Founding a start-up is easy. Finding success is hard. One thing that might increase the chance of success is speed. With the advent of Web 3, what was already a high standard of growth velocity in the field has been magnified to a different level.
To serial entrepreneurs like Gamifly’s CEO Robert Zhang, this was the kind of challenge that made him and his friends want to take on. Robert and his former college mate, Derek Shen, along with sports expert Wali Khan and their founding partner Rameez Ansar who supported them both intellectually and financially since day 1, toyed with the idea of exploring what Web 3 can do that had not been done before to an existing industry.
“There are many problems that we can tackle, but for all the things that we can put our energy and focus on, why Gamifly?” Robert posed.
Gaming came in as the natural answer to Derek who used to work at Tencent Games.
A thriving industry that can re-distribute some benefits
Gaming is a highly profitable sector. People paid to be entertained. If you look under the hood, you can consistently see margins as high as 50%.
“Everyone made money. The shareholders are happy. But from the user perspective — the gamers — they don’t get any of the benefits. There’s a lack of better value sharing between gaming companies and players.”
Creating the gateway to Web 3
Web 3 felt like the perfect basin to create an elegant solution to an age-old problem. With the advent of play-to-earn and the myriad of lessons from its early period, Gamifly wants to give their GamiFans a chance to have fun with their friends with the possibility of earning real life money. Incorporating blockchain to a familiar gameplay like Cricket makes Web 3 less intimidating for the casual gamer to interact with. It is the most logical solution to scale while providing in-game credits that have more power and utility than ever before.
To onboard the next 100 million, we need a half-step to Web 3 for those who are hesitant to make the plunge. By building a solid Web 2.5 game like Gamifly’s Cricketfly, this was made possible. In less than a year upon launch, Cricketfly has had a million app downloads with very little marketing efforts.
“The user base growth is very organic. We listen to their feedback and iterate at hyperspeed.”
Not the first rodeo
The founding team of Gamifly, all seasoned entrepreneurs, each one boasting an impressive background knows this from experience. Robert himself has built two ventures before Gamifly — one e-commerce logistics venture for the #1 taxi company in Indonesia and another one, an edtech company that reached profitability within 6 months.
His top three tips of growing a start-up are: patience, data, and hiring the right people.
Persevering against all odds
“Perseverance is number 1. When things are going down, it can always go up, and when things are up, remember that it can go down just as fast. There will always be ups and downs, it will always be that way.”
Preparing for the worst while expecting the best and having the perseverance to see it through is on Robert’s top of the list.
In the middle of a long sprint towards enabling the cash-in cash-out basis in-app, whitelisting for their digital asset, and going on daily AMAs, the FTX crypto crash happened. The team decided to be more conservative on their Web 3 efforts and instead focused on increasing their gamer user base, improving the gaming experience, and understanding their core persona.
Let data do the talking
“I always try to look at things from different perspectives. It doesn’t matter if we did it wrong, as long as we learned. The point is always how to move forward from that.”
After their first 100k downloads in September, which came from the Daraz sponsorship, the Gamifly team made the conscious decision to opt out of sponsoring the Cricket World cup despite it potentially good for the optics. Priorities were re-established between many competing goals and the direction had to be pivoted according to what was needed and not where the team wanted the platform to be.
During a period where retention, a key metric, was going down; the team went on emergency mode to fix the issues. Within a month of super high-speed iteration of daily internal product build and weekly public releases, data revealed that this move was right. User retention, engagement, and re-installs are back to all time high.
“Be super objective. Don’t put ego in front.”
Do everyone a favor — hire well
“The last point,” Robert said. “Is to only bring people who are good for the team. That’s like doing everyone a favor.”
With the product coming to a period of stability, Gamifly shifts gear into a marketing-led direction. The team has started recruiting more community managers, customer service representatives, and marketing associates that will help strengthen and serve its current Web 2 users while opening doors for Web 3 players.
Future Plans
Plans of launching their own token ($GMY) is underway. With GMY, Gamifans can use their token to buy in-game credits ($GMF) at a huge discount or be deployed to support their favorite team with its fan token utilization.
“We are signing up professional cricket teams soon. They are all very excited to be a part of this.”
This move will guarantee paving the way for the new era in sports for gamers, players, and fans alike. With this, Web 2 becomes Web 3, and Web 3 welcomes Web 2.
Less than a year into building, we can expect Gamifly to continue its momentum with all the partnerships on the pipeline. The latest partnership with Skale network guarantees zero gas fees for all the GamiFans.
In the works is a series of partnerships with sports players, teams and governing bodies, among others.
As Gamifly continues to grow at hyperspeed, at the core of the company, is a few people that want to bring value to its users and to re-distribute some of the financial benefits of having fun and playing with your friends.
