GameApart

GameApart is the first platform built from the ground up to bring top-notch content—party games, teambuilding activities, icebreakers, and productivity apps—to any virtual meeting or hangout.

Zoom reports 300 million daily meeting participants. Microsoft Teams reports 145 million daily active users, and Google Meet has around 100 million. This is a MASSIVE ecosystem of people staring at each other through screens every single day, and the market just keeps growing: Gartner predicts that 51% of global knowledge workers and 53% of the U.S. workforce will be remote or hybrid-remote in 2022, while Microsoft estimates it at 3 out of 5 (60%). These are people who need to relax with, get to know, and have fun with their teammates without happy hours, team lunches, or the proverbial watercooler conversation.

GameApart works with any video collaboration platform: Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, WebEx, GoToMeeting, Skype, BlueJeans, Slack, you name it (though we integrate more tightly with some than others). A host starts a game or activity on the GameApart website, shares their screen, and users join in on their phones. We're live today with over 100 pilot companies, 15K early access users, and new features and content being added to the platform each month.

Remote work and virtual events are here to stay, but no one's making friends or building team culture online. The tools out there aren't built for that!

In a post-COVID world where 50-60% (or more) of the workforce is remote or hybrid remote (meaning they work remotely at least part of the time), companies desperately need tools to help their teams foster communication, build morale, and have fun. 

With our days full of virtual meetings followed by video hangouts with friends and family, online conferences, classes, happy hours and networking events, our interactions are increasingly virtual and Zoom fatigue increasingly prevalent.

One day last year, in what must have been our 50th Zoom call of the week, sitting around staring at each other (with drinks in hand) we went looking for a platform for playing games over Zoom… and were kind of surprised to find it didn’t exist! So, we built it.

A two-sided marketplace for board/party game makers and remote workers/digital natives.

We’ve built it, and so far users love it!

We’re live now, with 8 games available (12 if you count different editions for work, families, and so on), 2 more in development and another 12 in the pipeline. Our platform isn’t theoretical or a prototype, but available for teams, friends, and family today!

Now we’re engineers, not game designers. So, we’ve built a technology platform for games, teambuilding activities, and other events over Zoom. It’s infinitely scalable, fast, and incredibly easy to use. So much so in fact that 71% of all users that download our app go on to play a game, which is almost unheard of in the gaming space. We’re just getting started, but our sign-up cost is already at just over $2.

Since we aren’t game makers, we’ve built out a partnership program with independent party game creators to license their bestseller titles and put them onto our platform – essentially, we’re building the Netflix of party games! We’ve got five partners onboard so far, licensing twelve games, and have actually had to stop signing anymore until we can increase our development capacity.

The way it works is straightforward: a host goes to our site, starts a game, and shares their screen over Zoom, Teams, Meet, or any other video conferencing platform. Everyone then joins and uses their phone as their hand of cards, drawing pad, controller, trivia card, etc.

You’ll probably recognize our take on Cards Against Humanity (but with GIFs, obviously, because we’re digital and can do that!).

So the obvious question is, how much money can we make at this?

Well, we sit at the convergence of several markets: mobile gaming is a $98bn space, with casual games representing 68% of the market; enterprise collaboration is a $47bn market; and board/card games are another $16bn and ripe for digitization in the same vein as DVDs have gone to streaming and books to e-readers. At a macro level, the market we’re tackling is huge. More specifically, we’ve built a platform that is a union of “virtual team building”, “games over zoom”, and “party game subscriptions”, and we look at our market across two segments, B2B and B2C.

On the B2B front, with 157M people participating in the US workforce and recent projections showing 53% will be working remotely (at least part of the time) by next year, we have a potential user base of 83 MILLION people, at an ARPU (average revenue per user) of $22, giving us a B2B segment size of $1.8bn.

On the B2C side, out of 260M smartphone users in the US, 81% are participating in non-work “virtual hangouts”, and of those 80% say they’d like to play games during them (based on three rounds of market research covering 1500 people). This equates to a potential consumer user base of 169 MILLION people, at an ARPU of $12.32 (consumers will pay less, especially since many will be ad-based), and a segment size of $2.1bn.

Since we know there’s some overlap between business and consumer users, but we aren’t sure how much yet, we think our serviceable market is between $2.1-3.9 BILLION / YEAR in the United States alone.

Now, there’s absolutely competition out there. But none of them are quite like us. Our competition falls into two main categories:

• Other “platforms” that may provide a library of games and work over a video call, but run expensive, hard-to-use platforms with legacy technology and—frequently—building their own games from scratch.
• Service providers, who are actually offering their time—hosting a trivia contest, a murder mystery, or a virtual escape room—rather than a technology platform.
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Ultimately our differentiation against any competitor out there comes down to our platform approach and the unbeatable technology we bring to bear, the partnership model and partnerships we’ve brought on, and the playability of our system, which was born out of real-world frustrations faced by our founders.

Our business model is simple. For businesses, we’re a simple SaaS subscription, with companies signing up and buying licenses for their employees, either $2/employee/month or $20/employee/year, using budgets that in a pre-COVID world would have gone to monthly team lunches, happy hours, or outings.

For consumers, which represent our longer term growth, the acquisition is a little more complicated but brings in a strong viral element. We acquire an initial host who then goes on to invite their friends and family on to the platform. Anyone can join any game at any time by accepting a rewarded video ad, or can subscribe to the platform for $10/year or $3/quarter to get out of the ads and access premium features. Obviously some of the invited players will go on to host games themselves, perpetuating the viral growth cycle; we’re already seeing an average of 4.2 invites/host, and we’re just getting started!

We hope to achieve critical mass of users in 2022, breakeven in 2023, and scale to $99.6M in annual revenue @ 28% EBITDA by 2025

We’ve spent this year building our platform, figuring out how to acquire users, sign partners, and implement their games. Next year we’ll start ramping up, with over 200K monthly active users (MAU) and just under $1mm in revenue, and we believe we will  become profitable in mid-2023. Then we combine our outstanding long-term unit economics and viral growth potential to build a very profitable business over the next four years, targeting $99.6mm in revenue at 28% EBITDA—and that’s assuming our users only play twice a month and that we don’t branch into original content! We’re VERY confident we can build this into a profitable business either to build out long term or to be acquired into a company in the collaboration or gaming space. (However, projections are not guaranteed.)

Our rock-star team has been through multiple successful exits (including as CEO), includes multiple founders, marquee brands, gaming experience, and have all worked with our founder (and in many cases each other) on other projects.

The most important (and impressive) part of the company is the team behind it:

• James Simmons, our Founder and CEO, has a prior successful exit as CEO of Everyone Counts, a blockchain elections company working to change the world on one end with multiple countries, US states, and UN agencies on one hand and making money servicing the private sector with client including the Oscars, the Emmys, and three of the Big Four accounting firms. Before selling Everyone Counts in a deal M&A Advisor named Corporate/Strategic Deal of the Year for 2018, James spent 10 years in startups running progressively larger technology and product shops, including Head of Engineering at LegalZoom.
• The rest of our leadership team includes Justin Simmons, our Co-Founder & CTO, who’s leveraged his experience in the gaming space (both personal and professional), the entertainment industry (one of his last projects was the Disney/Fox merger), and two Masters of Engineering degrees to lead the development of our platform; Lee Bellon our fractional CMO; and Bill Kuncz to keep us in line as our fractional CFO. In addition to all having worked with James on other projects, each of these leaders has been a founder or has other exits under their belt, bringing a wealth of experience to the team.
• Rounding out our core founding team is Stef Histed, marketer extraordinaire, Holly Scott, game producer and owner of hundreds upon hundreds of board/card/party games, Giovanni Hernandez, one-man development army (backed up by our offshore contract team), and Creighton Pyles, rockstar designer.

Our advisors include Ryan Linton, for VP of Revenue at Zynga, helping us figure out how to build a mobile gaming giant and make money doing it; Steve Barnes, founder of Neddy Games, one of our first game maker partners helping us figure out the ins and outs of the industry; and Adrian Walters, principal and owner of the Prodo Group, who’s helping us get our ad game together.

Most important of all, pretty much everyone on this team has worked with our founder (and in some cases, each other) over the years. This is a team that knows one another and knows how to win together!

We set out to build a platform for teambuilding activities and casual games over Zoom (or Teams… Meet… Messenger Rooms… Slack… Discord… WebEx… GoToMeeting… Discord). Turns out it works just as well around the living room (or bar) TV with a FireTV, Roku, AppleTV, ChromeCast, etc.

But we’re quickly evolving into a social network all on our own, with direct integrations to Zoom (live now), and Slack/Teams/Facebook in the pipeline to instantly connect with your coworkers, family, or friends (or make new ones!) and join in to this ecosystem of over 545 million people connecting over video each and every day. As that space evolves, we will too, moving into more immersive and fulfilling ways to bridge the gap between in-person and virtual meetings and bringing the intimacy and connection of sitting around a table regardless of where you physically are.

We’re raising $1.7-2.5M for our seed round (with a maximum of $250k sourced through Wefunder) with the majority of funds going into Product Development (42%) and then Sales and Marketing (26%). With these funds, which will give us 12-15 months of runway, we’ll hit key milestones of >340K Monthly Active Users and >$250k MRR, while building out our content library and partnership base.

We’d love to have you in our corner!