growing up in India alongside a band of brothers and male cousins, sports were a constant throughout Rohini Sardana’s childhood. Although she didn’t have a fixed career aspiration, she clearly knew who she didn’t want to be – someone conforming to traditional gender stereotypes and trapped in the cage of ‘what girls can’t do’.

This strong desire for independence went on to shape many important decisions in Sardana’s life. When a cousin from the UK came to visit and flaunted a pound coin that could buy four Cadbury Flakes, she was mindblown. From then on, she set her sights on the country thousands of miles away as her future destination.

Following the footsteps of her father who ran a textile firm, she joined the University of Manchester at age 17 to study textile manufacturing and marketing. But she soon noticed that as the industry rapidly moved overseas, there weren’t many opportunities left in the UK. More importantly, the degree didn’t feel fulfilling enough. After speaking with the dean and her parents, she switched paths and enrolled in an intensive master’s degree in computer science.

“I did not find computer science because I had dreamed of becoming a programmer. I selected it because I was looking for a field that offered opportunity, challenge and independence. I have never looked back,” Sardana recalls.

The leap into affiliation

No success comes without stress. In any competitive field, it can be hard to ignore the external noise and focus on personal growth. Sardana’s motto has always been “self-improvement over comparison”. This helped her stay grounded throughout two decades in corporate life before eventually pivoting to build her own consultancy firm.

Joining Inspired Gaming Group in 2004, Sardana spent her first 13 years in iGaming working across various roles, from head of bingo product to commercial director, and liaising with household names such as William Hill and global lottery operators. Her fondest memory was hosting Lunar New Year on her birthday with a Chinese client and handing out Shaun the Sheep toys to hundreds of people. She later juggled senior roles at global gaming companies until deciding she was done growing businesses for other people.

In December 2023, she began her own chapter of entrepreneurship by launching WiseWager Consultancy. For over two years, she focused on helping North American startups expand outside the US, supporting European brands in establishing go-to-market technical structures and advising on product-market fit. But her latest passion project – a departure from the B2B2C space she was used to – has been the Cricket Enthusiast affiliate site.

Coming from the opposite end of the business, Sardana had been the sales target of many affiliates. Her honest first impression of the sector wasn’t exactly glowing, given the many structural challenges it faced. As traffic and monetisation metrics dominated the conversation, she felt uneasy about the disconnect between content strategy and operators’ longer-term needs.

“The craft of SEO, content strategy and audience building is genuinely hard, and most people underestimate it. I have also been told directly by affiliate networks that good, niche SEO sites in the UK are scarce and valued because there is a large volume of broad, generalist content across the space,” she says.

Keen to take on a new challenge, Sardana was determined to fill the gap. The question then was how to lock down the right niche.

While cricket had been a theme throughout her childhood, the idea only clicked when she watched the Indian women’s cricket team win the 2025 World Cup. Albeit generating a similar level of emotional connection, she noticed that the sport was almost entirely deprioritised by affiliates in favour of football. A further market SWOT analysis showed high betting interest around the IPL and domestic T20, pointing to a large and loyal diaspora and domestic audience waiting to be served. Hence, Cricket Enthusiast was born.

The £18 content model 

Being a one-person band and building the site from scratch might seem like an impossible task, but Sardana has found it incredibly low-cost, with the only recurring expense being a £18 monthly spend on infrastructure. With no agency or content team, the secret lies in an AI-assisted content process that supports everything from SEO to social channels.

“AI handles everything that is repeatable and scalable: content generation from structured briefs, post scheduling, HTML page building from data scripts, code writing, deployment pipelines and analytics reporting. I can now complete tasks that would require a team of four or five people in a traditional agency workflow alone, accurately and efficiently,” she explains.

Yet in the age of AI slop, Sardana is careful not to confuse automation with autonomy. The decision-making determining whether the output is accurate and commercially viable remains with her. These include identifying high-demand search queries, validating data, judging content compliance and understanding why one page ranks while another does not.

Although Cricket Enthusiast is still in its early days, the numbers speak the results. During IPL 2026, she tested her model through a structured data pilot with a third-party intelligence partner, automating web pages, social posts and part of an interactive prediction game. Within weeks, league-specific team pages were ranking on Google with click-through rates above 6%, while average search position improved by nearly 20% and weekly X impressions reached 15,000. 

On the future of AI in affiliation, Sardana believes the strongest contenders will be those investing in proprietary data systems, not just churning out content. 

“AI-generated content is already widely available and easy to replicate,” she warns. “What sets a business apart is a structured, niche-focused data layer: reliable statistics, live odds signals, verified results and real audience insights within a specific market. That is what creates a defensible advantage.”

“A great leader who happened to be a woman”

To Sardana, the cerebral, time-consuming task of building Cricket Enthusiast also means liberation. While being a successful entrepreneur has nothing to do with gender, her journey has been inevitably entwined with fighting back unfair stereotypes. 

In her early roles, whether in engineering, product, or senior leadership, Sardana was always the only woman in the room. She often felt the need to prepare more thoroughly than male colleagues to establish the same credibility, and was even told off for being too direct and not soft enough. 

“I learned to adapt my behaviour in certain contexts. But I am clear on the difference between adapting behaviour and changing who you are,” she reflects. “My directness is an advantage and has not changed. It just comes with more precision now.”

While Sardana has also worked for a brand with a full-women C-suite, she believes pockets of the boys’ club remain, as seen in the many male-dominated industry award shortlists. Despite the noises around diversity, there is still a wide gap between intentions and outcomes. Ultimately, she doesn’t want to be remembered as a female leader, but “a great leader who happened to be a woman”. 

“The distinction matters,” she says. “I notice when someone presumes I cannot do something because I am a woman. It has never stopped me. If anything, it has been fuel. My reputation has become my moat, and that travels regardless of gender.”

On her brands’ future, Sardana expects Cricket Enthusiast’s SEO foundations to mature over the next 12 to 18 months, with the two-year goal of converting ranking authority into affiliate revenue, then expanding across the UK, Ireland and the Netherlands. 

Meanwhile, WiseWager will relaunch as Chikoo Intelligence in 2027, focusing on sales advisory, product-market fit and AI-native intelligence and content systems for regulated industries, with the affiliate site serving as its proof of concept. Her five-year vision is for Cricket Enthusiast to become a profitable, independently ranking and cricket-focused publisher, while Chikoo helps other businesses build similarly lean and defensible AI-native operations.

Throughout her two-decade iGaming career, Sardana has been an unstoppable force wherever she goes. Now bringing the same energy into affiliation, she is building her entrepreneurial dream on her own terms.