Comment by 0x202020 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 0x202020 | Hacker News Reader

I’ve got an esports side project that was starting to get some interest within the community and generate non-trivial MRR (~4k mo). I have a closed alpha that a few teams in the league were using, and I was talking at some level to basically everyone that could be in the market for the current version of the problem. I was looking into getting a business/sales partner in order to have more success on the business side of getting the other organizations I was in talks with, as I am normally just a lead dev with no business interaction. Then the league, along with everything else, got delayed and quarantines started. Within 3ish days all of the professional teams, academy teams and two other organizations are interested in my “alpha” software. So now my “side project” as of April 1st has ~10x’d its MRR (~40k).

As of now I am getting some business stuff ironed out and only making bug fixes/small updates while I get a better feeling of what type of workload difference the growth is making

Interesting. If you don't mind me asking; how did you make contact with the first few teams? Was the early exposure from sharing parts of the project through social platforms or directly reaching out to the teams?

I have existing contact with some people in a few of the organizations which has come following the game over the last few years on a personal level. I’ve travelled to some events, have conversations with some players but mostly coaches, analysts and production team members, and have been around the scene on a hardcore fan basis for a long time. Last season I created a fantasy league app and some advance stats collection. This season I didn’t feel like doing the fantasy app again because there were good enough options out there but got some requests for stats/rankings from some of the people I know. So I started that then pivoted it into a platform instead of creating a bunch of spreadsheets (even though I still end up doing that for them sometimes)

Can I ask what the project is? Have worked in the space for a bit and would love to connect to learn more.

Analytics and AV tagging/insights. So I can give them a bit deeper stats from data that they all have than what most teams can get internally, but then via tagging tournament audio and video can also show any clips that lead to the statistics. They can also upload their practice and scrimmage footage for private tagging and review.

Say Team X is the best team at Objective Y, they can filter that down and watch tournament footage of their strategies on that objective only instead of scrubbing through footage manually.

Congrats, that's awesome. Good job and good luck seizing the opportunity!

Thank! It’s exciting and scary at the same time. I’ve had some small projects that have also made small amounts of money, but never anything to possibly turn into a business

Hi! I know someone who could help with the business side of things. If you’re interested my email is in my about page. Best of luck either way!

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