Aaron Kardell: [00:00:00] Yeah, or what's your biggest frustration? And you can say that it's, that Some of us are not full time in this right now.
Nate Kadlac: Yeah. I think Aaron and I share a similar sensibility and wanting to go.
Welcome to the Hey, Good Game podcast, where we chat with the creators of your favorite games that you secretly play in the cracks of your day. Hey everyone. I'm Nate Kadlac and I'm here with my cohost, Aaron Kardell, and we are taking a little bit of a. I don't know, what would you call this? We're just taking a little bit of a pause in between weeks here.
We thought we'd give a little bit of a behind the scenes at what's happening at Hey Good Game.
Aaron Kardell: We'll call it a reflection. Growing company with a growing podcast and reflecting on growth and occasional growth
Nate Kadlac: challenges. Love it. Aaron, what is the game that you're playing these days? [00:01:00] Since we asked this of all of our guests, what are you doing right now?
Aaron Kardell: I have been playing way too much. This game goes by at least three different names and I play some of all of these. So it's called Star Battle. It's called To Not Touch. It's called Queens. So one of our prior guests, Jim Bumgardner, crazy dad, shout out Jim, if you're listening. He's got really, he calls it both To Not Touch, I think that's what actually New York Times calls it or Star Battle.
He's got some of those great puzzles on his website. He partnered with an app company that has that game Puzzle Star Battle in the App Store. Jim, I hope you're making some money from that because I play that way too much the adjacent game that I Surprised myself playing. I'm on LinkedIn a fair amount not a ridiculous amount, but I found myself most mornings recently I'll wake up the very first thing I [00:02:00] do Is I'll load LinkedIn and I'll play their Queens game, which they chose to call it Queens.
It's just another form of the same star battle or to not touch puzzle. And it's a timed daily. I think I liked the fact that it's a timed daily. Hopefully nobody from LinkedIn is listening. I think the social features could still use a lot of upgrading. I like that you're started in gaming, though. I think that's pretty cool.
Would love to talk to you more about that. But yeah, that's the game I'm playing and the different places I'm playing it.
Nate Kadlac: Wait, so I'm curious, you're getting on LinkedIn to play games, or are you Just on LinkedIn a lot and playing their games. Cause I'll admittedly say I've played their games, but I actually haven't not been playing them daily.
So is it the game that's bringing you back every day?
Aaron Kardell: It is a game that's bringing me back. And it's the fact that it's a daily star battle. puzzle [00:03:00] and I like that it's a daily and although I play that game in other places it's not a daily and so I go there to play it because it's a daily. Now I mentioned the social features, it tells me sometimes but not consistently, it shows me like pictures of two or three other connections that played the same game, doesn't show any stats about how they did.
There's also sometimes a look at other Like it shows me, so I went to a particular school and it shows me other schools in the same conference. Of how our school is ranking versus those other schools, but it doesn't justify that in any way. It leads me to believe that it's maybe a number of people that played it that day.
I have honestly no idea. Love you guys at LinkedIn and Microsoft. I think you can make some improvements [00:04:00] there. To answer your question, it's the game that brings me back. I am occasionally on LinkedIn for other purposes, but I'm Absolutely not loading up LinkedIn the first thing I do every day for LinkedIn.
Nate Kadlac: Lately, I've been playing two games and since our interview of the chess. com co founder, Eric Albest, I downloaded chess. com back on my phone because he got me excited to play. I usually play this one minute blitz chess game, which gets me into a lot of trouble playing a little bit too much during the day.
He plays this game where it's one second chess, like every time you make a move, it adds a second to your time. And, so I've been playing that a little bit and then I'm biased, but I just still play crossword or every single day. So one of our games and that's my wife and I play it every morning.
So
Aaron Kardell: never really get tired of that one. It's a quality game. if I have to pick amongst our games, [00:05:00] crossword or on some plate or top of my list these days. Thanks, Daniel, for creating good games and letting us acquire them.
Nate Kadlac: Yeah, absolutely. we were briefly talking before this started about, what should we talk about today?
And thinking a behind the scenes might be interesting. I'll pitch you this question. If you could see, we don't have any mobile apps of our games. They're all browser based games. If you had to choose one game you'd love to see of ours as a mobile app, What would that be?
Aaron Kardell: crossword or some plate. Those are my favorite games. I think some plate maybe because personally find some plate to be more interesting for the more than once daily play. So most of the time when I play crossword, it's a daily and on some plate, that's one that [00:06:00] on occasion, I'm more likely to.
Play multiple games or just come back to the game over time. And for that reason, it'd be more compelling for me anyway, to see it in app format. How about you, Nate? Yeah,
Nate Kadlac: it's gotta be crossword for me. I would love to be playing that on my phone as a native app. Although I do enjoy it in the browser.
I think having it in full transparency, be great to fix a few things, figure out the scoring a little bit more consistently. And we'll get into this maybe a little bit more, we get a lot of user feedback from people and we're a small team. We're still responding to everybody when we can.
If we did not get back to you, that's, I'll just apologize here. We do read every email. And one of the things that we. Continuously get as the scoring on crossword old people would love to know what's the best I can do, or why was I not allowed to win with what [00:07:00] seemingly feels like the minimum amount of tries.
But yeah, I don't know, like anything that comes to mind for you, Aaron, that's when it comes to improvements or user feedback that you've heard on our games.
Aaron Kardell: yeah, I think we A lot of people want to know how they're doing versus others, there are a lot of smaller things we continue to address like people want dark mode or people want, various things like that we're chipping away over time.
We recently went through a major update on Mathler and part of that was really updating the user experience to surface some things that were already there, but maybe hidden. We would hear ooh, Mathler's too hard, or Mathler's too easy. and we'd get both of those on the same day. And, we would wonder, we have an easy Mathler, we have a hard Mathler, we have an even harder Mathler.
Are you trying each of the levels? And so we modified the UX a little bit, [00:08:00] surface those in different ways, but you've been working with our team, Nate, on some key updates that are going to surface some things around stats and accounts. You want to give a, peek behind the curtain, so to speak on that?
Yeah,
Nate Kadlac: there's. when we go back through all the feedback and our own personal feedback, by the way, too, I think there's the main thing is it started with, I'd love to save my stats across devices. We always get these emails from people who change phones or change a computer and their stats reset for some reason.
And we don't always know why, but it's something we would love to fix. And along with that, our games are across. Multiple domains, and so it's a little bit more tricky, a little bit more complicated, but we're really trying to bring forth is some account based system and being able to track and save stats and [00:09:00] have leaderboards across all of our games.
And so we've been working really hard. We have a small team here. we have four co founders, but we also have a developer that we work really closely with and love. And he's been working really hard on accounts for a while and trying to bring this to life. And we'll probably release it with one game first, and then we'll release it across the rest of the portfolio as, as quickly as we can.
But I'm really excited about that because that's probably the number one piece of feedback we get around. I want to see my stats and I want to be able to change devices. And I think this is going to. Really make a lot of people happy, especially on that future.
Aaron Kardell: Nate, you bring up something interesting as you talk about our team size there, we've got, as you think about it, we are self funding this.
We, there are a few things we're like really intentional about as we got started, we knew that we wanted to. Sometimes build our own [00:10:00] games, but often grow through acquisition. We knew we didn't want to raise any external capital, at least not at first or for a long time. And we knew we wanted to grow a profitable business and really to keep everything at a manageable size, that this would be something fun for us to work on collectively.
But we now have really eight people that are consistently contributing to the effort. Four of those are at it full time. And, really from when the four of us looked at each other and committed to going forward on this, it's been 18 months approximately since that date. Nate, what's maybe the biggest, Celebration for you out of that last 18 months and with all of our podcast friends, what's your biggest frustration?
Nate Kadlac: I think the biggest [00:11:00] thing, we've really wanted to keep this a profitable company from day one. And like you said, bootstrapped and I think we've been able to do that. We've been able to. Grow the games upon acquisition. I think that's been a really testament to our thesis. going into this is can we grow the things that we acquire?
And that's been fruitful. So I'm really excited about that, but I am really excited about the content side of things from a brand standpoint, we felt. And we had this, idea that maybe there's this void in this brainy game space, and there's not really a brand that's fulfilling that.
And can we bring guests on? Can we create content around this and be an advocate for these brainy daily games and, Word games and math games and reach teachers and educators and a number of other people in [00:12:00] and around this space. And that's probably been one of the more exciting pursuits that we've, I think we've done really well with.
Especially since being in this for 18 months.
Aaron Kardell: Yeah, or what's your biggest frustration? And you can say that it's, that some of us, Are not full time in this right now.
Nate Kadlac: Yeah. I think Aaron and I share a similar sensibility and wanting to go faster. And, there's always things that kind of get in the way of that, but I think we can always go faster and I would love to work with more of you in a full time basis.
yeah, I will throw that out there.
Aaron Kardell: we've got four of us that are full time and another four contributing. So that, Calling in about any specific individuals, other than to say, we're glad you're in it full time, mate. I think we're onto something. we had a quarterly meeting, got all the co founders in person, [00:13:00] what, a couple of weeks ago.
And I think it was just really good to look at the numbers, look at the growth and look at frankly, where we could be even three months from now. And. Not that I think we're really happy with the progress that's been made, but it feels like we're on the cusp of some even much bigger things. So I think that's, that keeps it exciting for me, hopefully for you too.
Nate Kadlac: Yeah, it's really exciting. I also think that. But there's competition in this space a little bit. There may be not a direct one to one correlation in terms of what our model is or what we're trying to do. But I would say like from, we are fully self funded and I think that's its own unique kind of story that is specific to us.
And so I do have a lot of ambition and excitement around what we're doing. Even if there are other players in this space, I just think that very few are going at it the way we are. And so that's what makes me really [00:14:00] excited for Hey! Good Game in general.
Aaron Kardell: Agreed. Nate, I think you and I maybe both have different reasons on why we've been resistant to funding over time.
For my background, I have raised money before a couple of times on different ventures, and it was never a bad experience. I'm glad I did it those times, and they were good outcomes. The reason I'm hesitant to do that on new ventures, other than, maybe having a Stable cushion to build from, which is helpful.
But the, other reason is I think a lot of founders don't really think about what it means to raise venture capital. And I think, and I would put myself in these shoes 10 years ago, but I don't think enough founders like really go through the math of. What it means to [00:15:00] raise money and once you start raising angel capital and especially venture capital, those investors are wanting a 10 X return on their money, at least in those first rounds and some will state they want more than that or they want to see the feasibility of more than that.
And so if you're and they look at it as a very binary operation, right? So they might. They're pretty okay if they get zero or one X back in the scheme of things. Not obviously everybody wants their money back or better. They're more okay with more bets being zero as long as a few are in that 10 to 100 X category.
Like they make their fund back all day long with that. They do want founders taking big swings and making big bets. But when that becomes binary and when half of all bets don't even pan out in a way that the founder [00:16:00] gets anything, that's not very exciting. It can be, some for a certain class of business that it really is like world changing and earth shattering and is the next Uber is the next Facebook, you got to raise venture capital.
But I think what I developed a greater appreciation of is. Some people maybe say a lifestyle business in almost like a derogatory or slur way. And it's what are you talking about? This is the greatest thing ever. Get to work with friends on problems you want to solve and orient your lifestyle around that.
Okay. Make fun of me all day long, but it's pretty great. So I just gammered on for a while about that, but. I know you've had a strong stance on this previously too. So where are you coming from?
Nate Kadlac: to be fully transparent, I've never raised VC funding for any business or a startup that I've been a part [00:17:00] of, we worked on your company.
So my influence around bootstrapping comes down to having more control over things and more control over pace, being able to feel like. I can safely place bets on things that fully aren't proven or they're maybe they're more intuition based, gut feel like we don't exactly know, but we don't want to bet the house on this, but we want to play some experiments or play some bets, some smaller bets.
And so just the, getting away from these risky, putting all your cards in with some investors. I think just being able to have that control is where I come from. And I've always viewed this, and me, you've known me for a long time, but like just being able to like, Life is short and I want to play around and I'd like having a few different things [00:18:00] going on at any given time and I know that's more of a long term strategy versus a short term strategy, but that's always been my mindset is to have a balanced lifestyle and so part of bootstrapping doesn't mean that you can't hustle or you shouldn't hustle or you shouldn't be just as ambitious, but It does feel like it gives me the proper mind space to operate a company like this.
So I think that's where it comes, from for me. Makes sense. So we did a little bit of a transition earlier this year around ad partners. And I don't know if you want to speak to a little bit around Where we were, we did some testing. We've talked to a lot of game creators about advertising, and I think we learned a lot, but did you learn anything around our tests with different ad partners?
And maybe we want to speak to a little bit of around where we are today.
Aaron Kardell: Yeah. Thinking about this as I go, I think I'm going to opt out of naming any specific ad partners we've worked [00:19:00] with or where we're headed. Don't mean to be obtuse, but don't want to put anybody on blast either.
Nate Kadlac: And for the record, I don't think we had like bad experiences necessarily with any of anybody.
Aaron Kardell: Totally fair. Some have been better in some ways. So I'm just going to make some, general statements. The first statement I'd make is, I think it's fair to say. Occasionally, Nate, I always have strongly held opinions and hopefully they're loosely held and occasionally I, I learn and I admit when I'm wrong.
And so I think if we rewind the clock 13 months or so, I would say you were pushing me pretty hard to let's not do this ad stuff on our own. Let's. Talked to some other partners and I was absolutely the resistant one and to give a little bit of background on that Not an ad tech expert, but like I've done a lot in and around ad tech So I think [00:20:00] there was a little bit of personal pride I don't want to give somebody some percentage of our revenue like it's not that hard.
We've already Got, we were invited into Amazon publisher services and we've got Google ad manager and we just got our own addicts account and we've got, keep ratcheting up these things that, and we can see each step of the way that our monetization is increasing. So we. We were incrementally getting better and better doing it in house.
Even I was surprised we, last fall, we opened six of our games, give or take, up to three ad partners and did a bake off across, three ad partners. And in every single case, We were immediately monetizing way more than we were previously. So I've got to eat some humble pie there, but also just say Hey, I can learn.
And that's a [00:21:00] good thing. There are a lot of instances in life where I can learn. We then mixed up those three ad partners a few months later, had some ways that we looked at the data. The problem with this is it's never really a one for one. you can use the exact same ad units.
You can do a lot of different things, but seasonality factors in as well as a bunch of other things. But I think we came up with a path to normalize some of the seasonality, normalize some of the other factors. And. We also were able to negotiate through that a little bit to get a best deal. We consolidated on one of those three, and then we had heard good things about another partner, brought them into the mix for kind of a next stage of tests.
And we've learned from that too. One insight I would give that may not be obvious to everybody is if you're curious [00:22:00] on what others are using, look at people's ads that text files on their website, and it's not always 100 percent obvious, like some of these are a little bit obfuscated, but you start to notice patterns over time.
Some are very explicit, oh, this is from so and and a lot of them want to have their name right there so they know who they are. But because we have a database of a lot of games, I had a little crawler that brought us back some data of who is everybody using and that, that helped inform our initial conversations of who should we even be talking to.
So once you get a game site with any scale, like you're going to get inbounds all day long of Oh, we can do ads for you. We can do ads for you. While we had some of those conversations, we were. More proactive versus reactive to just whoever reached out to us. It was really driven by where the biggest game sites, [00:23:00] what are they using?
What's driving success? And let's go talk to those people versus the other way around. So that's maybe one of the biggest things that I would suggest is Learn from those that are being successful versus just accepting the call from the first person that reaches out to you.
Nate Kadlac: Yeah, I think that was probably the biggest trick, hack, whatever I learned from you.
And just to be clear, for those who don't know, it's, if you go to any domain that's running ads, domain. com slash ads TXT, you'll be able to see that. Yeah. If you're in any niche, you could go look at competitor, sites in that niche and, look that up and that will give you potentially a good idea of what they're using for, partners.
But that was like really surprising to me that even exists. I had no idea that existed.
Aaron Kardell: Nate, I believe this is podcast episode number 40. This was an idea that was sparked [00:24:00] maybe spring of 23 to add this podcast. And we. Built towards it last summer, started recording. We were initially super motivated to reach out to game creators and to speak with game creators.
We've had more diverse guests as of late. Do you want to maybe just briefly. Talk about some of those diverse guests that we've had.
Nate Kadlac: Recently we had Josh Plotner who is a flutist and you might hear a lot of his instruments in many of the games that you play. We also recently chatted with Keith Farley, who is a voice over artist and director.
And there's just been so many kind of wild and weird in the best way, like we didn't really expect to get into this too much, I think we've really. Talk to a lot of people just across the board that are loosely attached to games more than we thought we [00:25:00] would have.
And so that's been really exciting. Aaron, I think you're going where I think you're going with this, but if you know of anybody who might fit this podcast, we will love to get a recommendation or an intro, we would just love to chat with them. If that wasn't what you were going to say, Aaron. Why don't you, take it away?
Aaron Kardell: No, that's a, that's one great tee up. I think we do a poor job on here of. Asking for your help. And I think there are three ways we'd love to ask for your help that are very podcast related. The first is if you think we should be talking to a specific guest or if you might be that guest, we would love to hear from you.
If you are listening to this podcast and have any feedback whatsoever for us, we would love to hear from you. For either of those two things, I'd, recommend you head on over to heyhey. gg and there's a big old contact us there and you can [00:26:00] contact us about either of those things. The other ask podcast related is I've never been a smash that like a button kind of guy, allergic to it, but would be really great if some of you felt it in your heart today, because we never ask to go on to Apple or Spotify or wherever you get this or YouTube and subscribe there if you haven't subscribed and give us a good rating.
It's how people find out about the show. We are having a blast making this podcast, but we do want to hear from you and we want to see those reviews and it will help get the word out to others. So thanks for hearing me out on that.
Nate Kadlac: Yeah. Well done. This is number 40. We can't wait to, we're not ending anytime soon.
We can't wait to get to a hundred. Thank you so much for listening. We really appreciate it. And we do get feedback from some of you and it's really exciting to hear. So thanks again and we'll see you next [00:27:00] time. Peace.
