We Closed Our Seed Round. Thank you!

In August, Flow State Media closed its seed round of funding.  I wanted to take this opportunity to thank the people that helped make this possible.  It was our first attempt at fundraising, so it was fraught with its own set of challenges, but due in large part to the good people that helped us out, we were able to close the round within 3 months and focus on making great games.

First off, I'd like to thank our investors.  They are putting their faith in our team that we can deliver on our promise to make great games and make a big splash in the game industry.  We fully intend to do just that.  I would especially like to thank my very earliest investors, as without their early commitments, closing the rest of the round would have been very difficult.

Secondly, I'd like to thank my MIT, Penn, and even high school colleagues that either invested themselves or made introductions on my behalf to investors.  They were responsible for roughly 75% of the round, so I can sincerely vouch for the value of an education!  My fellow alumni were absolutely clutch, and I thank them for that.

The entrepreneurial spirit at MIT played a significant role in my decision to start Flow State.  By either attracting entrepreneurs or giving students the confidence to strike out on their own, the start-up friendly culture gives students important tools to succeed and provides a world-class network.  From that network, I've met a number of inspirational entrepreneurs that have proven to the world that successful companies can grow from small, two-person start-ups.  Here's a few.

The first one I'd like to mention is Bong Koh (@bong).  I actually first met Bong when we were teenagers, when our mutual friend Adam K. introduced us.  Naturally, as teenage males, we played Street Fighter II to kill the time.  Bong's Ryu was strong.  A dozen years later, I would bump into Bong when I was visiting MIT Sloan.  He was graduating, I was headed in.  By that time, Bong had already sold a company to Qualcomm, just a few years out of Yale undergrad.  He had showed us that the start-up path was something very real if you were smart and worked your butt off, and I appreciated seeing that very early on.

I'd also like to thank Elizabeth Yin, co-founder of LaunchBit.  She's super, super nice, and super, super smart, and growing in notoriety among start-up communities on the East and West Coast.  She answered numerous questions I had about getting started, incorporating my company, and getting introductions to investors.  And she knows the email newsletter universe down cold.  So thanks for all the help EY!

Brian Shin (@brianshin) is just a beast of an entrepreneur.  He's raised around a bazillion dollars, and is currently CEO of Visible Measures, CEO of Viewable Media, and Chairman of MustBin.  He was just always on a crazy trajectory and he's just kept on going.  He's living proof of being a bad-ass, successful entrepreneur, and it's inspiring stories like his that pushes other entrepreneurs to go even further.

My last MIT shout-out goes out to Tony Chen.  He was very kind in the earliest days of Flow State, willing to meet up with me to talk about fundraising strategies, reviewing my presentations, and generally being incredibly helpful in getting Flow State in the right direction.  Thanks TC!

Of course, I have to thank the Flow State Media team.  Without the early work of Red and Harold to get our live crosswords game "Letter UP" released, I'm not sure Flow State would have been successful in closing our round.  Their contribution was enormous.  "Krazy" Joe, Aaron, and Rommel have also played a huge part in getting Flow State Media to where it is today.  I wholeheartedly look forward to working with this extremely talented team and make something amazing.

Finally, I'd like to thank my family for making all this possible.  My parents have only lived entrepreneurial lives, always managing some type of business in order to support us and pay for our education.  I think they liked it when I told them I was just doing the same thing they had done for us: start my own business!

And last, but the exact opposite of least, I'd like to thank my beautiful wife.  She has been incredibly supportive throughout this whole process, from deciding to leave Zynga to start my business (the same year we were planning our wedding!), to giving great suggestions about how we should improve in our games.  She's really good at games (Candy Crush level 356 WITHOUT paying, routinely beats me at Tetris Battle), knows what our audience will like, and has extremely shrewd business sense.  I feel like I can discuss any aspect of my business with her and I do.  I'm very grateful that we are actively making Flow State great together.  So to my wonderful wife, thank you from the bottom of my heart!

It's already been a terribly rewarding experience, and I'm so excited about the future of Flow State.  Thank you, everyone!

Join The Circle of Apps

Small, up and coming mobile game companies have a big problem: awareness.  No one knows their apps exist.  And with no awareness, no downloads, no money, no lights on in the office anymore.

So what are the options if you have no existing network of players, no list of email addresses, no Fans or Followers, essentially, no base?  You either beg Apple or Google to feature you in their App Stores, pray a big company like Zynga or EA let you use their distribution channels, or pay for mobile advertising.

But none of those options are very pretty.

Getting featured in App Stores is hard.  There's like a BILLION apps now in each store.  So to actually get a good contact at Apple/Google, and then convince them your app is worth promoting over thousands of other new apps is a very daunting task.  In the end, apps from most small companies are NOT promoted.  You just have to have an air-tight, super-polished app that catches the eye of users and App Store managers alike, and hope that you get a slot.  It's possible, but the odds are not in your favor.

Then you can try to approach a Zynga or EA and see if they can help with distribution.  But they're so busy getting their own games ready, and figuring out a good release schedule for themselves, that it's pretty rare that they actually pick up a game from a small developer.  When it happens, it makes news, but behind the scenes, dozens upon dozens meetings occurred that eventually ended with a "Thanks, but no thanks."

So then you have mobile advertising.  This option is pretty ugly too.  With Costs-Per-Install (CPI) at least a couple dollars for quality players, skyrocketing close to $10 during the holidays, you can kiss any type of budget goodbye quickly.  Very quickly.  And since you HAVE to make your game free now to have people try it, there's no guarantee you're recouping that cost -- ever.

Again, this is the playground of the big companies.  Ad networks getting bigger and bigger, raising VC money left and right, continuing to cater to the big spenders like GREE, DeNA, Zynga, and EA.  A small company quickly gets priced out of the market because there is no quality ad inventory left.  Remember that $50k that your company's founders saved up to help with advertising?  Well, you could easily spend that in a day and NOT get into the Top 25 in the App Stores.  The only real winners here are the ad networks, smiling all the way to the bank.

So what's a small shop to do?  That's where The Circle of Apps comes in.  I want to create a community (initially on Facebook) of up and coming companies that need help in promoting their freshly-minted games.  I want to create another real channel of genuine communication about what their apps and games are all about, to a community that WANTS to hear about cool apps and games and is tired of seeing the same games atop the charts.  And these people will truly be the lifeblood of the community.  We WANT folks that root for the underdog, they LIKE quirky and cool games, they want Indie shops to succeed, they were giving money to Kickstarter projects way before d-bags like Peter Molyneux were going there (even though he could get a publishing deal from EA within one meeting).

So, simply, The Circle of Apps is a community of people who love and make games for a living, and the people that are rooting for them and want to support the games they make.  That's it.  Yes, we'll need a large community to start making a material impact on download numbers in the App Stores, but you have to start somewhere, so I'm starting it now.  I know for certain that the need is terribly real, so I want to get this going right away.

So join The Circle of Apps on Facebook.  Game developer, game lover, or lover of underdogs -- all are welcome.