Seed to Exit
Welcome to Seed to Exit, the ultimate podcast all about startups, scaling, and venture capital. Your host is Riece Keck: Startup veteran and recruitment entrepreneur.
Join us as we dive into the journeys of startup founders and venture capitalists who share their insights, successes, and lessons learned from seed stage to successful exit.
Each episode, we bring you candid conversations with startup founders, executives, and investors. Whether you're looking for inspiration, actionable advice, or a deeper understanding of the startup ecosystem, Seed to Exit offers invaluable knowledge and real-world experiences to help you on your entrepreneurial journey.
Tune in to Seed to Exit and get ready to be inspired, educated, and connected with the exciting and ever-changing world of startups and venture capital.
Seed to Exit
Nick Cuomo, Co-Founder and CEO of AllStar.gg | Revolutionizing Gaming Content Creation | Empowering Gamers, Monetizing Experiences, and Engaging Gen Z Insights
Nick Cuomo, co-founder and CEO of AllStar.gg, discusses how his platform revolutionizes content creation for everyday gamers, enabling them to share gameplay highlights effortlessly. The episode explores the challenges of engaging in gaming content creation, the importance of community, and valuable advice for aspiring creators.
• AllStar.gg’s technology automates video creation from gameplay data
• The platform empowers everyday gamers to share their highlights
• Current gaming platforms primarily serve elite players
• User acquisition relies on curiosity and seamless integration of highlights
• Nick shares insights from his fundraising journey, including investment from Mark Cuban
• Advice for aspiring content creators includes patience, consistency, and community engagement
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Our end user is the everyday gamer, and what we do is we enable them to create and share content with each other. And that's kind of the paradigm shift. That's not something that has really existed before in games, and our mission is to connect gamers to their content. So our belief is that if you can make it far simpler and easier to make content that's good and watchable, that is kind of the missing piece of the puzzle of how do you create, you know, a real kind of connective tissue around gaming and kind of own this, you know, sort of social network opportunity. And so we started with the media. We built and invented this proprietary technology to make it so that anyone can generate this media, and invented this proprietary technology to make it so that anyone can generate this media and then that allows you to build, you know sort of a platform and network around it.
Speaker 2:Today, I'm thrilled to host Nick Cuomo, CEO and co-founder of AllStargg, a platform that is redefining how gamers create and share their highlights.
Speaker 2:Nick's journey spans from professional gaming to scaling businesses like Blue Fountain Media and Movable Inc. All-star. Let Rhys Likewise Appreciate you having me Absolutely Well. I love gaming, as I think I talked about a little bit in the episode with Brian Cho, so I'm really excited to talk to you. Tell me a little bit more about what inspired you to create All-Star. Obviously, you used to be a pro gamer yourself in the past. How did that shape either the development of the company or the inspiration to found it?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so my pro gamer background is in Counter-Strike. I played a whole heck of a lot of it in high school and college and I felt like I was good but not getting enough recognition. So I made a couple of movies and I did it the hard way. I spent thousands of hours capturing and curating and editing and then I'd convince someone to host it on their website. There was no YouTube or Twitch and then I had to figure out a way to distribute the video to people. There was no Facebook or social media and that kind of left a big impression on me. It worked. My content went viral. The next tournament I went to, people wanted to watch me play, shake my hand. It was really, really cool Kind of left a big impression.
Speaker 1:I started All Star 15X years later and it was a really really impactful part of that journey because what I did was something I was fortunate to be able to do. I was lucky. I was creative, technical, fast computer, a lot of free time. Most gamers don't have any of that. So All-Star really is technology that automates a lot of what I did and makes it available to anyone. So we kind of say that we enable gamers to share their gameplay more easily than posting a selfie and you know, when I made my content, it had a big impact on like launching e-sports career and I realized that, like most gamers kind of want to do the same thing but they just don't have the same capabilities.
Speaker 1:So our technology levels the playing field. We take out all of the sort of friction, the effort. You don't need to be creative, you don't even need to be live streaming or recording your screen. We actually take data from the game and we render it into video out of these things called demo or replay files, and it's actually the same things that I used to create video when I was playing, so you'd record these demos every time you played. You'd watch the whole game back, you'd make video from that. So it really was. You know, all-star is very much born out of that, that origin story and that insight that you know it was. It's a really high impact form of content. Many gamers want to make it and very few can.
Speaker 2:So so you did a lot of this. You know pre the websites we all know and use now pre social media, but now we do have social media, we do have YouTube, we do have Twitch. So what? What gap are you feeling then? That these platforms don't?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so distribution has definitely gotten a lot more easy in social media, but there's really nothing for gamers like discord and communications tool. Twitch is more like television than anything else. Uh, things like YouTube, tik TOK they're crowded. Uh, and most social media platforms, uh, that have gaming media in it are really produced by a very small subset of of gamers. It's like your top, you know 0.01% so like influencers, uh, professional gamers, pro teams your top, you know 0.01% so like influencers, professional gamers, pro teams and, like you know, big organizations like tournaments and things like that.
Speaker 1:So that is, who creates the content? The people that consume it are generally the gamers themselves, and that's kind of we flipped the model, that is, who creates content with Allstar. So our end user is the everyday gamer and what we do is we enable them to create and share content with each other, and that's kind of the paradigm shift. That's not something that has really existed before in games and our mission is to connect gamers to their content. So our belief is that, if you can make it far simpler and easier to make content that's good and watchable. That is kind of the missing piece of the puzzle of how do you create, you know, a real kind of connective tissue around gaming and kind of own this, you know sort of social network opportunity. And so we started with the media. We built and invented this proprietary technology to make it so that anyone can generate this media and then that allows you to build, you know, sort of a platform and network around it.
Speaker 2:So starting a company is obviously a big leap. You had the chops to do it yourself, but what was the early feedback? Like Like, who were the first couple of people you told? What did they think of the idea?
Speaker 1:early feedback, like who were the first couple of people you told? What did they think of the idea? First person was my co-founder and CTO, gavin. We met at a digital agency called BlueFound Media where I started my career. After pro gaming, I did design, after design I got into the agency side Turns out it's very useful to know how to you know design and code websites and then if you can talk to clients and sell stuff and manage things.
Speaker 1:You know agencies back then digital agencies were. You know those people were in short supply so I had a really kind of quick rise. The company grew really fast and I actually hired Gavin onto my accounts team and we were like opposite in a lot of ways. He was super technical while I was like very creative. So I would, you know, annoy the designers by getting hands-on with design projects and like he would annoy the developers by getting like hands-on in the code. And I knew something was like different about him when a website would go down. You know normally you know I have to like phone the project manager. You know normally you know I have to like phone the project manager. You know be like we got to get the site back up. He would just pop open a terminal window and you know it would disappear and the site would come back up. And I learned he was like rebooting the servers himself and so that you know kind of we we connected through just being friends through games. We both played the same games Like that was how we became close. We complemented each other really well on the team.
Speaker 1:So after I left and I went on to Movable Inc, which was a venture-backed MarTech in New York, gavin stayed on at Blue Fountain. He became their director of operations as they got acquired by a public tech company called Pactera and so we used to hang out after work. I still live, you know, I lived in Brooklyn, he was in Harlem at the time, now he's in Jersey. We used to meet up after work in like Midtown and we would go hang out at, you know, wolftones or Churchill's and I, you know, I had this kind of idea for a while, actually like All-Star as an idea.
Speaker 1:The first time I pitched something in this was actually I think I was like 19 years old. I went to it was called the CPL, the Cyber Athlete Professional League, and they it was the worldwide Counter-Strike tournament in Dallas, Texas, twice a year in the Hilton ballroom and and I went there and I was just, you know, I was on one of my first like semi-pro teams and we're playing in this big tournament. And and I saw the manager of this team, complexity, this guy, jason Lake, he's still in esports, he's still a very well-known figure and I remember I kind of, like you know, tugged on his coat. I was like hey, excuse me, sir, my name's like Nick Ants Cuomo. I have this idea. I think we could sell Counter-Strike movies and I didn't really know how to sell it. I didn't know get why my movies were successful, but I was like there's money here, there was an opportunity here, and I felt like more people wanted this. And he was like very nice, he accepted the pitch. You know, he was like thanks, like oh, you know, let's stay in touch and maybe, you know, we'll figure this out at some point. And obviously nothing happened. But so that was like the first person I ever kind of pitched a general idea to what All-Star really became.
Speaker 1:I just Gavin and I met up after work and I was like listen, man, like I think there's something here. Creator economy is exploding, esports is exploding. I still play. Every app sucks, no one gets it. I think I get it and I'm like you know, do you think this is technically feasible? Could we get, you know, demos or watch games, get the data, render the video in the cloud? And he was like maybe, but it'll never work. That was the first reaction was like maybe, but it's never going to work.
Speaker 1:So so one of the like defining things that I think you know has always carried me forward in my career is I am the most persistent to a fault, very annoying, in sales, like you know, I'd never give up, and even when you're like please give up, I'm like no, so I don't give up. So, you know, a couple of weeks go by, we go back to the bar and we're hanging out. I'm like all right. So I'm like I put a spreadsheet together, I'm like it's going to work and I, you know we laid out the numbers and started to dig in and he was like OK, he's like we should do this.
Speaker 1:I was like all right, and then, I think, a week or two later, we put in our two weeks notice at our jobs, we bootstrapped the company for 18 months and everyone thought we were nuts, because we're not your typical 22-year-old founder who's dropping out of college, not an asset to their names. We's, like you know, we're in our thirties, very well established successful tech careers, but we saw a bigger opportunity. I think we both were ready for some change and I was excited to, you know, really jump back into games with all of this professional career experience now that I have in product development, in marketing, in sales, in tech, in venture scaling tech and yeah. So that's kind of the origin story and I think we're in year five and everyone also thought we're a little less crazy once Mark Cuban invested in our pre-seed than all of our friends and family were like, okay, we feel better about this decision.
Speaker 2:We'll get there. Why didn't he think it was a good idea at first? Why didn't he think it was going to work?
Speaker 1:The economics are very complicated, right, if you think about, like, what we do, we're rendering video in the cloud. Uh, videos heavy, it's expensive. Rendering it doesn't make it cheaper. Uh, you know, dealing with the data that you render it out of doesn't make it cheaper. Uh, the the sort of viral dynamics of, like how you would grow a business like this, you know, can you monetize it fast enough to deal with the costs? And then, like, as first time founders, can we raise enough capital to get to scale to do that? And like, is there ever a point where, if certain assumptions were true, could this be a profitable business?
Speaker 1:And that was kind of where the things were. You know, that was his biggest concerns and so we just dug in and, you know, you start to understand and it's interesting, we still execute things today that were thought of back then, before we were even an official company. Because it was like that discussion and that, you know, sort of beating up the idea gave us the levers that we still pull to this day to reduce the cost per clip or increase the you know, you know sort of growth rate of the company and, you know, reduce the expenses on hosting. It's all related. We pulled apart those variables. Once he saw that, once I saw that, and he was like yeah, this, I agree, that's not, you know, unbelievable. That was kind of the final Love that.
Speaker 2:So Cuban invested in your pre-seed round, which I can imagine was a huge boost for credibility, visibility all of the above Very good. How did you make that happen? What was that process like?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So our second investor in the company was actually our lawyer, neil Friedman. He's still our lawyer, and I remember we started a company we had to find a lawyer. You know I talked to like 10 or 11 different. You know we wanted a small, independent practitioner. We were bootstrapping. So I'm like I'm not spending other people's money, I don't want a white shoe, you know, huge retainer and and he was a similar stuff. He was like a startup lawyer and small practice. We hit it off. He was like you guys are so impressive, this is so exciting. He's like I would like to invest and I didn't even know if your lawyer could invest. So I'm Googling, like you know, can your lawyer invest in your startup? They can. That's not that abnormal. I was like great. So he invested, neil and his wife.
Speaker 1:They had a relationship to Cuban through his wife's work, and so the opportunity to syndicate the pre-seed materials to him presented itself, and she had sent it over to Mark, and so the timing was not the best. I was actually at JFK Airport about to go to Florence, italy, with my then girlfriend, now wife, and it was our you know, engagement trip and I hadn't gone on vacation for like three years, so it was like a big trip go to Italy. We're at the airport, neil's like calling me in a panic. He's like Cuban replied he has questions. I'm like what, okay, so you know? We're like banging out the email because you know, every second counts, right. It's like now I'm in sales mode, like this is, we have a live one here and and he is asking questions directly they're smart questions and so we like bang out the reply, calling our name. Literally the gates are closing. Barely made it on the plane.
Speaker 1:You know, long story short, she said yes, he yes. He said yes, I had like it. I don't felt like 30 pounds, like a very heavy gamer laptop with me. Uh, just, you know, through italy, I would like you know we get an email, I would stop at find a cafe with wi-fi and, uh, reply back to him and, granted, he was understanding. Uh, and you know, he gave me a few days in the first weekend we were there before we started really going and digging in, because I think Neil's wife explained like, yeah, nick just got to Italy with his girlfriend, they're going to get engaged. He was like, all right, have them reach out to me on Monday. And then you know, but it was, we got into due diligence by the end of the trip.
Speaker 1:So not the most relaxing vacation, but super memorable, really really cool. So not the most relaxing vacation, but super memorable, really, really cool. And it was just you know, he just he loves email, I love email, so just lots of email back and forth and just he got it immediately. And his questions were very deeply technical, which I really appreciated because it wasn't he didn't care about a lot of the fluff that many investors care about, which you know a lot of founders kind of grown at, because it's like okay, you know culture. It's like I, you know that we're going to.
Speaker 1:Culture is important, yes, but like at this stage, it's like how does the technology work? Does that scale? So that was the stuff. He was like you know, does how does the tech work? Does it work with Fortnite? That was one of his questions and was like, yeah, like we started, we had to go and do some diligence and I was like, yes, it will work with fortnight. And we actually just launched one of our first fortnight partners, uh, just a few months ago and, uh, so we have a huge, huge uh network in fortnight growing at this point. So it's pretty cool stuff and I just loved how hands-on he was.
Speaker 1:You would not expect that out of someone like him, right, right. So you didn't even pitch him live. It was all over email. No Shark Tank, all email. Never spoke to the guy on the phone. I haven't met him in person Still to this day. He will reply to any email within 20 minutes and when we used to send out very frequent investor newsletter updates, he would be the first person to open them every time. I don't know how he does that, but that's probably why he's a billionaire if I had to guess.
Speaker 2:So, wow, that's incredible. What do you? What do you send out in your investor newsletter updates? I'm curious.
Speaker 1:Um, so we used to, so those two um. We haven't done that since series a. We've just got a lot more focused on um, working with the board, executing the business, and uh, you and we'll send out updates. At this point, like twice a year, is kind of where we're at.
Speaker 1:In the past we used to have a more generic newsletter that would go out to like a prospect investor list and existing investor list, so it's kind of like a corporate newsletter geared towards investors. So it's like company updates, product development, hiring, milestones, but nothing too sensitive. And then for our existing investor base I typed really fast. That was always my pro gamer skill. I am very fast on a keyboard, so, as you might imagine, very long-winded when I talk and when I type. So it was very easy for me to provide like long form, detailed updates and you know, just go like kind of function by function, like product marketing, growth, finances, you know talent, whatever, and you know the milestones.
Speaker 1:Then there'll be like a summary, executive summary, on you know my view as CEO, as the state of the business, the good, the bad, and then kind of looking ahead. And I think the investors have always appreciated that we don't sugarcoat and we'll always provide a balance of like this is going really well. This is not, and this is what we're doing about it. And I think investors are they're used to a lot of founders be very rosy, everything's super positive, and that's never the truth. You know, if you've ever built a business, you do execution. Some days suck really bad and you're like where's the you know face punch going to come from, and then other days are like cloud nine. Oh my god, everything's going amazing. And so I think a lot of the more builder investors get that and they're suspicious if everything's positive because that's just never, never the case.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's so funny. I just had Cal Patel on from Bright Insights. They're in digital health, they're serious, and he said almost that exact same thing. He's like if you tell your investors everything's good, someone is lying.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, it's true. I mean, even the best company on earth, it's not going that well. You know, there's good and there's bad. That's life.
Speaker 2:So how do you, since you're more on the B2C side, how do you?
Speaker 1:target your user base in terms of user acquisition and growth. Yeah, so this is kind of our secret weapon not so secret anymore. So the nature of our technology. So Allstar is kind of leading like a paradigm shift. And that is until us gamers made content by live streaming or recording their screen. So you had to have an app installed, you had to be. You know, creating video from the client device you're playing a game on in real time Introduces a lot of issues.
Speaker 1:You lose frame rate, you're eating up your connection, your storage. It's distracting you from the game. You might forget to create a clip because you're too focused on making the moments happen. So that prevents a lot of gamers from making content. One in four gamers want to create. Less than 0.01% do, and that, believe, is a technology gap.
Speaker 1:Everyone makes content on social media. 40 to 60% of monthly users contribute to platforms like Snapchat, instagram, tiktok. It's because we all have phone in our pocket. You don't really have that in a game. It's like you're on the phone while you're playing the game. It's not the most conducive way to create content. You're also stuck with what you see, so you can't take 20 selfies in a row and only post the best one. So our technology gives people the ability to do that because we render it in the cloud. It's off of game data, it's server side, so there's nothing happening on your client. We can't impact performance. So this was our sort of consumer user value prop.
Speaker 1:The nature of how we achieved that, by making this a server side technology, opened up a user acquisition strategy that to this date, we've had a hard time finding anyone that's done something like this. So that makes it really hard to like, plan and optimize because it's like a net new channel. So the channel that we've effectively invented are like personalized, cloud generated game highlights. So what we do is we offer free APIs to partners and we have a developer portal and it's kind of like Stripe for game highlights. So if you're building a website, you're building a desktop app, a mobile app, and you're focused on a game that we focus on, like Counter-Strike, fortnite, league of Legends, dota 2, there's probably a half dozen other games coming up on the roadmap but these like hardcore, multiplayer, competitive games. If you're building something for those games, you're probably accessing the same data that we use to make video and you wish you had video and no one has video because making video from that data is insane. So that's like the whole reason we exist is because, like that's, it's a crazy thing to do. So we have like two data centers. We have like physical metal hardware. We just set up a new rack, the other, I think literally this week, you know, make one clip, a second and we have an API and people plug in and they request content and we render it and deliver it and then that video player that's embedded basically exposes the gamer to our product.
Speaker 1:So the experience you think about it from the gamer's perspective is they play a game, they use a product they already love and then, like magically out of thin air, their like 1080p, 60, high powered gamer selfie is just waiting for them. They didn't have to have an app installed, they didn't press a button, they weren't streaming, and so the first thing you get is curiosity. They're like how did they make a video from the game that I just played? I wasn't doing anything to do that. The second thing is they start to think how that could work and then it basically explains all of the questions they might have about our product. Because gamers are smart, they put two and two together. They're like, oh, they had access to the demos, the replays, the server they rendered the video for me. They probably know who I am from my Steam login or something, and that's a really great way to educate people about a very complicated product. It's very difficult to explain to someone on a landing page how All-Star works. It's very easy to explain to someone by just showing it to them, and so it's kind of neat.
Speaker 1:We put the best part of our product as the first thing someone sees and that's how we acquire most of our users. About two thirds of our new monthly users come from basically our partner network, which spans three games Counter-, league of Legends and Fortnite, with partners on the way and other games and that partner network represents a combined reach of upwards of 20 million monthly gamers. We're only really tapping into one twentieth of that right now. So there's some really exciting growth in store for us and it's really interesting because it's again a very novel channel and it's awesome to own your user acquisition channel.
Speaker 1:But you know, I'm sure that in the early days of, like you know, google paid search and dealing with SEO and kind of inventing this plane while you're flying it, you know it's a typical startup thing is it comes with a unique set of challenges that you're not going to really be able to read a book on or, you know, talk to somebody and get the answers. You kind of have to just be in it and deal with the react to the pressures that drive innovation. So that's really what's kind of pushed us forward and helped us get to one clip, a second, and helped us do this scalably, where we're not just burning through our bank account in a month. So it's a really, really cool way to acquire users, in my opinion.
Speaker 2:It is. I mean, yeah, you've basically taken the show. Don't tell principle to the extreme.
Speaker 1:Surprise and delight yeah.
Speaker 2:So okay, so you integrate with a few different games right now and I know you mentioned you have a few more on the roadmap. Is there any sort of plan to expand and I didn't mentioned? You have a few more on the roadmap. Is there any sort of plan to expand? And I didn't hear you specifically say this, but it sounds like it's just for console or for PC or Mac at this point. Do you have any plans to expand to console? Is that just something that's not technologically feasible?
Speaker 1:Yeah, we clip across all platforms and devices right now in Fortnite actually. So we create videos in the cloud out of their Fortnite tournaments that people enter right from the Fortnite launcher, and these tournaments are run across mobile, console and PC, and so that's what's kind of neat about All-Star is our technology doesn't care, it doesn't know the difference, it doesn't matter. All the content looks the same. It's just the gameplay, it's just the data of the match. It's what happened, as if you were watching it live. So that is kind of our big vision is that, ultimately, this is how all gameplay should be shared is starting at the gameplay data and rendering that server side instead of trying to capture that client side at different resolutions, different graphics qualities, different sort of technical challenges, and so we're currently doing that across platforms and devices. But our long term is really to go into the game engines and abstract this out and be both the replay and the UGC infrastructure, both the replay and the UGC infrastructure, and that will enable us to really scale us out across generally any game.
Speaker 2:On any platform or device Got it, and so, from a scaling perspective, obviously there's a financial component to that, and you've continued to raise. You raised an $18 million Series A. What was that process like? Do you plan to raise again? How are you thinking about things from a fundraising and growth standpoint?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I think there's a bit of always raising money in a startup that's kind of ends up being your next milestone, even if you're not thinking about it. It's like you close around and then you're like, all right, let's execute, let's build, and then a few months go by and you're like, all right, like what's the next sort of milestone between us and our big vision? It's like usually another round. So you know, we'll likely look to raise more financing in the next year. We're not under the gun or feeling too much pressure there, but I think for us, the fundraising cycle itself, Series A, was tough. It was a tough year. I had a lot of people reach out and were like whoa, like crazy, you know, can't believe you raised a Series A during, you know, 2023. And yeah, I don't have any particular like this is the magic bullet of how we did that. It was, you know, just the same thing we always do when we raise. We run a pretty tight process. We put together, you know, really good material. We focus really hard on the iterative feedback of understanding where investors are getting hung up or what you know they're getting really excited about. How do we kind of bring that more to the surface and then just grinding.
Speaker 1:You know I have a lot of background in sales so I'm very used to being on the road, uh, spending a lot of time just back to back to back meetings and um. You know we'll usually go to gdc. I think last year I went to gdc and I had, uh, 30 meetings in three days. So it's a long. It's a long couple of days, um. But you know that's the kind of energy you put in and I don't know if any. I honestly don't think any of those meetings converted to financing. But I can tell you that the noise that that makes and the sort of energy input and output that's how sales has always worked for me is.
Speaker 1:You know, you work really, really hard over here and then the success starts to happen over there. So that is a bit of how I describe the process. But there's usually the stages of finding, creating your list, getting out there, doing the initial pitching, seeing who's going to move into deeper diligence and questions than actually real due diligence before a term sheet, or sometimes term sheet before real due diligence, and then you have legal and closing and legal was a bit protracted there because we had a very large cap table from our earlier rounds. There was a lot of complex things that needed to get cleaned up by very expensive law firms, so that was one lesson learned is actually probably should have paid the more expensive law firms a little earlier in the company. It would have saved us a bunch of money at Series A. But you know it's first time doing this, so live and learn. I guess that's exactly what I was going to say, live and learn.
Speaker 2:What advice would you give to gamers that are I know you mentioned? You know 25% want to create content, but only 0. 1% or 0.01% do so for the for the vast majority who are not. What advice would you give them in terms of growing their personal brand and making the most of platforms like all-star or other ones?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I think it depends on what kind of creator you want to be. You know, if you're just creating for fun, to share and connect with your friends, then you don't really have to think too much about it. I think you just need to find the tool that suits your style. I think for the competitive you know, multiplayer gamers, esports, players, all stars is really the best solution. It doesn't have an impact on your performance. You don't have to worry about creating content while you're playing. You just press a button, and or you don't even press a button, you come to the website after the match is over. Find the match, find the moment, share it. That experience is much more, you know, attuned to that type of gamer. Now, if you're trying to be an influencer, you want to really make money. Now, if you're trying to be an influencer, you want to really make money. So we have some products coming out that will enable brands to work with our community of gamers to drive engagement and growth and to directly incentivize the gamer. I'm a big believer that.
Speaker 1:I think advertising in games is a little broken and I think no one's really cracked the nut of how you extract, you know, real revenue out of advertising and games. And it's because they don't understand gamers. Gamers are, you know, playing games that are highly immersive. You don't really want to disrupt that immersion. They expect a very high ROI from their entertainment dollars. So, you know, if you're trying to monetize them even further, that is going to leave them a little upset. You know they could spend zero dollars on a free to play game and play it for 10,000 hours. So you're going to, you know now you're going to start to, you know, expect them to sit through a bunch of ads or, you know, have a worse gameplay experience. So you make money. That's not really going to fly. That's not really going to fly. And then I think the last piece is that all of the stuff the brands really want, like getting into the games, reaching gamers with good reporting, brand safety, very expensive. Influencers are very expensive, hard to manage. Platforms, programmatic, very blockable Ad blockers are very popular. Twitch you know very few gamers. I think 0.1% of Twitch streamers make median income. So the vast majority of Twitch streamers are trying and burning out and stuff like that. So my message would be you know, be patient, try All-Star in a couple of months.
Speaker 1:We started to launch more of these competitions, we're bringing brands in to sponsor them, and our whole sort of angle is sort of user generated content marketing, uh, but driven through a uh, a platform and a technology where, uh, it's not so much a uh high friction endeavor, it's more automated, uh, and and the gamer directly earns from this, right. So we're cutting out the middleman. It's not just the influencer getting paid there. There's no, you know. It's like let's get the gamer incentivized to drive results for the brands and put them into the gameplay in a way that doesn't disrupt the game. So that's what's coming for us and I think the best practices still apply for any creator.
Speaker 1:It's like create content that's new, find your niche, make it stand out, and you got to be consistent and persistent. You know you have to have that schedule. It's like my dad always said you know if you're going to open a store and you know you have to make your hours and be consistent, because otherwise a customer is going to show up and say I expect them to be open. It's, you know, whatever 1030 on a Friday, but they're not open yet, right? So, as a streamer or a YouTube creator, you have to like make content on a schedule. You know you need to set expectations and meet them with your audience. And then I think you have to just be across every channel. I think you saw this as TikTok exploded. Youtube and Twitch creators had to you know, flood the TikTok, that's where their audience was. They were gonna lose that mind share if they didn't follow them there.
Speaker 1:Everyone has a Discord community. You have to have a place to connect with people directly. So I think that stuff is super important and it's hard. It's very, very hard. So we're trying to make it a little easier for that. We're calling them kind of like nano influencers, where, if you're really good at a game, you know you've got an interesting take on content, you've got something unique to bring to the table. We can help connect you with brands. And you know, maybe you're not going to quit your job tomorrow but you know, perhaps you're going to have an easier time buying groceries, you're going to have some extra spending money to buy a new set of headphones, something like that. So that's kind of where we're taking things, but it's a tough gig. Creating is hard, very noisy, very competitive. Most people want to be creators the younger you go. I think 80% of Gen Z wants to be a content creator. So it's a very, very competitive market.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I fully resonate with a lot of what you said there, even as a creator. In the context of this podcast, right Like every every Tuesday at 6 am Central is when I publish the new episode, and there and there have been Monday nights where I'm like God damn it, I didn't edit it yet I got to jump on and do it and it's. You know, I don't, I don't have.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, and it's not like I have 100000 listeners and there's going to be a bunch of people opening it up. It's like, but if you don't have that consistency, you're never going to build it and get there in the first place.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so yeah, that's the hard part. It's also like building a company. You know it's there's these uh, it's like they're crossing the chasm idea where you know there's this period where you're just kind of working, you're like what am you're never going to cross that chasm, you're never going to get to the other side without you know the consistency, and just you know it's like kind of I guess if you build it they will come. I don't always agree with that. I think some people conflate that with like I can build a product with no distribution. It's like that's not what I'm saying, but for content it makes a lot of sense. If you build it and market it properly, they will come. Yeah, not as catchy, but Not as catchy but probably a little chur.
Speaker 2:So final question then, just on a little bit more of a personal note You're obviously a former pro gamer yourself. You have very deep roots within the gaming community. What's something that you wish more people understood, either about gamers or just the gaming industry in general? Uh, I will.
Speaker 1:Let's see here I'll have. I'll give advice to three different groups of people here, because I think I would have a different thing to say for everyone. I think for founders getting into games if you're coming from, not games like traditional business just be aware that there are founders and companies and people out there that have more of a gamer mindset than like a professional business person mindset. It's just a very different type of personality to deal with. They play the game differently. They'll, you know, do things where you're like that's they play. They play the game differently. They'll, you know, do things where you're like that's unprofessional or being. You know, I wouldn't necessarily do something like that, but they're thinking like a gamer, they're not thinking like a business person. And once I understood that and and you know I've had some interesting experiences in in the industry it just kind of the light bulb went off and and you know I went back to my pro gamer days and I was like I know how to deal with this. This is a, you know, I understand that mindset. So that's, you know, sometimes you're dealing with the gamer, not the business person, even if their title and their role and their accomplishments and the amount of money they raise is is business. You know, I think to investors, you gotta the teams they have to care about games. You gotta be passionate.
Speaker 1:You know it's the same thing like uh, there was the clean tech. Uh, there's like a whole you know sort of the bubble, uh, years back. Uh, there's a lot of like companies that were started by like you know kind of uh clean, you know clean shaven executives and and guys in suits and salespeople and you know, salesperson I was an executive but I'm a gamer Like these. You know, all these clean tech companies were started by people that weren't technical, they weren't engineers. And there's this great kind of excerpt in Zero to One by Peter Thiel where he talks about that like they just started passing on anyone that didn't look like an engineer because there was so many companies that were being founded, pitching for funding. And you know, clean tech is, like you know read it in backwards tech that's clean.
Speaker 1:So if, like you're not a tech person, you don't understand engineering, like you're probably not going to have a good time solving that problem. You might be able to raise a bunch of money but, like you know you're, you're solving climate issues through technology. So you kind of have to start there. So if you're investing in games, like you gotta be investing in gamers and they gotta be like you know it has to have been a real big part of their life and I think also that, like deep personal connection gets you past the hard part. Um, you know there's a lot of ups and downs we were talking about this earlier in in building a company and running a startup, and the ups and the downs, uh, get a lot easier when you're really passionate about what you do. So I think you have both.
Speaker 1:That, you know wants to be a pro or wants to create like a career out of it, and yeah, I think you need to just stick with it. Practice makes perfect and you know the idea that someone is just so talented that that's why they're successful, I think is a fallacy and I think the you know, the only thing that luck really gives people is the right time and place to be able to practice a lot, and I think if you do 10,000 hours of anything, it'll be amazing. I think anyone could be a pro gamer. Anyone could be a professional influencer. You got to just really, really want it and you got to just not give up and you got to go real real far, real hard. So yeah, that's my three cohorts of. Uh, you know, if I ever I can go back in time and, you know, give myself advice in these different sorts of mindsets, that's probably what it'd be.
Speaker 2:Well, that's some incredible advice, Um, nick, thank you for that and thank you for coming on in general.
Speaker 1:Thanks, reese. I appreciate having me. This was great. I really enjoyed the conversation.
Speaker 3:Thanks for listening to See to Exit. If you enjoyed the episode, don't forget to subscribe and we'll see you next time.
