Mobalytics: Our Story Thus Far
2017 was an incredible year filled with challenges, triumphs, and most of all, learning. As we enter 2018, we wanted to give a look back through the eyes of our team of our story thus far. Starting from the very roots of the ideas that became Mobalytics, through winning Techcrunch and building our team, and onwards to the future.
Note: The following quotes were from talking to our team members separately, they were not together when retelling their perspectives- Agilio Macabasco (Head of Content)
The Early Days: How the idea came together
Amine Issa (co-founder & Warchief of Science) : It never started as “Mobalytics”, I was always a data guy. I used to come to World of Warcraft tournaments with this giant stack of papers and my team looked at me like I was crazy — literally like, “What is that?” It was every other team’s armory profiles, their stuff, what they usually run, what they don’t, and my notes, and we’d go over them before the game day.
Bogdan Suchyk (co-founder & Warchief of Growth): I was thinking about the ideas that became Mobalytics, back in 2010. I was playing games all my life, playing at university, making money out of playing video games…and then when I decided I wanted to start my first company, I was thinking a lot about, okay, how can I start something in gaming?
Amine: I originally started thinking about it when I was doing research on fighter pilots and athletes, and using all these different techniques like eye tracking and heart rate measurement, and heart rate variability, and breathing rates, to understand what was going on physiologically and psychologically, and cognitively in a person, and I’m like….I mean a fighter pilot isn’t that much different from a gamer, right?
He sits on a chair, he looks in front of him, and he looks at a few heads up displays and he uses joysticks or control knobs, levers, to make an action. So his ability to control the environment around him is the main factor, his main response, it’s not necessarily his physical movements. His manual dexterity is much more important — it’s not very different, so why can’t we use the same techniques to understand gamers?
Bogdan: Back then, there was no esports market, there was no easy way to get data, and playing video games was still seen as some sort of a crime. While I worked on other startup projects at the time, I was thinking about a platform where people would be able to have all their data about how good they are in different games, basically it would represent them as a player.
Amine: So I reached out to a bunch of professional teams, I was trying to find someone that was interested in doing this kind of research with me. I was getting turned down a lot but Steve Arhancet, from back then Team Curse and now he’s the co-CEO of Team Liquid, he reached back out and said “Yeah, why don’t you come out here and try this stuff out?”
Amine: With permission from my mentor from the Mayo clinic, I basically took this $35,000 eye tracking machine on an airplane, you know as a carry-on, I was so worried that something would happen to it. I wouldn’t even put it in the overhead bin. I would fly out on my own time to the Curse house in the middle of Las Vegas and I would crash on the couch and I would stay there and study some of the gamers who had become really good friends of mine.
Back then it was the old school team of Saint, Cop, and a lot of the guys who play now, or who coach even. I would do these tests and we found some really cool stuff, made some really great videos that got some attention and I started to think…well maybe I could make a living out of this, I could make this my job. To study gamers.
Bogdan: Eventually, I decided to go through the market to see what exists, I spent 3 months just going through all the websites that existed for gamers in terms of what they have/what they do, and looking to see if there was anything like what I had in mind, and that’s why I ended up going to the first Twitchcon in 2015.
Twitchon 2015: The founders meet
Amine: I took this life sabbatical from my job and I first met my co-founder, Bogdan, when I attended Twitchcon. We were both at the same panel which was about esports and SirScoots was the host. Bogdan and I both went to him after the talk with the same question, except he asked him first.
Bogdan: When I talked to SirScoots, I asked him ‘What do you think of moneyball for esports?’. Amine was standing nearby, and he was like okay I was thinking about asking the same question. We had a chat just the three of us, but then Amine and I decided to leave on our own to grab a beer and talk gaming.
Amine: I’m like, that’s just analytics for players and that’s like what I’m doing. I quickly pulled him aside and we started talking, and we kept talking and talking, and the idea for Mobalytics kinda came out there and we worked on it back and forth.
Bogdan: We started bouncing ideas and what I told him what I was thinking about. Amine shared his life story, his experiences with pro teams, and how and why he’s excited about that space — this was a moment that we realized okay we can definitely make something out of this.
Amine: We’d never met each other before, but ended up working for three months and said - let’s just do it! We decided what our first product would look like and that our mission was to make a tool for all gamers to be able to understand their performance and to improve their performance. By studying the elite, we could help them and disseminate that information to everyone else.
Bogdan: We soon invited Kolya [third Mobalytics co-founder] who was my university mate — I knew he was really excited about big data and we had considered working together in 2013 for another project. I reached out to him and said “Hey man, let’s analyze data, but for gamers.”
Nikolay “Kolya” Lobanov (co-founder & Warchief of Technology): I did not have any expectations. I had a lot of dreams and some vision of how it could grow. The main goal at the time was just focusing on the product — first build the platform, then get the feedback.
Bogdan: At that point, we were working on the GPI — I remember I came to Greece because Amine was there before his trip to Killamanjaro. I came for 3 weeks and we were living in the same building while working on the first version of the GPI. It was really funny because the first week of the trip was my honeymoon. Once it was over, my wife went back to Ukraine and I stayed at Amine’s place for two weeks.
While there, we decided that we wanted to standardize a way to understand gamers and that’s how we created the Gamer Performance Index [GPI]. We were drawing the first formulas on napkins thinking about what were the most important skills and important metrics to assess those skills.
Techcrunch Disrupt SF
Amine: It kind of all blew up when Bogdan decided to submit two hours before the deadline to Techcrunch. At the time I was on an expedition in Killamanjaro — I came down from the mountain..and I saw a thousand messages from Bogdan: “Hey, where are you?” Where are you? We got accepted, you have to be in San Francisco in two weeks to present!”
Bogdan: After Greece, I went back to Ukraine. We worked on the product with Roman, our first developer who joined us in April. He was the one person working on the product while Kolya worked on the infrastructure and everything like that. I knew about Techcrunch Battlefield events that were held twice a year so I decided to check when was the next one and it just happened to be that the deadline for the next one was that day.
At that point we had no product, I did a screencast of our mock ups and applied, and within a month we heard from them. When they saw our unique application they were so excited that they said they wanted to take us on.
Amine: I’m like…what’s Techcrunch? I didn’t know what it was. Bogdan did the submission without me and he explained everything to me. You have to understand when you spend 10–15 days out of society you come back refreshed but you’re tired. A trip like that takes a lot out of you because you’ve stressed your body to the maximum, you’ve slept in uncomfortable environments…So I’m like fuck, alright let’s do it.
Bogdan: I took the calls with the Techcrunch guys and started working. First couple of calls with them it was more on my own. They explained to me what how it was, how everything works, and how to put together the slide deck in terms of what we should tell and how to present. When Amine came back he started practicing his pitch.We came to LA and stayed for a couple days to go through the presentation, the product, and then Kolya joined us before we took a trip from LA to SF in early September.
Ryan Dean (RnD & Farseer of Science): I had been working with Amine on various League-related projects for about a year and a half, closing in on two years, but I had been busy working for TSM during this time. In fact, Amine and I went to Twitchcon together to meet with TL on a project we were working on at the time. In any event, He was just getting back from his trip to Africa, so when he touched base he said, “Oh, yeah, by the way, we are enrolled in TechCrunch Disrupt in SF in like two weeks.”
Being an hour away in San Jose, I was super excited and made very tentative plans to see him. I ended up heading to SF and booking a hotel while Amine and Bogdan were in some pre-meetings with the TechCrunch people (Kolya was busy busting out a tech demo with Roman back at the AirBnB).
Kolya: The entire process of speech preparation, conducting multiple meetings with people to gather the feedback, and finally the competition was like 1 long day but in reality it took us 2 sleepless weeks.
Bogdan: It was crazy — we were thinking there was no chance for us to win because we were doing something really unique and niche. At Techcrunch you mainly have industry/enterprise products, some VR/AR things, and we were the only one doing something unrelated to the usual tech scene.
Ryan: The next day, they had a few morning meetings, so I met them at Fisherman’s Wharf for lunch with a friend. It was great - there, the five of us were all just super excited about everything that was going on. They ran through the presentation with us, and we excitedly wished them luck.
I was flying to Colorado the next day for my birthday, but would be back in a few days, just in time for their presentation. By the time I returned from Colorado, they had learned they were through to the finalists!
Bogdan: When we presented we really didn’t expect to win, we were just seeing it as a cool experience for us. We ended up getting into the finals and the whole time we were thinking…this is so cool. I was nervous because I don’t like to present or be on stage, but it’s what we had to do.
Ryan: It was surreal (and also IMPOSSIBLE to get ahold of them). When the final four presentations were scheduled to be made, I plopped down in front of my PS4 and streamed the event live. I don’t know how they did it, I was a nervous wreck, pacing a groove around my coffee table.
All of the finalists were very impressive. When the winners were announced, I immediately called my girlfriend, and of course messaged Amine and Bogdan right away. On like every channel I could think of: Facebook, Skype, Text, you name it. I couldn’t believe it. THEY HAD DONE IT!
Life after Techcrunch
Bogdan: We didn’t realize Techcrunch would open so many doors. At the time we were thinking to never fundraise [in terms of investors] and even considered doing a Kickstarter campaign. I actually have a banner that we used at TC and on the banner we have “Coming on Kickstarter soon.”
Kolya: 2017 was a very productive year for Mobalytics. First, we worked a lot on building our team and getting the best people in the field. Second, we launched beta and got graceful feedback from our users. Third, we focused a lot on creating connections with our partners.
Ryan: After Techrunch, I drove to SF to have sushi and sake to celebrate and I was really able to catch up with the guys. Within the month I was a full-time member of the team, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Matthew Coyle: (Dreadlord of Growth): Back in the WoW days, Amine and I were on rival teams. Since then, I had been working in the gaming industry for companies like IGN and MLG. It’s been a long journey seeing the scene grow to the point that it’s taken us from being pro players to working on a platform that will help future generations of pros. I joined the team right after they won TechCrunch, it’s been a pleasure watching Mobalytics grow from concepts to creation and seeing a community form around it.
Amine: When we opened the first part of the private beta, we let in a thousand people. They started saying this is awesome this is really cool it was like — you know that guy Atlas who carries the world? You feel like he just dropped it, the weight on your shoulders is gone for a little while. So it was really a huge relief that they actually liked the direction, the design, and the functionality. Our Discord grew from 10 people to 7,000, so it’s hard to describe, but it feels like yesterday. Time has moved really fast.
Katelynne Visser (Community Troll Batrider): I started playing League of Legends in 2011 and met one of my good friends, Ryan Dean, otherwise known as “Geei” online. In the fall of 2016 Ryan introduced me to Mobalytics, and shortly after that I became a staff member.
I’ve been playing League consistently for years now, and with that I have developed a love for meeting and communicating with members of the community. When it came to the Mobalytics server on Discord, it seemed like a good opportunity.
At first, it was slow and we had a small community of around 100 users. There were a few consistent people that showed up everyday to chat and give feedback on the site. By July, we had grown from 100 people, to over 1000 people. We had dozens of active users coming in everyday just to get to know our staff and give us feedback on what was currently going on with the site.
In November we hit 10,000 users with around 3000 active users. The same people that were there at the start are still around and are now what we call Honorable Community or Moderators, and they are active every day, asking and answering questions.
We’ve built a community of people who have made friendships with other users as well as created and shared their own content and experiences with us and each other, all with a common goal of improving.
Bogdan: It’s been an amazing journey…seeing how everything is coming together, piece by piece. The best part is that we are going according to the plan since we first met. There’s a huge amount of companies who realize after a few months things aren’t working…in our case we have this long roadmap for 5 to10 years . We haven’t needed to do any pivots and we’re still working on the original idea. Amine and Kolya sometimes make fun of me and say hey stop worrying about 5 to 10 and let’s focus on something that we have today. But for me, I was (and am), always about thinking about the long future.
Kolya: Some day, I hope we improve our product to the level when competitive players can’t play games without using our tools! As far as 2018 goes, I’m looking forward to launching CS:GO version of the product.
Bogdan: By going through all the different ventures in my life and always coming back to gaming, I’ve been able to leverage the experience that I got from those different things. It’s basically something that Steve Jobs said, “At the end of the day all the dots will connect,” something that I feel is happening in my life and I’m really excited about that.
Right now, when we’re thinking about new features for this next year, we’re looking forward to allowing users to set personal goals, using the experience of other high level players and building action plans based on those numbers…this is something that we plan to do and is extremely connected to the first ideas I had.
Amine: It’s been a long year for us at Mobalytics. We have done so much, and we are grateful that we have such an amazing community to share the journey with. From our Discord community and the mods that patrol the channels, to the user that hunts bugs down with Rengar-like dedication, everyone has played a key role to getting us where we are today.
I want to give a huge shoutout to the team. A lot of them don’t go to Discord too often and have limited interaction with the community, while people like myself, Kate, and Agilio are much more visible. But the truth is we have a lot of team members who have been working tirelessly to fix seemingly invisible bugs and build features that aren’t out yet. I want to dedicate this message to them, and although they are perfectionists, they are lifted up when they know that other people appreciate their hard work.
We have so much in the works for 2018. Keep an eye out for our first Changelog (which will be Coming Soon™) for a big preview of what’s to come!
—————————————————————————————————
Amine’s note: Although Agilio does not appear in this article, despite writing it, I would like to share his story. Agilio wrote the best cover letter out of any person who applied for the job (over 100 people, and yes I read all of them). I invited him out to meet us, and he showed up dressed very professionally which made me a little worried.
Then he started to talk and answer questions and everything felt very very natural. I wanted to throw him off guard by asking him a deep and sophisticated question, but we stopped by a Bevmo before Bogdan’s birthday celebration and chose to ask it then, so it ended up being funny in hindsight. At the end of the interview, I walked him to his car and he put away the blazer and I told him “ You won’t be needing that anymore. Over here, just be the best you.”
