My big idea: the Gameram social network for gamers

Hi Philipp! What's your elevator pitch? 

Gameram is a social network for mobile players. Gameram helps players around the globe build  their player identity, find like-minded people and teammates, share their gaming experience, discover new games and explore games together.‍

Why does the market need your product?

Right now, there is a unique market situation.

First, there is a significant number of mobile players that have emerged during the last decade - almost 3 billion.  According to several studies 40% of all players want to be part of a community, share their gaming experience, and discuss games with like-minded people without fear of social pressure or disapproval.

Second, mobile game developers, due to the user acquisition crisis and to data privacy changes, are starting to invest more in their gaming communities, looking for ways to boost the user-generated content and have access to their game's community and other creators.

Third, even almost a third of the Earth's population is playing games - and there still remains a lot of negative biases around gaming. People are afraid to post gaming content on social networks, like Facebook, Instagram, etc.

Gameram's mission is to create an inclusive platform for all users to engage and make friends with their gaming preferences and styles. Additionally, it offers a platform for mobile developers to raise brand awareness of their products and get access to the community and other creators.

Where is the business today? 

We launched the product as soon as possible after 3 months when the idea was created with basic features and started gathering data and asking our users (about their experience and feedback). It's the only way to start a consumer-oriented product. We have a strong team of 25 people working on Gameram. We have reached a PMF milestone and now we are improving metrics each month. Our next big goal is to develop B2C and B2B monetization in 9 months.

What made you think there was money in this?

The mobile market dramatically surpassed PC and console games during the last ten years and is still growing. Several billion mobile players, aged 36 years in average, are looking for high-quality services to pay for.

We saw a gap in the market with our competitors, mainly vertical social networks that were more focused on hardcore PC games. Mobile games require new formats! There are only some rare mobile games that are good for streaming like match-3 or dress-up games with hundreds of millions of fans.

What's your biggest strength?

The team. I relentlessly invest a lot of my time and energy into the team. The most important thing is our team. I believe in people!

Transparency. Transparency provides better results since there are fewer misunderstandings, less Entropia, and less need in purposeless meetings. All the metrics results, product  plans and fundraising updates are open to every employee in our company. Once a month, I make a board-like presentation  to talk about the latest news and answer any upcoming questions from the team.

Finally - I have been a passionate player since my childhood. I do what I believe in, and I invest my energy as well as my time and personal funds!

What is the secret to making the business work?

For us, getting feedback and metrics from the core audience from the start was key. Social networks have an impossible amount of features, like chats, videos, posting and commenting, feed algorithms, moderation, etc. So there is a great temptation to make everything right first and only after showing the application to users. But, all the social networks from the amount of features are the same. Only USPs make the difference. We decided to launch as soon as possible, obtain metrics and develop features simultaneously. It is hard, as you get low metrics from the start, and have to grow it gradually without a huge marketing budget, but it worked, and now we are happy to declare booming metrics with a core audience.  We also now have a detailed and clearly developed roadmap for Gameram.

Tell us about the business model

For the B2C stream. We don't want to focus on advertising, even if it is the so-called “liquid gold”, since all the mobile developers are looking for installations and fresh traffic sources. We will focus on paid gaming mechanics, because all of our users are players, and all those mechanics are quite native for them. 

For the B2B stream. We will provide tools for game developers to effectively work with their communities, develop special features to boost UGC content, and prepare reports and essential marketing data.

Our main bet is community economy. We see lots of tools for any kind of creator to earn money. But, there are lots of community enthusiasts, who create communities, connect people into groups, make events and so on, but still don't have enough ways to earn money. We want to provide them with earnings for creating  communities!

What were you doing before?

The core team behind Gameram has a strong background in gaming, social networks, and B2B products. This is not our first startup, we have experience in selling companies as well. team members previous achievements - launch of War Robots game with with $750m revenue and 200 mln instals up to day, creating algorithms for social network; Odnoklassniki with 40 million monthly active users; half of million clients in the B2B startup.

Are there any technologies you've found useful?

The Flutter framework by Google helped a lot for us to move faster. It's a cross-platform technology that allows developers to write their code once for iOS, Android, and the Web. For example, it took us around one month to port our mobile app to a web version by just one developer! More features and more value for our users in less time. 

What is your future vision?

Our future vision is to become the largest platform for players which gives space for safely and freely interacting with new gaming friends. 

We want to become the largest community where gamers know they can have the ability to self-express and socialise without the fear of social pressure or disapproval. 

We wish to achieve normalisation of gaming and eliminate gamer biases together with the gaming community