Transcript: Ani Mohan: Founder & General Manager at GameSnacks (Google Area 120)

Host: This episode of Start-Up Project is brought to you by Beartax. Beartax compiles all your crypto transactions and makes it easy for you to file your taxes. Check out beartax. That is b-e-a-r.t-a-x, Beartax.

Host: Hey Ari, thanks for being on the show.

Ari: Yeah, it’s great to be here.

Host: So I think the first thing I want to talk about in our conversation is you know how GameSnacks became what it became today. And you know in our last conversation we were talking about the pivots you’ve taken to make it what it looks like today. So can you talk a little bit of what GameSnacks is and how did you end up to make GameSnacks what it is today?

Ari: Sure. So I, uh, spend most of my time as the co-founder and general manager of GameSnacks. We are building a gaming platform for users in emerging markets. So mainly countries like India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Brazil, Mexico where a lot of people are coming online to the internet for the first time. Uh, often on, uh, lower cost Android phones on 2G, 3G or 4G networks and they might never have played games before. Um, the business is being funded out of Google’s internal incubator called Area 120. Um, when we started working on the business when we first started getting funding for it back in 2018, uh, we did not set out to build this. We actually set out to solve a very different problem. Uh, myself and my co-founder, we are from, uh, San Francisco. We live and work at San Francisco in California. Um, and, uh, you know, I’ve had a fair amount of experience working on consumer products before. And the initial idea that that we were working on was a daily game show, uh, in the US. Uh, so it was a show that anyone could tune into on their phone, uh, but actually be a participant, uh, and, uh, compete with everyone else who was on line, uh, tuning into that show and play games and compete for for cash prizes. Um, so it’s been kind of a wild ride over the past 3 years going from there where we were targeting, you know, GenZ and millennial Americans to eventually users in in India and Indonesia, uh, with a very different product.

Host: When you say you pitched, uh, did you pitch it internally in Google or were you trying to create a different company outside Google?

Ari: Yeah. So a bit about my background kind of before that. Joined Google back in 2014 and spent a bit of time working on our emerging markets team and then spent a couple years working on the Chrome team. Uh, but kind of discovered that, uh, you know, I’m much more of a smaller team, um, early stage of the product style person. Uh, the way I got into tech was by starting, starting a maternal health business back when I was in college and I’d always kind of wanted to start something new again and start a new business. Um, and I was considering sort of raising capital, um, from, from, you know, investors and and doing it as a start-up. But around that time when I was thinking about doing this, uh, sort of late 2017, early 2018, Google was investing further in this internal incubator, um, Area 120, which is sort of structured as a early stage accelerator for, uh, folks to to start new businesses kind of with the backing of Google. Uh, and it’s, it was open both to Google employees but also folks outside the company, you know, founders who are just looking for an alternate place to to start something new. And the way the, uh, the incubator is set up is teams are given full autonomy, um, to to build, you know, a new business just like a start-up. Um, so you have to build a new product from scratch where you have no pre-existing customers and, you know, can’t use, uh, you know, Google’s tooling and infrastructure and so you’re, you’re on your own but you, uh, are on Google’s payroll and can, uh, leverage Google’s resources when it’s helpful for you. Whether it’s hiring folks to grow your team, taking advantage of distribution opportunities, uh, especially when it comes to to reaching customers or partnering with sort of popular apps to get your product out to market, uh, and also leveraging technology, uh, that that Google might have that that could be useful for a new business. And so it’s meant to kind of combine the best of, of both worlds of both starting something new from scratch while also having kind of the backing of, of a larger company.

Host: So you mentioned you were trying to build the game show, right? Uh, and then you had to pivot to something what it looks like today, which is not really a game show and you're serving customers in, you know, in India and Indonesia and, you know, other places. So at what sort of point did you guys decide to, you know, pivot to this idea?

Ari: Yeah. So I mean the genesis for the game show idea was, was us being inspired by this app called HQ Trivia, which was really popular in the second half of 2017 and early 2018 in the US and and the UK in particular. And it was essentially a trivia show that anyone could tune into and play and compete for cash prizes and I mean it really seemed like the next big thing in consumer at the time. Uh, I think it ended up raising to a multi hundred million dollar valuation. They had 2 million concurrent live viewers every, every night, which is way bigger than any sort of live streaming platform had at the time and you know, it seemed, it seemed clearly like the next big thing. Uh, and so, uh, we built a variant of it. Uh, that’s what we got funded for where it was a daily game show with the games changing every day. And so this was sort of the summer of 2018. Um, our first pivot, we ended up doing it, uh, in the later half, uh, of 2018 sort of around the winter time when we discovered that we were not the right team to be building that game show. Um, I actually still have conviction in that idea. So if anyone is interested in building it, please let me know. Uh, but what we kind of discovered was it was more of a media play than, uh, a product and engineering and a technology differentiated, uh, business. Um, a big part of what made HQ Trivia successful was it was a well produced show and the talent who they had hosting the show was very compelling. He was a funny comedian influencer. Um, and so our idea we realized was, was more of a media business than it was a technology business and you know, my background and my co-founders background was in engineering and product development and we wanted to sort of build something that was differentiated by that. But, uh, what we realized was we had built a very interesting format. Um, we were actually hosting all the shows in the early days and, uh, in the process of doing that we were learning a bunch around what formats made the most sense. You know, how many games should be hosted in each show? How often do you vary, uh, the games and so on and so forth. And so we were sort of iterating and converging on a format that we thought was very compelling to users. Uh, and realized that what we could do is actually turn that format into a platform, uh, by allowing people who already had audiences through live video, so YouTube creators and Twitch streamers and, you know, influencers who are, who are comfortable with live streaming already, we could bring this format to them and let them host game shows for their audience. That was sort of our first evolution in our thinking was rather than us hosting the game show every day, what would it look like if, you know, YouTubers and Twitch streamers hosted shows for their audience. And so the way I often describe it to people is kind of the, the North Star that we always had in our head is what would it look like if, you know, someone like Ellen DeGeneres or Jimmy Fallon or, um, some sort of, uh, you know, casual lifestyle influencer like that were to play Flappy Bird or Candy Crush or, uh, Snake, you know, with their entire audience live over YouTube. That was the idea. You know, would that be interesting? Um, is there a business to be built there? Is there a new way that they could start interacting with their fans and actually start playing with them and interacting with them rather than their fans just passively sort of watching them and consuming their content? Um, so we spent most of 2019 trying to build that business. Um, it, it was called livegame.show and that domain is actually still live. You can go check it out. Uh, and the basic product was, um, essentially we took a bunch of games and, uh, allowed an arbitrarily large number of users to be playing those games live in real time together competing, you know, to see who could get the highest score in a minute or two with a host, uh, like Ellen DeGeneres or, you know, a Twitch streamer moderating the whole thing. Um, and at our peak, we ended up, uh, you know, getting, getting a reasonable amount of traction. We had tens of creators using the platform. So not massive scale but you know, enough for us to learn and for us to realize that the format was interesting. Um, had tens of thousands of users kind of using it, um, during, during the beta, uh, but concluded, um, around the second half of 2019 that there wasn’t really a viable business model there. Uh, like we got, we, I think we were on to building an interesting product and clearly we’re building something that resonated with creators and resonated with fans. It was an, it was an experience that they couldn’t have anywhere else online. You know, being able to play with hundreds of other people and their favorite influencers but we couldn’t figure out a way to make the, the math work from a business perspective. We were, we were paying creators to use the product and when we would stop paying creators, uh, creators would no longer use it, you know. Uh, and we couldn’t really figure out alternate business models. We couldn’t really figure out a way for fans to want to pay to play with their favorite creators. We couldn’t really figure out advertising. We tested a bunch of these different things. And sort of an interesting shift was happening in the creator economy around that time too where, uh, you know, in 2019 and even more so now in in 2021, uh, creators went from wanting to just accumulate followers and, you know, accumulate influence to actually wanting to monetize. People started realizing that, uh, you know, there’s an opportunity to to build a viable career, uh, by, by being an influencer online. And so the days of being able to pitch influencers that they could get followers and get engagement and the monetization would come later just were gone. Um, influencers were demanding sort of monetization sooner in the life cycle of the product and and we couldn’t deliver it. And so, uh, you know, we had, uh, this was around August 2019, we had around 3 months of funding left in Area 120 and we're kind of scratching our heads, uh, to be honest. We didn’t really know where to take it. Um, you know, we sunk a year and a half into this project, tried two different products, um, learned some interesting things but, uh, didn’t, didn’t really have a business that was working. And so, uh, you know, it was, it was a challenging time and we were considering, considering shutting the project down, but, uh, on a whim kind of realized one day when we were digging through our analytics, uh, that we had a small but, uh, engaged and retained user base from India coming to our website to play our games. They were coming to livegame.show, you know, the site that had been built for YouTube creators, you know, to play these games. They were coming, uh, and just discovering some of our games and, and playing them. Uh, nothing to do with YouTube creators, nothing to do with the game shows. It was just a website with, with, with web games and we ignored it for a while because it felt like a distraction. Uh, it wasn’t the core audience that we were trying to serve, it wasn’t, uh, you know, you know, didn’t seem like it was in line with our product thesis but, uh, you know, around September 2019 when we were openly sort of pivoting in a bunch of different directions, we decided to take a closer look because it was the first time, you know, a year and a half that we had saw, we had seen real organic retention, um, out of anything we’d built. We saw people who, uh, sought out our product when we weren’t even trying to market them, uh, to reach them, um, who not only used our product but were coming back without us having to, to beg them, uh, to use it. Um, and so when we started taking a closer look and started talking to some of those users who are, who are using the product, we realized that many of them, uh, you know, had never really used the internet before. Who were relatively new internet users and, uh, you know, places like larger cities like Delhi but also, you know, smaller cities like, uh, you know, Ahmedabad or, uh, or Pondicherry or places where we were not really expecting people to be discovering our website and it was true also in Indonesia by the way. And, and we realized that many of these users, uh, had never really played games before on their phone but also were not going to the app store and the Play Store to install new games because a lot of those games are quite large. The games that you might discover on the app store and the Play Store are hundreds of megabytes, whereas the games on our site are much smaller. They might be two or three or four megabytes and so they load a lot more quickly on a lot of these user’s devices and consume a lot less data. And so they are a lot cheaper, cheaper to use. So almost by accident.

Host: When you were taking that pivot, I mean you mentioned that, you know, there was not a viable business model in livegame.show, right? Were you seeing a clear business model in pivoting to this direction, you know, lightweight users, first time internet users, you know, in India and Indonesia was, was there a viable business model that you could see while you are pivoting or because you were also mentioning that, you know, you’re losing your funding, there’s only 2 month runway. So how does that work, how did you guys think about, you know, whether or not there is a viable business model there?

Ari: Yeah, I mean it’s a good question. Ultimately yes, it ended up leading to a viable business model but at the time sort of what we wanted to initially focus on is where is there true demand? Because our, our belief, um, from the very beginning of when we started, started the business was if there’s true legitimate demand, demand that you are not BS-ing to yourself, demand that you’re not pitching to investors but true demand. You build something, you know, in the YC ethos of building something that people want. You can eventually turn it into a business. And I think the challenge before both with the daily game show and with the game show platform livegame.show is we didn’t have true demand. We deluded ourselves into thinking we had true demand by looking at vanity metrics, metrics like total number of creators, total number of users, but we weren’t looking at the things that really matter, like retention and specifically organic retention. Um, but we were seeing that with this Indian audience and we were seeing it with that Indonesian audience. And so that’s what really started turning, turning the wheels in our head was okay, there’s real demand here and if, uh, and this is the first time we’ve seen real demand. And so this is a thread that’s worth pulling on. And so what ended up happening was that observation, uh, us realizing that there are a bunch of these users, you know, in India and Indonesia coming to our site to play our games, led to us sort of diving deeper into what was happening with web gaming in Asia. Uh, and what we learned was, you know, web gaming has been going through a big renaissance in the region. Uh, a lot of it was kicked off by WeChat in 2017 in China, uh, by their launch of a web gaming platform inside of the WeChat app. And so now, uh, I mean you can play hundreds of these games inside of WeChat where you can challenge your friends to play these lightweight games and compete to see who can get the high score and things like that. Um, and one out of every two WeChat users, so that’s 500 million people play these games every month. It’s massive, it’s a massive gaming business. Uh, and so WeChat kind of kicked off this the second wave of web gaming all around. The first wave of web gaming was happening, you know, in the 2000s when people could play flash games on their desktop computers. Sites like MiniClip and Addicting Games and Kongregate, maybe some people will, will remember those and those were primarily popular on desktop, primarily popular, uh, you know, in the Western world. But this new wave of mobile web gaming is really, uh, taken off in a big way in Asia and, and I give a lot of that credit to WeChat. And so WeChat kicked it off in 2017 and a bunch of messaging apps, uh, in Asia and other countries started following over the last, uh, few years, apps like Line and Kakao and, uh, Facebook has added gaming inside of the Facebook Messenger app and Snapchat has recently started getting into gaming over the last couple years. So that’s when we realized that the market size for this is actually quite large. Um, you know, we were seeing the demand for it on our product. We realize there are many users who, uh, could potentially discover these games because they’re very lightweight games. Um, they’re games that are meant to be accessible to both people who you might think of as conventional gamers, you know, who have Xbox or PlayStation consoles or gaming a lot on PC but also mobile gamers, you know, people who don’t spend a lot of time playing games. Um, and so the addressable market for this is really large and so when we realized that okay, we had a product that was getting real demand and we were in a potentially big market, this is something worth exploring. And so that was, that was our most recent pivot which at this point is, is, uh, is over a year and a half ago. So I’m glad we haven’t pivoted since. Uh, but we’re, we’re, uh, you know, on, on our way to building, building what we think could be, uh, could be a quite a large business. Um, and so with GameSnacks kind of what we’re doing now is we work with game developers all around the world, um, who make these web games. We help them optimize those games for these, uh, older devices, these flickier networks. We host them on GameSnacks. We help them get distribution by integrating these games into products that users already use so that they don’t have to go and install something new. Uh, and then we’re also going to help them monetize through advertising. And so to answer your question in a long way about why is this now viable business? Um, we’re, we’re work, we are working on sort of new ad formats, um, to, uh, to help developers monetize these games, um, and also respect user’s attention. These are ad formats that are natively integrated into the games themselves so they don’t feel as intrusive to users.

Host: This is, so, we've also talked about distribution strategy for GameSnacks because I mean the way web gaming or GameSnacks is designed is that it makes sense for them, you know, you could do this distribution deals where you could embed GameSnacks games in different platforms, right? Can you talk a little bit more about what you’re doing in that direction and how is it fitting in the business model or helping even developers generate more revenue or in future maybe?

Ari: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s a good question and this has been one of my biggest learnings, uh, as a founder is just how important distribution is. You know, coming from a product background, I think I, I was always, uh, biased to think about product first and I, that’s, that’s still where my interest is. I think all my heart will always be there but I think when you’re thinking about the business, like distribution matters just as much if not more than product and that’s something that I’ve learned, uh, multiple times over the last few years. Uh, and so, um, we started, you know, by rebranding livegame.show as gamesnacks.com, so that’s kind of that that that’s our main showcase for our games. You can check it out. Um, and, uh, that’s where we got a lot of our early users, but we soon realized that it was going to be very difficult to acquire traffic to a mobile website. Um, because when you think about it, people don’t go and like type in new URLs on their phone. Uh, and they think they do, they don’t come back to it the next day. Like that’s not how user journeys work on phones. People are used to spending time in apps, right? Um, whether it’s messaging apps or payment apps or, social apps, whatever it might be. I mean people spend most of their time on 5 to 10 apps every day. They don’t discover new websites on their phone. And so we realized that if we really wanted to crack the next level distribution and reach, you know, millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of users we would need to meet users where they are. Um, and so we’re like okay, uh, it’s going to be hard to get people to come to a mobile website. So our other option is potentially to build a new app, um, you know, the GameSnacks app let’s say and try to get people to download that app, but that’s also a very difficult problem. Um, you know, in 2020 and 2021, it’s really hard to get people to find out about new apps and install them. There's ton of people trying to build new apps. These app stores are very crowded, very competitive. The cost of new user acquisition is very high. And said okay, that might not be a very viable strategy either, but what if instead we could meet users where they already are and figure out a way to get these games embedded and integrated inside of the apps that they already use day in and day out. Um, and especially in Asia, you know, people are used to using these super apps, whether they are payment apps or ride hailing apps or messaging apps. They’re used to getting multiple things done within the app whether it’s entertaining themselves, watching videos, paying their friends, whatever. Um, and one of the benefits of building all of our infrastructure on the web is that it’s embeddable. Um, you can embed these games inside of apps that people already use just as web views inside of these apps. And so that’s been the, the crux of our distribution strategy over the last year is, um, integrating these games inside of popular apps that users already use, many of which are Google apps. So we’re integrated inside of apps like Google Chrome, um, Google Pay in India, which is, you know, massive payment app in India, uh, where users also entertain themselves, Google Assistant, um, the Google Discover feed. We have, uh, partners that we work with as well, like Gojek in Indonesia, which is a ride hailing app. Um, and then the best part is from a game developer’s perspective, they don’t need to worry about any of this. They don’t need to worry about striking these distribution deals with these partners. They just need to work with us with GameSnacks and we will get them traffic. They don’t need to worry about it at all. We will, we will do the work of, of, uh, of laying down that infrastructure.

Host: Do you see sort of like a freemium model as well coming into GameSnacks or is purely going to be distribution and monetization through ads and, you know, other formats?

Ari: Good question. I mean, we’re, we’re willing to experiment with different types of business models. Freemium, maybe what we mean by freemium is sort of like a subscription model. Is that kind of what you mean?

Host: Yeah, it's a sort of like a premium where, you know, you can actually buy and, you know, XP in GameSnacks and, you know, that will be a new, new, new stream of revenue for GameSnacks.

Ari: Sure, like in-game purchases, yeah, which is a common for mobile game monetization model. Yeah. I mean we’re, we’re open to experimenting with all forms of monetization whether it’s in-game purchases or subscriptions or tournaments for example, have been very popular in, in Asia as well. Um, so we’re open to it but for the time being we are, we’re focused on advertising. Um, it’s definitely Google’s bread and butter.

Host: So one interesting thing that’s strike me is you know, you talked about funding running out. So how does it work when you work with Area 120? Like are you guys, and you, you refer to yourself as a founder, right? So do you actually own, uh, you know, a certain amount of the company or how does it work when you’re creating a company inside Google and, you know, inside Area 120?

Ari: Yeah, it’s a good question. And the way I talk about it is I, I wouldn’t say it’s accurate to say that we’re creating a new company. We’re creating a new business, um, within Google. So, uh, at the end of the day we’re Google employees. Google, Google owns the IP. Um, there’s, there’s no, you know, cap table in the conventional sense. Um, but, uh, you know, teams are incentivized to care about the value of what they’re building and I think that’s kind of one of the most interesting things that, um, that Area 120 has figured out is how to get small teams to care ultimately about, uh, the long term sort of business value of, of the new products that they’re building from scratch. Because that’s a, that’s a difficult challenge, you know, that large companies face is to create that incentive structure. Um, but, uh, but it’s, it’s owned by Google. Um, a little bit, a little bit in terms of kind of the operations of Area 120. Um, so the way it works is that, uh, teams, uh, small teams, the founding teams initially pitch new ideas. In an application process that’s pretty, you know, similar to like a YC or Techstars or, uh, an accelerator style application where you have a short written application and then maybe a 30 minute pitch, um, and if you get funded, you get six months of initial funding, uh, a little bit of, uh, capital, uh, and a small amount of headcount, maybe to hire one or two or three people to make progress on, uh, on, on building the new business and try to get traction. Uh, and then after that point, there’s sort of a, a decision that’s made about whether you are building something that, you know, could be a Google scale business in the future, you know, something that could lead to tens or hundreds of millions of new users, uh, for Google or or be a, you know, a massive scale revenue stream, or does it not make sense? Um, you know, um, and so many projects at that point are discontinued and shut down. Uh, this is actually my secondary 120 project. Before this I worked on something in a personal finance space which ended up getting discontinued after 6 months. Um, but if you’re able to make the case that, uh, you know, you are on to something, then you get additional, additional time, uh, and additional funding, uh, and additional headcount to to continue building it. Uh, and so teams are sort of reevaluated after that on a 6 to 12 month cadence. Uh, and that’s another thing I think Area 120 does a great job of is, uh, creating that urgency. You know, you never have more than 12 months of runway, I guess so to speak. Which is analogous to a start-up, you know. You are usually fundraising on a 12 to 18 month time horizon and so you need to make sure that you’re continually demonstrating product or progress because there’s always the prospect that your project might get discontinued. And then the long term, long term hope is that you end up building something that’s large enough that ends up, uh, turning into Google’s next major new product.

Host: So slightly shifting gears and I want to talk about, you know, the economic side of gaming and the value chain and, uh, involved in game production itself. Uh, one of the observations that I personally made, you know, it's often referred that gaming economics are very similar to media economics, right? It's all hit, hit driven businesses, right? Uh, one game studio if it can produce one hit, it will offset all the costs. And you know, there are different players, I see now and talking to you, GameSnacks looks more like a publisher/distributor way compared with a media business, right? How, how do you look in general like the economics of gaming and how do you see GameSnacks, you know, economics in future? Uh, I'm assuming it's still pre-revenue, uh, you know, in the quote unquote start-up language. Uh, how do you see the economics of gaming in general?

Ari: Yeah. It’s a good question. Uh, and it’s, it’s a complex one. Um, so let me, let me try to break it down. So first of all, uh, I actually think the word gaming, uh, is an overloaded term. I mean, just for numbers, um, gaming is roughly a $200 billion a year industry by revenue. Like that’s mind bogglingly massive and, and to give you kind of a comparative point, all of Hollywood generates about somewhere between 40 to 50 billion dollars a year.

Host: Gaming is actually the biggest media business, right?

Ari: Right. And use of all of recorded music generates about $20 billion a year. So gaming is not only the biggest media category. It’s bigger than all the other categories combined. I'm just absolutely massive. And so whenever you have a category that big, uh, you know, you have to, you have to go like a layer deeper. So I’d say the simplest layer that you can go deeper, uh, with gaming is just, uh, what platform are you gaming on? Um, there’s roughly three. There’s console, there’s PC and there’s mobile. And you know, there’s an emergent category of cloud gaming but we can ignore that for the time being. Uh, and so if you look at those three, you know, segments, console, PC and mobile, mobile is about half of that 200 billion. So mobile is about 100 billion. PC and console are about 100 billion and the economics of both of those look very different because the ecosystems are quite different. And so if you look at kind of the major entities in gaming and if you look at the value chain, uh, let’s start from the very beginning, which is, uh, you know, the creation part of it. And so what goes into that? There are the actual tools that you use to make games. Uh, and so a large part of that is the game engine. So this is where players like Unity fit in, Epic and, and Unity really are the, the players that, that are well known. Um, you know, they, they are, they’re a player in that value chain. Um, so, uh, there’s a creation tool. Then there’s the actual distributor, um, and more and more those are large platforms that aggregate consumers and make it really easy for consumers to discover games. And so on mobile, those are the app stores. You know, that’s Apple’s App Store and Google Play. Uh, on desktop, that might be, you know, something like Steam. Uh, on console it might be provided by the console providers. Uh, you know, Xbox, uh, Xbox Live or, uh, you know, the Playstation Store, what have you. Um, then there’s the actual publishers which you were talking about and so what, what they, their main role in the industry is not necessarily to make the games, but to buy and license IP from game developers and figure out how to work with the distributors and figure out how to do the marketing to actually get those games discovered, uh, discovered by users. Uh, and then finally there’s, there’s the advertisers and the ad networks that actually help a lot of these games get monetized, especially the free to play games. Um, there’s an emergent, uh, entity I’d say in the ecosystem as well, which are the influencers. So these are the streamers on Twitch and and YouTube who are increasingly becoming, uh, a key player in the top of funnel sort of discovery of games. So that’s how a lot of users discover new games. You know, it’s by watching a streamer play them rather than looking at sort of banner ads or movie trailers on, uh, online. Um, and I’d say those folks, uh, take, take a cut of the revenue as well.

Host: Do you see GameSnacks more like a publisher or a distributor? How are you seeing GameSnacks?

Ari: Oh, that’s right. Yeah. GameSnack’s main role is as a distributor. So we are trying to, uh, work with gaming publishers and gaming studios on the one hand to help them get distribution. Uh, and we are trying to be, uh, you know, the, the place where users go to discover the games. And that’s so we’re kind of interesting because we often don’t own the exact end user relationship. Like we’re okay with that. Like I said we don’t expect users necessarily come to gamesnacks.com. Users might be discovering our games, uh, on Chrome, you know, or Google Pay. But that’s okay, um, because, uh, because, uh, ultimately it makes our job easier. We don’t need to worry about doing the user acquisition which is very difficult to do these days. So we, we are sort of an intermediary between the game developers, uh, and game studios and game publishers, so on, on the one hand and apps and services that are looking to add engaging content into, into their, um, into their products.

Host: So in terms of working with developers, what does GameSnacks offer, you know, developers in terms of getting their game onto GameSnacks? Is it, is this sort of relationship like, you know, an app store has, uh, towards developers?

Ari: Yeah, I'd say it’s very analogous and so I mean we try to keep it pretty lightweight for developers. Um, our pitch to them is we want you to just focus on making a great game, like that’s it. That’s what you love doing. Like that’s why you became a game developer and we’ll take care of the rest. You know, we’ll take care of, uh, things like hosting, which it turns out is actually quite complex in the web gaming ecosystem because there’s many different contexts in which a game could be, uh, could be played. So it’s got to be hosted in a flexible way. Uh, we take care of things like QA, um, making sure that the game works well on a variety of different devices. So all of our games work on iOS and Android and desktop. That’s the promise of the web. Um, we have a QA team that helps with that. We take care of distribution. I mentioned that and we think that’s one of our biggest value props to developers. We figure out how to get users for these games. And then, uh, we will also help with monetization, uh, by making it really easy for these developers to do ad supported monetization.

Host: So, uh, I thought one of the interesting, uh, topics to ask you is since, you