When Passion Meets Product-Market Fit

Intro 00:01
Welcome to Startup Success, the podcast for startup founders and investors. Here, you’ll find stories of success from others in the trenches as they work to scale some of the fastest growing startups in the world. Stories that will help you in your own journey. Startup Success starts now.

Kate 00:18
Welcome to Startup Success today, we have Ian Bateman in studio, who is the co-founder and CEO of Highscore. Welcome Ian.

Ian Bateman 00:29
So glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Kate 00:31
It’s super exciting to have you here for us, because you are in the gaming space. We don’t get a lot of founders in that space on this show. And it’s an important area, and so we want to delve into it. But before we get into Highscore and what you’re doing now, if you could just give us a brief overview of your background in the startup ecosystem, that would be super helpful.

Ian Bateman 00:56
Sure, I’m a second time founder, first time CEO. I previously started a company my sophomore year at Dartmouth. Ran that for about five years. We moved from Hanover down to the Research Triangle area of North Carolina. We grew the business to about 20 head counts. Had a lot of customers serving the restaurant, retail, sort of hospitality space primarily focused on chain restaurants. And in 2019 we were acquired by a payments company based in South Carolina.

Kate 01:24
That’s incredible. Congratulations. So it’s a good exit for your first time.

Ian Bateman 01:29
Yeah, it wasn’t bad for the first time around, for sure.

Kate 01:33
Yeah, that’s awesome. So then Highscore, if you wouldn’t mind kind of giving us a brief overview and why you founded it, and then we can get into the particulars a little bit more.

Ian Bateman 01:44
Yeah, I’ve been a Mac gamer for my entire life, so I deeply understand the pain point that we’re solving. My first Mac was the PowerPC MAC, which ran about zero games. I can remember being consistently disappointed. Games would come out, and I’d be all excited, and then I’d go to see if I could play it, and the answer would be no. I remember, like, one Christmas I really, really, really wanted Sim City 4, and I begged my parents for this. And I was so excited. Christmas morning, went down, found it under the tree, ran upstairs, it was like CD-ROM era, so I stuck it in the tray in the computer, and it basically didn’t work.

Kate 02:25
Wow, so I didn’t know there was such a problem with Macs and games.

Ian Bateman 02:30
Yeah, it’s been a persistent problem for many, many years. It’s, you know, games typically come out on PC first, and they come to Mac much, much later, if ever, like most games don’t like, if you look at Steam, it’s ostensibly like 10% of games on Steam are supported on Mac. But I think in reality, the true number is much lower. Yeah, a lot of the games that say they’re supported on Mac are supported on like Intel Macs, which I haven’t had an Intel Mac in almost 10 years. So you go into the Steam interface, and they’ll say “Not Supported on this Mac.”

Kate 03:03
I see. So this is a problem that you felt the pain point for, obviously, for a while. So then after that successful acquisition, you thought, Now is the time to solve for this?

Ian Bateman 03:16
Originally, we approached the space from a different angle. When we sort of set out, we were thinking about doing this sort of from the perspective of, Oh, you know, a lot of games are only available on one platform, and they typically don’t support multiple platforms until much later, if they ever do. So, we spend a lot of time talking with publishers, seeing, Hey, is there a way maybe we can take your games and help bring them cross platform. And after talking with enough publishers and being told “No” enough times, we sort of realized, okay, maybe we need to rethink our approach.

Kate 03:50
Oh, interesting. So this was, in a sense, of a pivot, after you had started. (Exactly, exactly.) So pivots are challenging sometimes for founders. I, you know, I’ve been doing this show for a while, and they say it’s hard at times to wrap your head around it, because you have one thing in mind, you’re kind of really excited about that. And so how did this pivot go for you? Was it pretty easy for you and your co- founder? Or what was the experience?

Ian Bateman 04:23
I don’t think any pivots are like super easy. It took a little bit of coordination with the team and like, making sure folks were bought in and making sure everyone’s aligned and pointed in the right direction, and make sure investors are on board – things like that. But overall, we’re still trying to solve the same basic mission, which is to bring more games to more people and make gaming more accessible for everyone. And I think in that way, we’re still sort of, pointed in the same direction they saw the same North Star.

Kate 04:53
I like that. That’s a great point. You still have the same North Star, but changed maybe the directional path you’re taking to get to it?

Ian Bateman 05:00
This approach is a much better one, because in some ways it’s more of a win for everybody. I think with the approach we were originally considering, took more work on the part of publishers to bring their games to two additional platforms, but now it’s basically less work for the publishers, and we’re able to bring more games to the users. So I think it’s actually a net positive, and actually like one of those rare cases where you have a win, win, win for everyone across the board.

Kate 05:25
That’s great. Yeah, that’s a really good point. So when we met the first time, you mentioned that you’re gearing up for an alpha launch.

Ian Bateman 05:35
Yes, we are. It’s very exciting and stressful.

Kate 05:38
Yes, I can imagine. It’s both those things. So walk us through that, like what the Alpha launch will entail, and kind of what you’ve been doing on your end to prepare.

Ian Bateman 05:49
It’s a lot of testing, so sort of with the product that we’re making, like the really short version of what we’re doing is it’s a very simple service. You connect your PC game store accounts when you sign up. You can see all of the games you own, and then just click play, and that’s pretty much the entirety of it. It works in the browser, native clients as well, mobile clients also. We’re working on TV support down the road. But it presents a very unique set of challenges to do this. So we support games programmatically, so we don’t actually know what games people are playing. So a lot of the preparation for our Alpha has been, you know, trying to find big classes of bugs that, you know, maybe apply to, you know, 1000s of games at a stretch, and then fix those. So, with the tweaks that we’re making, we’re adding and losing, you know, 1000s of games that we support per day. So it’s been sort of a challenge from that point of view, but we’re making good headway.

Kate 06:41
Wow. The way you broke that down is super interesting. So to find the bugs, what does that entail? Like, are you playing games?

Ian Bateman 06:50
We are playing games. We have a cohort of folks, which we’re calling our feedback testers. So we started a feedback period. We made a whole application process that they went through. It’s like a 20-30 minute application to get in. We’ve made a selection of a small group of folks, and we’re progressively letting more folks on, but we’re essentially deputizing them to help us test games, find bugs and sort of diagnose the edge cases.

Kate 07:17
That is brilliant. That’s so smart. I love that. And then I can only imagine that when you’re ready, those testers can probably be good word of mouth, help evangelize the product, right?

Ian Bateman 07:32
We’ve been sort of selecting folks from the application pool with a slight bias towards the folks that have been most active in our Discord communities. So we’re trying to give our super fans access first, and sort of, give them a taste. And I think they’re even more excited now that they’ve been able to try it. So we’ve gotten some really positive feedback from that early cohort of folks, which has been great.

Kate 07:52
That’s brilliant. As somebody you know, my background is in marketing, to tap into your loyal you know, who will eventually be loyal customers early and get that kind of feedback, and it must be really helpful. I’m guessing they’re being pretty transparent with what they’re finding to you?

Ian Bateman 08:11
Yeah, we set up, like, a whole, like, bug reporting system for them. So like, every morning, basically, we have a private Discord channel that is just getting, like, flooded with messages from them. It’s been good as well. They’ve been sort of pushing the team. So, you know, as we get the bug reports, the team’s like, Ah, we gotta go rush and go fix all these issues so we can get back to that and say, Okay, you can play these games now.

Kate 08:32
That’s great. Talk about an excellent user feedback loop. So then when you go into this alpha mode, people will be able to pay at that point to use this?

Ian Bateman 08:47
Yes, we’re sort of taking payment from users right now in the way that they’re testing for us, but we’re working towards sort of a more robust polished service that we will charge for going forward.

Kate 08:57
Okay, okay. Is it going to be trial and error with pricing and plans, or is that something? Yeah, because that’s kind of a big deal too.

Ian Bateman 09:06
That’s a great question. That’s something we’ve been sort of talking about with users and sort of getting their feedback on. From what we’ve learned, people tend to price anchor a service like this because it’s subscription based. It’s like Netflix. So I think most likely we’ll land somewhere in like the $15- $25 range. We’ll see exactly what it ends up being. You know, sort of from our perspective, we want to get this into the hands of as many people as possible. So, you know, we might price aggressively initially and then sort of take away some early bird discounts later on. Overall, our goal is just to price it in a way where as many people as possible can enjoy our service.

Kate 9:46
I really like how you’re going about this. I just feel like, based on doing this, show the startups that have a lot of success, this is how they scale with these Discord groups, with these user feedback loops, with iterations like this. I think it says a lot for what you’re doing. Is the team at Highscore right now, pretty small and nimble?

Ian Bateman 10:11
Yeah, we’re about five and a half folks, depending how you count it. So we have five full time folks on the team, and then we have a rogue hardware engineer who’s in San Francisco with us, but he drifts around.

Kate 10:03
Okay. So that probably helps with kind of your culture and your ability to move quickly, I’m guessing. Because with a team of that size, you’re probably all pretty much on the same page.

Ian Bateman 10:38
Yeah, it’s been a lot of fun. We basically just hang out on Discord all there. What we would be doing anyway. You know, sometimes we just hop in, like, voice channels together and chat and, you know, it’s been very easy to, like, communicate with each other.

Kate 10:51
And that’s what you want for those early days of a startup. I think, you know, you want to be able to be that nimble, that cohesive of a unit, and move quickly like that. I think that’s really important. When you look at successful startups. Do you see that after you go into this alpha mode, alpha launch, you’re going to have to start hiring pretty significantly, or will you be able to kind of continue on with a more nimble team for a while.

Ian Bateman 11:20
I mean, I think we, I’m a big believer in hiring for pain. So I think, you know, as we sort of, you know, grow the business, you know, we’ll hire, or start hiring where it hurts the most. So right now, we’re super engineering heavy, basically, except for my co-founder, Marianne, the entire team is engineers. So we’ll probably need to start staffing up. You know, more on the marketing and partnerships, and business side of things.

Kate 11:44
I like how you phrase that. People echo that a lot in the startup culture, hiring for pain. I think that is smart. I think sometimes when you hire too quickly, right? That’s when you can run into scaling challenges. So you mentioned you have a co-founder. How did you two find each other?

Ian Bateman 12:03
We go way back. We’re friends from North Carolina. So Chapel Hill is, like, a pretty small town. They had, like, one climbing gym we used to go to. There was, like, one bouldering gym. It’s like a hole in the wall place. It’s like, out here in California, we have these amazing climbing drip facilities. They’re huge. They’re like palaces. But in Chapel Hill, there was one and it’s like a small tunnel, and everyone in there gets to know each other really well, because, there’s, there’s not that much space. We go way back.

Kate 12:32
Okay, I like that. We just had someone on the show talking about count co-founder dynamics, and they were saying, when you have that kind of history, it really helps when starting a company. So you both had experienced this pain point, and kind of the timing was right to come together and do this. Is that how it worked?

Ian Bateman 12:51
Exactly. Yeah, we, we sort of, uh, became friends over a shared interest in startups. Marianne was going to school at the time in Chapel Hill, and she was, like, pretty involved in the startup community. She actually is, like, pretty amazing in that she basically put herself through school, like selling things on eBay and Shopify. Like, paid her whole way, like doing that, which is pretty incredible. (That is, yes.) She’s the best hustler I know. Like she’s really good, like business go getter type person, and I’m a lot more the engineer type product person. So very complimentary skill set.

Kate 13:24
So I love that, because that’s the other thing this expert said, if you have complimentary skill sets, and you each kind of have your lane, you kind of each know what you’re working on your areas, and that helps right with who’s tackling what, and helps prevent problems. So it sounds like you’ve really got it structured well at Highscore. Okay, you’ve had a successful acquisition. Now you’re in the midst of starting this company, which, based on our conversation, sounds like you’re doing a lot right. We always like to kind of wrap up the show and talk about a little bit at the end, things you’ve learned along the way that you could share with our founders who are starting out in this journey.

Ian Bateman 14:11
I would say, one of my biggest learnings has been the difference working on something you really care about makes. I think that was a big lesson from my first company. My co-founder at the time, you know, had a lot of passion for the restaurant and retail and hospitality space, and came from a family that had a lot of history and experience in that space. I, on the other hand, did not. I was not especially passionate about restaurants, retail and hospitality, but I’m extremely passionate about gaming. I absolutely love games for their artistry. I can make a very strong argument that I think games are actually the highest form of art. But working on something where you care so much and you’re so passionate about it just makes such a big difference. Every day, I feel so lucky that I get to wake up and work on Highscore, and I can’t imagine doing anything else. Like I feel like the luckiest person in the world that I get to have this job. And I think that’s been the biggest thing for me, is just, you know, when you work on something you care this much about, it just gives you all of superhuman energy. And that’s been really incredible.

Kate 15:18
I like how you phrased that, because I’ve heard that a few times now from successful founders, and they said that’s also what kind of keeps you going through those valleys, right, those tough times. When the peaks are there, it’s great, but there are some challenges in launching a company, and if you don’t love it, if it’s not a passion of yours, if it’s not a pain point that you yourself have experienced, it’s really hard to get through those times. And you don’t bring as much as you might have if you and you say you saw that firsthand.

Ian Bateman 15:57
One of the things that really keeps us going is our our users, like when you can see, like the reaction on their faces when they they find out they can play a game that they’ve been wanting to play, they just haven’t been able to it’s, you know, it brings so much joy to your art, yeah. And it just, you know, even when you’re in the the dark depths of the trenches, fixing, fixing bug after bug after bug. It’s, you know, when you can see the reaction, and, you know, see how enthusiastic they are about it. It’s really, really, (15:17)

Kate 16:24
That’s really neat. Ian, I mean, that’s, that sounds great. I can see where that’s what keeps you going. I have to ask you, just as a mom of teen boys, what are your favorite games? What are some of your – you probably have a several, but just maybe a one or two that you could throw out there for everybody listening, because you really have your pulse on gaming, I would assume.

Ian Bateman 16:44
I really like indie games. So some of the games I’m a fan of, probably, if you’re not like super into the gaming world, you might not have heard of, but recently, I’ve really been into this game called the Halls of Torment. Yeah, it’s, you know, it’s gaming sometimes, yeah, yeah. Diablo’esque crossover game with vampire survivors. So, you basically play a guy with a whip who’s running around as demons come after you in wave after wave, and you try to survive for like 30 minutes. It’s very silly, but it’s a lot of fun.

Kate 17:14
So I like that. I read a book about gaming recently, and you were right. I was really inspired by the creativity and how artistic gaming has become, right? And how like some of these worlds that people create. It’s really impressive. We’re really come a long way from Pac Man and Super Mario Brothers.

Ian Bateman 17:39
I have a lot of respect for auteur video game devs like Lucas Pope or Jonathan glow. Some of these like solo game devs, where they sort of like come up with a concept and then entirely build it end to end on their own. It’s completely incredible. The one game I think about a lot is called the Return of the Obra Dinn. It’s a single developer made game. He developed a unique dot matrix art style. But it’s a puzzle game where you sort of step through time and try to solve this mystery of what happened on the ship where all the crew disappeared, and you try to solve sort of, you try to figure out what happened to each crew member individually and solve the puzzle.

Kate 18:26
Wow, that is so neat and creative. I love it. See, I don’t think everyone understands where gaming is nowadays. That is awesome. I love talking to you. You bring so much passion about the industry. Where can people go find out more information about Highscore?

Ian Bateman 18:41
Best space to learn about Highscore is Highscore.com on our website or in our Discord, discord.com/invite/highscore, or follow us on Twitter @Highscore.

Kate 18:51
Fantastic. Thanks for being here today, and it was a lot of fun.

Ian Bateman 18:55
Thanks so much, Kate. Great to be your guest.

Intro 18:58
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