https://bounti-web3.vercel.app/

A crowd testing marketplace for video games

We help solve a critical pain point in the video game development cycle - recruiting good testers is a strenuous, time consuming and expensive process and many studios simply do not have the resources to do it correctly or often enough, when they know they should be.

We solve this by creating a gamified marketplace where developers can get valuable feedback in a matter of days rather than weeks through the platform’s community.

Our solution solves the need for two personas - game developers and video game players.

Game developers create bounties(tests/tasks) and a wide range of gamers get rewarded (money, nfts, tokens and in-game currency) for providing valuable actionable feedback helping improve and enhance the games.

Game developers can create numerous types of bounties from market research to release testing, getting feedback at each stage of the development cycle, helping contribute to the overall betterment of the game.

Gamers feel like they’re a part of the development process of the video game, making them avid players and promoters of the game.

Sydney, Australia. TBD after YC

We've known each other since April. We met through the Antler program for startups - a pre-seed accelerator that brings together founders to form amazing companies.

We connected through a shared background and shared values and eventually got funding from Antler. The Antler program has a 3% admissions rate globally and only a select few get funded after being admitted.

We have both met in person and work side by side day to day. Additionally our parents live in the same suburb here in Sydney.

We're two months in since we're a fully funded company and here is a summary of our progress so far:

1. Successfully raised $190,000 AUD (130k USD) of investment with Antler
2. Built a proof of concept and working towards a MVP which will be ready 3rd week of October 2022
3. Ran 6 bounties and got steller testimonials and case studies of how Bounti improved games.
4. Won 2x Fishburners (Australia's largest startup hub) awards (Peoples' and Judges Choice) at their pitch night.
5. 600+ Game Testers on our waitlist
6. 2x Industry partnerships giving us access to more than 40+ Game Developer clients
7. 15 Expressions of Interest from Game Developers and 35+ on our waitlist.

We are currently in closed alpha and are building our product around 10 developers that we work closely with in order to ensure they'll love the product. before we look at reaching out further.

We’ve both been working on the business full time for the past 3 months.

We have 10 gaming studios who are helping us with building the product and marketplace. We also are partnered with Game Plus (https://gameplus.com.au/) - Australia's largest gaming accelerator and co-working space and. have access to their 40+ developers who are constantly trying out and giving out product feedback.

We are also partnered with AIT (ait.edu.au) - one of Australia's largest gaming universities and they have been using it to gather feedback about their student projects. One AIT lecturer paid the most ($55) for a trial and they were so happy with the results their students wrote two case studies for us.

You can see the case studies here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1seNt0E7Z_Y9kI4Ib-1lHtyxXreFGRy_r/edit

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RcL3MKxS1Fkf8vMdr4MgOW5fcv1oeshw/edit

We are not making any attempts to monetise atm until we have the features that game developers are happy to pay for and are focused on growth.

We were part of the Antler Australia pre-accelerator program and were successfully funded by them for 190k AUD (130k USD)

I’ve picked this idea because I’ve been building video games and video game related websites and platforms since I was 8 years old and this has always been a personal pain point of mine.

Throughout my career in video games I have
-Built modestly successful flash games
-Was a moderator for most of the twitch streams of CLG Europe (still am actually)
-Was an analyst for a semi-successful professional League of Legends team (Alliance 2014)
-Built a news website (Paravine) and broke major esports stories for the best publications in esports at the time (onGamers, Daily Dot Esports, the Score Esports)
-Lead Frontend engineering for the largest esports website in the world (Dot Esports)

I’ve also been in Crypto since 2015:
-Read the Ethereum whitepaper and bought Ethereum when it was just getting started as I believed Smart Contracts fundamentally changed interoperability - which it has
-Built a blockchain with Polkadot and Substrate when it was in beta
-Won the global Immutable X hackathon

At each of these exposure points I’ve noticed that most new games have a hard time building a community around their game before they launch and as a result many game studios are one or two games away from bankruptcy. I want to change this and help make video game development much more sustainable.

We’re starting with playtesting first because it is the biggest immediate value add for a game developer. Fundamentally Cloud Playtesting is going to revolutionize video game delivery in the next 5 to 10 years. The trend is all but inevitable thanks to the rise of 5G. 5G itself is a game changer for Cloud Playtesting as now mobiles can seamlessly stream games. Cloud Gaming is predicted to rise to a 40.81 billion market at a 45% CAGR by 2030 and we’ll be perfectly positioned to feed games into this market.

If mobiles can stream high end games, then what’s the point of a video game console or a high end pc besides esports? VOIP has essentially killed those crappy phone cards you had to buy to call overseas friends. Netflix has essentially killed physical media. Everything eventually will be rented / streamed because it makes no sense to keep buying the latest console / processor when the cloud servers can do the processing themselves.

This opens up a whole range of possibilities - gone are the days of multiplatform port requirements. The next console wars will be fought between Apple Stadia, Google Arcade, Xbox Cloud Gaming, PS Now etc and the war for content will be fierce.

And since we’ll be the place where games get started to be built before they’re ready for the massive streaming platforms we can start feeding in data analytics to those platforms and our games and identifying which games they should be trying to make exclusive bids on.

So if everything is streamed, what defines ownership? Humans still like the concept of ownership and this is where NFTs are a potent tool. NFTs allow you to truly "own" a piece of video game. This means that the NFT can be transferred from platform to platform and even between video games. Say you're building a video game and you want to acquire new users - what you can essentially get is a pre-built fan base by offering holders of certain ERC721 tokens advanced features.

Fractal does this very well, as a holder of the Fractal NFT, I get airdropped whitelisted spots for the game's mint and often check out cool new games. Now imagine if you're building an Axie Infinity clone - imagine the ability to target active users of Axie Infinity and offer them rewards for trying out your game. Not only does that lower your customer acquisition cost quite dramatically but also increases the lifetime value of the gamer you just acquired since NFT purchasers are more likely to purchase additional NFTs.

We know this is a major problem because video games need playtesters and getting playtesting is a major pain point. I know this, because as aforementioned, I've been building games myself and I know video game developers very well - they’re basically me.

But just to validate it, we've done over 40+ interviews with game developers who all agree it's a problem. We're also validating it with a core group of 10 developers and they're giving us really good feedback.

In addition to this - we’ve got some wonderful mentors from a senior ex-VP at Activision Blizzard to the current marketing lead at Apple Arcade who all agree this is a serious problem and that we as a team have a real shot at disrupting this industry.

We have 4 major forms of competition.

1. In house testing from publishers:

Generally very expensive, requires 3-4 games to be worth the return of investment - which is why publishers and major developers are pretty much the only companies that do this. And with unionization efforts happening across the entire industry specifically with regards to playtesting and QA testing, this labor cost is frankly going to keep increasing and major publishers will be looking for solutions that are alternatives to in house costs for testers.

2. Traditional outsourced playtesting houses:

These are QA houses that are based in developing countries to take advantage of labor arbitrage and weak labor laws. So think of Quantic Dream, inExile Entertainment etc.

Frankly speaking this type of model is going to die and get disrupted very fast with cloud playtesting. It's inefficient, horribly bloated and painful. For example, CD Projekt Red is suing Quantic Dream for allegedly misleading their contracts for Cyberpunk 2077. It requires too much trust between multiple parties.

3. UserTesting.com, Upwork.com, etc - standard software testing platforms.

These aren't made for games and cannot pivot and introduce the plethora of new features that games need at a rapid pace. Because we live and breathe video games and we only speak to gamers, we can build custom curated solutions around games much much faster without shifting product roadmaps and taking their vision of what they're really good at. These are excellent platforms for general software testing. We'll be an excellent platform for video games.

4. Direct Competition: Playtest Cloud, GameTester, Antidote etc

Similar playtesting platforms to us, generally would consider them direct competitors. However this shows us that our model works, there is a demand and people are attempting to solve this problem. We have a couple of USPs that are different (community building software and metrics, leveling systems, web3 native demographic targeting) but fundamentally the market is big enough for many players. Plus they'll make perfect acquisition targets down the line.

We take a platform transaction fee for every bounty that is posted.

1st tier - 25% transactional fee for unlimited bounties

2nd tier - $100 subscription + 20% transactional fee.

The subscription will allow game developers to have access to in-depth data analytics and advanced lookalike audiences for testing.

3rd tier - enterprise pricing with a dedicated account team.

The dollar value of each bounty can vary based on the testing budgets but typically a game developer will spend 10-20% of their budget on testing and QA.

Our market sizing is as follows based on the following publically available data:

Total Addressable Market (TAM) of Video Games is 200 billion dollars growing at a CAGR of 14% (drastically under selling it imo, VR + metaverse will explode this, especially with 5G) - but we're not going to use that as the metric since we're not actually making the games

The average development cost for a game is 500,000. There is about 12,000 games released every year on Steam alone. Google Play added about 83,000 games in 2020 and the App Store adds around 50,000. By using just these platforms we can get a decent underestimate of our TAM. 500,000 * (12,000 + 83,000 + 50,000) is about 50 billion dollars spent annually on video game development - this will be our TAM.

For the Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM), we're going to be focused on testing initially - games spend about 10-20% of their development costs on testing, taking a midpoint figure of that of 15% gives us our SOM of 7.8 billion.

With YC's help we can easily get 10% of our SOM which would give us GMV of $720 mil a year - 25% of which would be 180 mil, making us worth 1.8 billion.

But we want to be the next Unity, we want to be the go to tool for game developers across the entire functions of making a game - from ideation to release. If we expand our SAM to the entire cost of operations around a game (so basically everything except building the game itself) we estimate we estimate our revenues could be in the billions (like what Unity does now)

We have two registered Australian PTY companies

Bounti Holdings PTY LTD (Parent Holding Company - where investor money goes)
Bounti Gaming PTY LTD (Trading Company - where contracts get signed)

Nilushanan Kulasingham - CTO - 37.5%
Suraj Vaghjiani - CEO - 37.5%
Antler Australia - 12%
ESOP: 12.5%

Antler Australia, 190k AUD (130k USD), 12%, Priced Round, 1.4 mil valuation AUD.

Antler takes a 71,000 AUD (50k USD) program fee straight after investing 190,000 so this is why the discrepancies between the funding amount , the burn and the amount we have left in the bank exists.

No

I write all the code. Code stack is React (NextJs) + Node Js + Supabase at the moment.

No other person has worked on this codebase but we are enormously in debt to the mountains of open source contributors who continue to make it possible to build great products

From September 5 onwards, my friend will be helping me a bit for free while he transitions between jobs and we’ll be hiring a couple of interns to assist with basic tasks

We have world class advisors and mentors helping us in our journey:

Nikki Shum-Harden leads marketing at Apple Arcade and was the VP of Marketing for Subspace - a decentralized cloud web3 infrastructure platform.

Nick Wong was the VP of Product and Strategy for Activision Blizzard

Sam Hilditch is the Head of Melbourne at Antler Australia and was General Manager for Airbnb UK

I own The Indo Pacific (www.theindopacific.com) - was considering making it a flagship magazine akin to the Atlantic (since I have a fair amount of media exp) since American geopolitics is all about orienting to the "Indo-Pacific" and this domain is basically a free SEO win. We can do some cool stuff with NFTs and Media that hasn't been explored before - was thinking using content as CAC for an NFT marketplace - killing 2 birds with one stone.

Nilu - Arguing with random folks on Reddit is actually an exceptional way to absorb bits of information you've never thought about before. People have a genuine desire to show that they're an authority in something even to a stranger on the internet.

I watch Garry Tan religiously and when he was appointed Head of YC I knew I had to apply.

Was first engineer (as a junior) at a YC Company (Snappr, W17) before they got into YC - that was the first time I heard of YC. Also I have been a lurker on Hacker News since 2011 (account is dooraven)