Startup Sessions - An inside look at Heyzap

So inside the fridge, we actually store all the cash. Can I see it? No, I can't open it. That's quite important.

Yeah, because the banks are not in a very good shape right now.

I think it's probably safer.

With the credit crunch, keep your money indoors, not in the bank.

So what we do is we allow any website to get casual games onto their site. So if you've got a blog or if you're running a website or you've got a MySpace page, we just allow you to get casual games really, really simply into the— into your blog or website. It's like a couple of quick clicks and you got it straight in. Super simple.

So we aggregate games from across the internet. We have more than 12,000 games and we have a widget that anyone can plug in very easily. We also have an API and RSS feeds so you can get access to the games and kind of position them how you want. And we're making some other cool stuff so you can, you know, get games into your Ning website and things like that.

So yeah, the funding came through like about a week or two ago. Everything, you know, you have to clear up a couple of things at the end of the funding round, get the money in the bank, and there's a couple of legal things to sort out.

Pretty much as soon as we started raising money, we knew that we were going to get something. Then it was just a case of getting the right people behind us, kind of improving the way we presented the product and Yeah, figuring out a few things on our side as well.

So, I think we definitely want to plan to recruit people. So, we're going to be recruiting decent programmers. We're probably going to get 2 people back us up and see how it goes from there and then recruit on demand basically. I mean, some people go out and recruit thousands of people and get too many people, have to sack them later. We don't want to do that. We want to get the best people at the right time and grow.

And we want to be pretty developer-focused. Like, there's a lot of stuff to do in terms of building technology and we've really just started on that. So we have a lot of ideas there and that's where we're going to focus. And we're going to keep the team like small and nimble.

So the overall idea is to get games onto your website. So we have different products for different types of sites. So if you run a blog, you might want to get a small sidebar widget. So this is one of the widgets that you might be able to actually go for and embed inside your website. So let's click through, get started. So here I'm presented with different options. And if I want to get a small little widget to go on my blog sidebar, I can just click small. And from there, I can choose different types of games that I might be interested in. So I can pick different kinds of categories. So I might want sports or action or multiplayer. So I'm kind of interested in multiplayer today and action. Or if I wanted to come up with my own channels, I can actually type the channels that I'm interested in, which are custom based on tagging. So I might be keen on racing games. And what this will do is search through our database of games and come up with the racing games that, you know, that we're going to add. You can flick through and test out the different games. Before even generating the embed code, which is kind of cool. And then if you're happy with that racing, you can go ahead and generate the code. And then from there, I get the code, I copy it, and then I just go over to my blog and I paste it in. Got it in my blog in like literally a couple of clicks. So we've made it super easy for users to, you know, to get it into wherever they want to get it into. So blogs would be one of them. Okay. If I'm a larger website and I want a more complex implementation, I might want to do my own custom styling that, you know, so it integrates better to my website so that users feel that, you know, they're definitely inside, you know, NBA.com or CNN. So, they're going to go— these kind of clients are going to want to go for the API. And that's fairly simple to connect up to. We got full documentation here and they can literally pull out any kind of custom implementation that they want. So there's a lot of possibilities around this because we've opened up the content to the web. So also publishers can add— can actually track their own statistics. Once they've added the blog widgets or, you know, the API, they can actually track how many gameplays are happening. And normally, you know, this would have graphing stats so they can actually see what kind of gameplays they're getting on their website inside the Heyzap system. The other thing that I wanted to go through quickly was the developer upload. So developers can easily upload their games. And in the future, we want them to be able to make money if they upload their games to Heyzap. We're going to, you know, help them monetize and distribute their games. So the process is super simple of uploading the game. So literally, fill it out, add the Swift file, and, you know, once they've completed that process, we added our own game here, Swine Fighter. And, you know, then we put it through an approval process and then they can see how many gameplays they get and different kind of statistics. And the beauty of this is that they get their game out onto all these different websites. So, you know, onto 20,000 different websites at the moment. And as our network grows, this is going to be like the primary window for getting your games out onto the internet and potentially mobile. So this is a large implementation of the widget. There are different sizes. That we can get to fit in different places of your website. So inside the widget, you can flick through different games. We've actually ordered these in terms of internet popularity. So these are the most popular games on the internet based on our algorithm. So I'm just going to go into a game now. It's, you know, fairly easy to use. The interface is simple. So we actually show pre-roll video ads right here and we allow the developer to monetize and also, you know, we take a cut ourselves. So in the future, there'll be like an option for publishers to monetize as well. So let's go and click on this game. This is Momentum Missile 2. It's been a pretty popular game on the internet. So if I like that game, I can also favorite this. And if I'm on Current.com or, you know, Weebly pages or whatever, it remembers my favorites there. And I can also share this game. So say I love this game. I want to share it onto, like, Facebook or MySpace. I can easily just share out the link, share it out to IM. I can also embed this widget straight from the widget. So the widget, you know, self-replicates itself out there. I can also email my friends. So I can just quickly go on to the next game as well. So we wanted to make this a very casual experience. The widget is, you know, it's very similar to the content in it. You can just flick through and sit back and, you know, easily find games. I might want to find an action game. I can do a search for different kinds of games. So we've tried to keep it super simple and just very fast to load, very easy to use, and, you know, straight to the heart of the nature of casual games really.

So advertising is definitely going to play a part in what we do. At the moment, we work with Mochi Media and they provide a lot of our advertising. And you've got opportunities to do video ads while the game is loading, so that can be very much a part of the user's experience. I think as we move forward, opportunities will develop in virtual goods as well. So that's been a big thing in, like, social games, especially on Facebook and MySpace, and that's going to extend out to the rest of the web. So we're really open to kind of ideas and opportunities there. I think the whole Flash gaming market is pretty young when it comes to monetization, even though there's a lot of engagement.

It's like if you focus on generating revenue early on, then you You hamper your growth curve. So it's much better to run yourself into a default position on the web, get a massive user base, and then monetize after. Or maybe test a monetization principle and try and scale that. But we've gone for the get a large user base and then monetize.

And we do show a lot of advertising even now. So it's kind of part of our product.