Lesson learned by building an Esports Startup in 2020
Ok. I can’t close the year 2020 without sharing with you guys a retrospective view of my entrepreneurship journey in the last 12 months. One of the craziest periods I have ever lived, the events shook our everyday lives and routines, causing a lifestyle more digital than never.
It’s curious because everyone around me started the year with so many ideas to create. In my case, at SkillCore, we started working hard to validate our guesses and release our MVP (minimum viable product).
The research we made during the planning stage revealed all the payment problems inside the Esports market. We decided to focus on the most painful one. Tournaments that don’t pay the prize pool or take a long time to pay the winners.
Basically, to validate the payout problem, we started talking with pro-players, realizing how many similar frustrating situations they lived. — there was a blinking arrow pointing this way.
Mauricio (the other co-founder) and I designed a clear path to solve this problem. We thought: “Let’s create a platform with digital wallets so organizers can create tournaments, onboard competitors, and send payments with a single click.”
Before we release this first version of our product, one other validation confirmed our point of view. Level Six, an esports accelerator in Canada, invited us to be part of their first cohort. After the news, we started to make many plans to go to Canada to fully experience being part of an incubator, learning from the staff, mentors, and other companies.
BAM! A few weeks later, all countries imposed travel regulations due to the COVID pandemic. So, we canceled all the plans to relocate there and change it to work remotely. Anyway, we would have all the sessions by conference calls, like before we already had, since we are based in Brazil.
Even with no trip to Canada 😐 we enjoyed all the time spent with every staff member of Level Six and other companies in the same cohort. Plus, invited mentors were particularly chosen to help with the most common problems when creating a business in a fast-growth market, like Esports.
Meanwhile, we released our first beta version of SkillCore to the Brazilian Market. Our first customers started signing up in May, and a few tournaments landed on our website. That was an incredible feeling, see real customers using an application made by our own hands.
The entire world was closed due to the quarantine, but video games are thriving. Streamers and Esports achieved a fraction of the mainstream audience by the lack of content in the traditional media. Step-by-step competitive gaming has been taking its place in the overall sports market.
July was a fantastic month for our company; we invited a group of people with special skills to join us in this endeavor. Rafael (Product), Fernando (Marketing), and André (Legal) accepted the challenge of our early-stage startup, and they became a fundamental part of all decisions and activities related.
After they join the team, it was time to present our pitch deck for the incubator’s Demo Day. It was an outstanding experience hosted by Chris Reed and Ben Feferman, and a little bit nervous for me. After this session, we realized how much hard work we put into that.
Maybe, the MVP stage was the biggest lesson taken during the whole process. As I said before, we prepared a product to focus on the payout of prize payments, but analyzing our customers, not gamers but leagues, what they were really looking for was: “How to grow my community and make money?”
A special consideration, many leagues, can’t charge an entry fee because of game publishers’ regulations, or sometimes their audience just does not accept paid events. So they need to be creative on how to create revenue without tickets.
Following the metrics, we saw a certain growth (mostly in the number of users), but not like we assumed before. There was something wrong that we needed to figure out.
We decided to get back to the validation step and understand the expectations of the tournament managers. Every call with investors, leagues, and gamers, we learned the vision about the audience in the market and why people enjoy being part of an esports community.
The more we understand the market talking to stakeholders, the more transparent we see that competitions are specific components included in a more significant scope, the community. So we realized that our real customer is the gaming community.
When we say gaming communities, it’s not just tournaments; they can be streamers, content creators, companies, or even teams. What produces the community purpose is the same interests they have, like the same game title they play together.
The competitive part of these communities is a small piece of the whole pie. Most of the gamers are not competitors; they are there for entertainment. After understanding that, we had to run all those experiments that I mentioned above to drive our eyeballs on the gaming market’s whole picture.
Currently, we already concluded that stage! To help gaming communities face growth, engagement, and revenue challenges, we are building a white-label product to support them. SkillCore is releasing a platform for Esports and Streamers giving them the capability to create their own virtual coin to improve the audience’s sense of empowerment.
Unlike donations or other membership types, managers can create rewards for their users to exchange coins they have acquired. From now on, communities can provide an exclusive environment for the audience, adding custom business models and a marketplace under their brand.
That’s great news, right? Check out here
Last but not least, I’d like to thank everyone who took part in this complicated but delightful journey that made us stronger and smarter than before.
And you, what you learned this year?
