The Juked Story Is Coming To A Close
TL;DR: Unfortunately, we no longer see a viable path forward for Juked and we will begin closing down the company in the coming weeks.
We’ve seen ups and downs over our 3.5 year journey and I know we’ve done a lot of good for the esports industry and for our community in that time, but sadly, our story ends here. We want to sincerely thank our community, friends, investors, and mentors for their incredible support, while we wish our story did not end here, it was a privilege to pursue this vision together.
Transparency has been one of our core values since day 1, and in that same spirit, I wanted to share the story of Juked from with you. Read on.
It’s often said that 9 out of 10 startups fail.
Most founders know this grim statistic intuitively or from first hand experience, yet they forge forward on their startup journey with a supreme, hubristic confidence. You have to believe that, despite the odds, you will make a lasting impact on the world.
In founding Juked we held that same belief: That by following our dream, we could change the world.
Before starting Juked, Chris and I had been friends for nearly a decade and had countless conversations about the shortcomings and roadblocks that were holding back the esports industry. We knew we could make our mark on the industry and help accelerate the growth of esports fandom if we gave it our all.
Eventually, the timing just made sense. I left Twitch in 2018 and was looking for my next thing, and I knew that together, Chris and I had the inspiration, experience, connections, passion, and drive necessary to build a successful startup in esports. Chris’s experience made him well suited to handle product and engineering, and I could leverage my experience through seven years at Twitch to lead marketing, partnerships, and brand.
We took the plunge, and started working on what would become Juked.
Juked’s Origins
Around this time, the esports industry as a whole had begun losing luster in the eyes of investors and media. Esports ventures were failing to meet the growth and revenue expectations to justify the valuations set by venture capitalists a few years earlier. While viewership was still growing year over year, it wasn’t living up to the hype.
But we knew that esports was still in its infancy and that on the macro scale, esports will continue to grow for decades. We knew that esports fandom could be 10 times bigger than it is today, but issues of fragmentation and a lack of storytelling were holding back the true potential of our industry.
Put simply, the infrastructure that exists in traditional sports — 24/7 TV networks, huge journalistic entities and podcast networks, high quality apps like ESPN and Bleacher Report, developed fantasy leagues and betting outfits, the list goes on — did not exist in esports.
What is the underlying context of today’s matches? When is my favorite team playing? Is the stream on Twitch or YouTube? How do I find the VODs if I miss a match? Who’s the favorite, and who’s the underdog? Where do I go for pre/post game analysis? How do I stay up to date on breaking news? Where the hell do I even find the brackets?
Answering any of these questions was almost impossible for anyone outside of the most hardcore fans. This friction, we felt, was holding back the potential for esports to transcend from niche into mainstream.
Sure, there are moments that transcend esports and break into a wider audience, but those are few and far between. We believed that by making esports easier to follow, watch, and enjoy, we could widen the funnel to becoming an esports fan in the first place and build Juked into the de facto community hub for esports fans new and old.
In March of 2019 we decided on a name, incorporated the company, and began working on Juked 1.0, a website that had everything both veterans and newcomers alike would need to stay in-the-know. A place where existing fans could expand their passion, and new fans could discover the thrilling storylines esports had to offer and follow the biggest moments. A community hub that united all things esports fandom in one place.
A passion project, but one we believed could become a billion-dollar business with enough time and perseverance.
Getting started
We put in our initial founding capital and started building our first prototypes. Despite being in a pre-alpha stage, we were able to secure early pre-seed funding from angel investors including C-Suite execs from Twitch, Blizzard, and MyFitnessPal and we were accepted into Batch 26 at the prestigious accelerator 500 Startups. This backing gave us both the resources and confidence to charge full steam ahead.
We launched Juked.gg into beta six months later as an esports TV guide complete with scores, schedules, streams, VODs, and standings, all neatly packaged for easy consumption. We aimed to remove unnecessary friction in the process of watching and following every major esport and supported as many games as we possible, even niche esports titles.
This initial version of Juked quickly became indispensable to esports industry insiders and ultra-passionate fans who lauded our effort to bring everything esports into one destination. We were able to count hundreds of esports influencers and insiders as friends of the project (to whom I’ll be forever grateful). Our calendar and frontpage became widely shared and bookmarked and we organically grew to over 80,000 monthly active users (MAUs) with minimal marketing spend in our first 9 months.
We then went on to raise an additional $1.5 million in funding with this traction as evidence of our trajectory, including from one of the fastest growing Republic crowdfunding campaigns in history (more than $1M raised in less than 4 months) and even more awesome angels. We were riding high. Juked to the moon!
As with any startup though, our growth curve was not linear, and over time certain growth channels began to slow or plateau.
In our case, the majority of our user acquisition was coming from Google search, and the majority of those users weren’t sticking around to become long-term users. Sure, we had thousands of fans who had bookmarked and came to Juked religiously, but we were almost entirely reliant on search engine optimization (SEO) to sustain our growth curve.
Juked was a traditional tech startup and thus reliant on ever-larger sums of investment capital to continue scaling up with each subsequent investment round means exponentially higher expectations from investors. A flat or modestly growing user base was simply not going to cut it.
We knew we needed a massive improvement in user growth and retention if we were to have a chance at raising our next venture round. We also knew that we weren’t going to get to the promised land with small tweaks; we needed something big, a fundamental shift in strategy.
So we went back to the drawing board, and over the next few months we conducted more than 100 one-on-one user interviews and collected thousands of survey responses with the hopes of gaining insights to inform the next evolution of Juked.
The social pivot
While there were many components to our questionnaires, the most important question was simply:
“What do you hate about esports?” and “If you could wave a magic wand and change one thing about esports, what would it be?”
Through this process we found a trend too prevalent to ignore: The esports fans we talked to longed for deeper social connections around the esports games, teams, and leagues they followed. Traditional social media platforms like Twitter, Discord, Twitch Chat, and Reddit were viewed overwhelmingly negatively by the fans we talked to due to problems like toxicity, spam.
Finding like minded fans and meaningful social connections around esports was challenging or impossible for many. We heard over and over again from esports fans who had stopped even trying to engage with the conversation on social media.
Thus, in early 2021, we made the decision to halt development of Juked.gg as it stood and begin work on a mobile-first social platform for esports fans that enabled a safer place, free of toxicity, where fans share their passion with like minded fans around the games, teams, and leagues they loved.
Luckily everything we had built for Juked 1.0 was transferable and would be the basis for the new platform (we believed to be social, you need to be informed, thus scores, news, schedules, etc still fit) but this was essentially rebuilding Juked from the ground up.
This was difficult and scary, after all, we did have some traction with Juked.gg. We could have been just 1 or two features away from real traction. But as a startup founder, you make the best bets you can, and we felt this gave us the best chance at success.
Launching the Juked App
Six months later in October 2021, we launched the very first alpha builds of the Juked mobile app, a social focused experience for esports fans (think: Reddit meets ESPN) with full release on iOS and Android a few months later. This was a herculean effort from our small but mighty product team who learned React Native and mobile dev essentially from scratch.
We came out of the gate swinging.
In our first 3 months we grew from 1.7K to 3K to 8.4K monthly unique users.
Despite this being a lower number of unique users than Juked’s original Web product, user retention was literally orders of magnitude better — for a time, we saw greater than 25% D30 (Day 30) retention (anything above 15% is often considered a strong sign of product market fit by quality institutional investors). User feedback and app store scores were phenomenal too with the Juked app still sitting at 4.9/5 on Apple.
We had worked so hard the past 3 years to get here–and it felt amazing.
However, that euphoria was short-lived because from a fundraising standpoint we were already under the gun. We felt that we needed to get at least a month of user data and traction under our belt post-launch before we had a compelling story to tell investors, but this meant that we only had six months of runway left in the bank–and needed to secure funding ASAP.
Seeking funding (during a downturn)
Our goal for this round was to court the big venture capital firms of the world to lead a seed round of $3 million, or more if we could get it, so that we could not only sustain but scale up Juked’s operations to new levels.
At our peak we were only 7 full time employees after all (again, small but mighty!). It was time to grow our engineering team and finally deploy real marketing budget to blow this thing up. We were stoked and had so much in store for the esports world.
Unfortunately, our timing for the round couldn’t have been much worse.
The war in Ukraine was escalating, Luna and thus the crypto market crashed, and rampant inflation created a unique crisis that threw global financial markets into a tailspin.
Nonetheless, we did not have the luxury of time on our side so we went out and pitched dozens of VCs during the months of April, May, and June and despite early signs of traction, our efforts proved to be fruitless.
Market conditions alone don’t paint the whole picture. Esports has become anti-sexy to VCs who had been burned by the hype and sky-high valuations esports startups enjoyed a few years earlier, and most investors now understand that game publishers are the primary beneficiaries in esports. It’s just incredibly difficult to make money in the space if you’re not named Riot, Activision, or Valve.
This was a constant concern in our pitches and almost all investors we talked to were skeptical that any real money could be made from esports fans.
And, ultimately, while our growth and retention metrics were “good,” we’re now in an environment where only the very best companies are getting funded. The cards were stacked against us.
We made a final effort to try and make our community into our “lead” investor by launching a second crowdfunding campaign, this time via Wefunder, with the belief that if we could raise another 6 months of runway (~$400K) from our community it could act as a validation point to help us secure additional investors, or at the least buy us more time to find a repeatable growth strategy. Despite getting to $100K invested in our first week on Wefunder, the campaign slowed to a crawl.
This kind of near-death experience is more common than you might think for early stage startups. Many of the tech companies you know and love, including my former employer Twitch, came to the very brink of death before finding a lifeline and we weren’t ready to throw in the towel just yet.
With just three months of runway left in the bank and facing intense headwinds, we decided that our best bet to keep the team together and continue pursuing our dream and mission was to find an acquirer for Juked, so we began looking for a new home for Juked in August of this year.
After many conversations and many negotiations, we finally found a company that was a solid culture fit and wanted to see Juked continue forward. This company was in the Web3 gaming space and while Juked was a different direction than their core product, we put together a plan to keep Juked going and eventually integrate our products down the road.
After several rounds of negotiations, we were ready to put together a term sheet.
That takes us to November 11th, 2022, when the second largest Crypto exchange in the world FTX’s liquidity crisis led to a Lehman Brothers style crash.
Crypto and Web3 startups have already been taking a severe beating since April of this year, but this was the final straw. The company who we had been speaking to suddenly reached out to say the deal was dead and that they were going into austerity mode to weather their own storm ahead.
Still with me? Well, that’s the whole story (so far).
Final notes
We had high hopes that Juked could become the destination where esports fans go to follow, enjoy, and talk about the games they love. We had high hopes that by removing barriers to entry and toxicity, we could help esports itself flourish. Chris and I felt like we were so close to something truly special… I just wish we could have kept going a little bit longer. We’ll get ’em next time.
While we’ve fallen short of that dream, building Juked and seeing our community flourish has been the highlight of my professional career. This journey has been the most insane learning experience I could ever imagine and allowed me to meet and become friends with so many people I never could have before.
Most of all, I’m thankful for my team past and present, my amazing co-founders Chris and Delan, Steven, Sean, Sam, Logan, Brandon, Linna, Scott, Nick, thank you all for believing in me and for making this journey a blast.
As for what’s next for Juked, while we’ll sadly be closing the servers and company in the coming weeks, we hope the spirit of Juked will live on through our community Discord server where we’re still sharing our passion for esports together. We actually do hang out and discuss most big tournaments, news, etc. It’s a good time. JOIN US :)
As for me personally, I’m heartbroken, but don’t regret a thing. This journey was driven by passion, it was exciting from start to finish, and the learning and friendships I made along the way will stay with me for the rest of my life.
I’ll be taking a little time off before searching for what’s next. But I ain’t going anywhere, esports is my passion and I’m here to stay. Look me up sometime if you want to chat ❤
Final note: we are still looking for a buyer for Juked’s tech and assets. If you’d like to learn more about what we offer as a white-label social media platform (or even better if sports/esports-related), please ping me ben@juked.gg
Metrics
Juked.gg web
- 7.7M pageviews
- 6.5M esports minutes watched
- 229K news stories read
Juked App
- 3.3M pageviews
- 310.7K notification opens
- 17.4K user posts, 91.2K comments, 21.2K chat messages
