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Bootstrapping with a Paycheck: DudaMobile CEO Itai Sadan (Part 1)

Itai Sadan is the founder and CEO of DudaMobile, a company that turns desktop websites into mobile sites. Itai has over 10 years of experience in business development, partner management, program management, and development. Prior to founding DudaMobile, Itai was a director at SAP, where he managed the SAP Discovery System program and was in charge of relationships with IBM, HP, and Fujitsu. Prior to that Itai worked for Amdocs, Finjan, and InterSight. Itai has a BSc. in computer science & mathematics from the Ben Gurion University in Israel.

Sramana: Itai, let’s start with the beginning of your personal journey. What is the story that paved the way for your entrepreneurial journey?

Itai Sadan: I was born and raised in Tel Aviv, Israel. I did have a six-year stint in South Africa, where our family lived for a while. I went to high school in Tel Aviv and met the person who is the co-founder and CTO of DudaMobile during my high school years. After high school I went to the army and served in the anti-terrorist school. After I completed my three-year army service, I traveled the world a little bit. >>>

Getting Your Game to Players: Keela Robison, VP of GameHouse Distributions (Part 7)

Sramana: Where do you see the industry going, and what trends are you seeing? How do you position GameHouse to address those trends?

Keela Robison: Overall the market has definitely moved toward mobile. Facebook is no longer the primary development platform. Facebook is still big, and there are great reasons to work with them because they are a fantastic acquisition channel for mobile. By and large, most studios are putting the efforts into mobile focusing on true free-to-play games and games as a service.

Those are areas that we are shift to with our players and with our studio partners. We have to help our partners be prepared to seize these new opportunities. It takes a lot of effort to offer a game as a service. It takes effort from both a development and a technology perspective as well as from a marketing, business analytics and engagement perspective. It is no longer a business where you build a great game and leave it on its own while it becomes successful. The biggest trend is thinking of games as a service as opposed to software. >>>

Getting Your Game to Players: Keela Robison, VP of GameHouse Distributions (Part 6)

Sramana: It sounds like you are a legitimate strategy for small studios that develop casual games for PCs and mobile environments and enable them to get a substantial reach into an audience.

Keela Robison: Absolutely. That is our core value proposition. We help smaller studios take their game to a large audience of customers who are interested in it.

Sramana: How do you find the studios, and how do the studios find you?

Keela Robison: We find each other through a combination of things. First, we have been around for a while and we have a reputation among casual game developers. They know our brand. Second, we participate in trade shows, and I will often speak at them or GameHouse will host a reception. Finally, we have a website, Partners.GameHouse.com, where we do marketing to attract the long tail of developers. We provide advice on marketing and provide strategies for success via app stores. We get leads through that mechanism as well. >>>

Getting Your Game to Players: Keela Robison, VP of GameHouse Distributions (Part 5)

Sramana: How do you cross-promote within your own game titles?

Keela Robison: We will identify a time management player among our catalog and make a recommendation to that player for them to check out a similar game from one of our partners.

Sramana: When you look at your relationship with the studios, how many studios are you working with, and what are their dynamics?

Keela Robison: We work with about 400 different studios. Those studios span a broad array of sizes and capabilities. A dozen of the studios we work with are quite sizable. They have more than 100 developers and they are developing multiple games a year. They work with us because we bring them an audience they cannot get on their own. >>>

Getting Your Game to Players: Keela Robison, VP of GameHouse Distributions (Part 4)

Sramana: What percentage of your titles are your own and what percentage are third-party titles across both your PC and mobile businesses?

Keela Robison: Our own titles are not the core focus for my side of the business. We have a fairly significant effort in terms of what GameHouse does for social casino games. That is an area where we are investing time and effort. In the casual games area, our own titles account for less than 10% of our total sales. Our focus is on providing developer services. While we have a suite of our own games, we really use them so that we can eat our own dog food, try out different technologies on our games, and use them as a base to cross-promote or kick-start third-party games.

Sramana: What I hear is that the bulk of the GameHouse business is publishing third-party games.

Keela Robison: That is correct. >>>

Getting Your Game to Players: Keela Robison, VP of GameHouse Distributions (Part 3)

Sramana: What is the split between those who pay to play and those who you monetize through advertising?

Keela Robison: We don’t make those particular numbers public. I will say that it is very similar to a mobile environment where the 90/10 rule is generally accepted. In that case, 90% of the users are not paying out of pocket.

Sramana: I think Zynga had numbers of 98% playing free.

Keela Robison: Some free-to-play games are more extreme. For us, it is important to understand that we have two different ways of monetizing our paid games. We monetize through retail [outlets] such as app stores. We also have subscriptions, and that is a payment form that has not taken hold yet in the mobile app world. We have an “all you can eat” subscription for $20 a month. Essentially the games are provided on a rental basis, and once that period is up, then you no longer have access to the games. >>>

The Unicorn Club on Entrepreneur Journeys

Aileen Lee’s Techcrunch post Welcome To The Unicorn Club: Learning From Billion Dollar Startups made me go back and check which of these companies we’ve featured in our Entrepreneur Journeys series.

Here they are:

Servicing IT: ServiceNow CEO Fred Luddy

How To Get a 20 Million Dollar Pre-Money Valuation for Series A: Tableau Software CEO Christian Chabot

Vertical Travel Search Engine Kayak CEO Steve Hafner

Opportunities At The Cusps: FireEye CEO Ashar Aziz

Growing A SaaS Startup With Velocity: Marketo CEO Phil Fernandez

9.4M Dollars In Concept Financing To 100M In Bookings: Palo Alto Networks Founder Nir Zuk

Getting Your Game to Players: Keela Robison, VP of GameHouse Distributions (Part 2)

Sramana: What is your most successful game title, or your sweet spot, for the casual gaming audience on the PC?

Keela Robison: There are three key gaming sub-genres within casual gaming that we enjoy a lot of success with. We have a franchise title in time management games. Our franchise title is “Delicious,” and it features a character named Emily. Time management games tend to be oriented where you are doing many things at one time. It could be something like serving customers in a café.

The second genre is the hidden objects game. Before I came to GameHouse, I was not even aware that this game existed, let alone that it was as popular as it was. These games are almost puzzle-like in nature, and there are often mini-puzzles throughout a game. The primary mechanic is where the player is attempting to find objects within a crowded theme. The most sophisticated games weave in a story line where a player is attempting to solve a mystery or a crime. They use bits and pieces of information and objects they find along the way to unlock more components of the game. >>>