Meet Kipras Gajauskas, Co-Founder and COO of BlockGames
In the beginning
As far back as 2014, I was fascinated by crypto and started exploring the space, buying, and trading Bitcoin. I made more significant investments in 2017 and I’ve been actively following the industry ever since. But in 2018, there was a major crash and the narrative was that everything was going to zero. Of course, that didn’t happen, but it was impossible to know that these were just teething problems, and that crypto would return with even greater force a few years later.
During this time, I decided to focus on business opportunities away from crypto. I had a background in managing a real estate portfolio in London, and this gave me insights into operational processes and streamlining that I still find useful today.
A new partnership is born
While I was doing that, I met Benas and we talked about developing some software in the sector that would automate certain tasks. We looked into the tokenization of physical assets, but because of the market conditions I mentioned, we decided to concentrate solely on real estate, without the crypto element, to protect our brand image and appeal to corporate clients. But the opportunities of blockchain stayed in the backs of our minds?
The Halo effect
Together, we successfully founded, fundraised, developed, and scaled Halo, which is a real estate software business for streamlining long-term property rental admin. We ended up selling this to a multi-billion dollar real estate software company. It was great to see that the product we’d created had the potential to solve problems for millions of people. The sale was incredible validation of what we had created. With the sale completed, we were both eager to start on a new project and turned our attention to the mobile games sector.
First foray into Web3
While I’m not sure if I could call myself a hardcore gamer, I always enjoyed playing with my friends after school and on the weekends. Like many kids and teenagers, I played games mainly for fun. But when one of my friends became a pro player, I realized you could take gaming further.
Today, the games market is bigger than the music and movie industries combined with around 3.5 billion mobile gamers globally. Within that vast expanse of opportunity, we identified a number of problems that needed solving — in particular, new challenges around user acquisition (UA), which have intensified since Apple and Google changed their privacy (IDFA) policies. Advertisers invest huge amounts of capital in acquiring quality traffic, and with the IDFA goalposts shifting, the accuracy with which they can do this has been greatly reduced. BlockGames is built to meet the problem head-on.
Mastering the model
But the journey hasn’t been a straight road. We iterated on the BlockGames idea and business model multiple times to get it right. We listened to feedback from industry players and modified the model to ensure all stakeholders would benefit from joining BlockGames. The real positive was that the core problem remained consistent — we just needed to tackle it from a different angle. What we learned from this process is that, if you discover that your model is broken, you have to fix it before you move forward. There’s no point in developing a product if the fundamentals don’t work.
It took longer than we’d hoped, but the additional investment of time and resources to get something right was the best move. Now, BlockGames is designed to deliver more meaningful rewards to players for their commitment, engagement, and referrals that help the Player Network and connected games grow.
Meanwhile, for a basic cost-per-install, games get to ramp up their UA through the ever-increasing traffic of players that enter the Player Network and stay. The whole process runs on Web3 rails, which is how we’ve been able to solve the UA problem so effectively. Of course, there’s a lot more to it, and we have a litepaper for anyone who wants to find out more about what goes on behind the curtain.
Pinpointing product-market fit
One of the hardest days for any start-up is identifying a plausible and workable product-market fit. Once you have that, the next challenges are developing top-notch sales and operations processes, an attractive product, a powerful narrative, and a supportive community with positive sentiment, all of which takes time to build. It’s an ongoing process that can be difficult at times, but you know that if you push hard enough, you get the ball rolling until it gathers momentum and becomes unstoppable.
The secret to a perfect start-up launch
When you’re starting something new, you have to try a lot of things. You have to fail repeatedly and quickly, iterating and testing everything to discover what works. This is how you arrive quickly at a version of success. It’s also important to find and build the right team. You need people with the right knowledge and skills. Right now, we have a lean team that handles everything from design and animation to marketing and product development. What we can’t do in-house, we outsource and everybody works well together. I’m proud to say we excel at execution. We’re creative with our solutions and smart with our resources. We have to achieve much more than a regular company and do it faster to lead in our chosen niche.
Taking the lead: demands of top-tier company roles
You need robust direction in a new company. Benas and I have good complementary skills. We both bring ideas and creativity to the table, and Benas is particularly strong in the areas of processes, and management.
We discuss everything from solutions and the company roadmap to product development and building out the user journey. Although I have experience building products and worked closely with Benas to set up BlockGames, he leads from the front when it comes to fine-tuning the product. Meanwhile, I mostly cover aspects of sales, plus working on collaborations and partnerships.
We both attend global conferences together and put in the full amount of hours, ensuring that we arrive when the doors open and we don’t leave until it’s kicking out time. This is important for us as a new venture — to make sure we get our messaging out there and connect with potential investors and mobile game developers that want to be a part of the BlockGames Player Network.
One last game?
Funnily enough, my household didn’t have an internet connection until quite late, so I missed out on crazes like RuneScape and World of Warcraft. I did have a console and plenty of discs, though. My favorites were RPGs like Call of Duty (story mode), Max Payne, Hitman, Silent Hill, Lara Croft, and Assassin’s Creed, so I guess it would have to be one of those. I’d have to close my eyes and pick one at random.
A mobile future?
Since university, I’ve been more into mobile games because that’s what I have time for. And because mobile games are so much better these days, I guess that’s why the sector has really exploded. Personally, I love hypercasual games for commuting, and I sometimes make in-app purchases to progress faster.
I think mobile gaming will continue to grow, and regulations like IDFA provide fertile ground for smarter incentive mechanisms. By providing more efficient reward distribution for users and game developers through BlockGames, I think we’ll help drive Web3 games through to mass adoption. Ironically, when that happens, we won’t call them Web3 games anymore, they’ll just be games, indistinguishable from what’s already available but with new layers of functionality. With BlockGames, we’re tapping in early to this expectation of change, exploring creative ways to attract users to great games through intelligent and meaningful reward distribution mechanisms.
Similar models are already breaking acquisition and retention records in Web2, so I think we’re well-positioned and early enough to make a real impact and be part of the big shift. With our worldwide approach, we can scale quickly, solve regulatory issues in new ways, and provide better ROI for and ROAS for advertisers and game developers. With these innovations, in 2–3 years, I believe BlockGames will be a very significant player in the market.
BlockGames is the world’s first cross-chain, cross-game Player Network, accelerating user acquisition for games through instant referral and engagement rewards mechanisms for players.
