Wednesday, June 19, 2019
How ProGuides Is Helping Gamers Master Their Game, With Sam Wang
If you're an avid video game player, how to you improve your game? Once you've exhausted looking online for tips, Los Angeles-based ProGuides (www.proguides.com) offers up professional, instructional content to help you improve your skills at such popular titles as League of Legends, Hearthstone, and Fortnite. We spoke with ProGuides founder Sam Wang to better understand what the company does, and why users are joining its service and using its marketplace to find professional video game coaches.
What does ProGuides do?
Sam Wang: ProGuides was founded with one mission, which is to take gamers to the next level of play. We have highly engaging courses, taught by professional players, and where you track your progress, driven by data, and which also features an on-demand marketplace to help you find any coach you want to help you improve your play on any game.
How did you start the company?
Sam Wang: I was previously at UC Berkeley, and came down to Los Angeles to be involved in e-sports. The first company I created was for the League of Legends. I sold that company to Immortals, the e-sports company led by Crosscut Ventures, and I leverage my e-sports network to start ProGuides. We started four years ago, and are based here in Los Angeles, and we now provide course for six games. We offer up courses for League of Legends, Fortnite, Hearthstone, Magic: The Gathering Arena and Super Smash Brothers Ultimate.
What does that look like to a user?
Sam Wang: We have a freemium business model, where any user can try out the service for free. The best way to think about it, is as a learning platform. Gamers will start by looking at a couple of tips, and they then go through what we call a meta page, which allows users to see how they can pick the best characters and champions, and see some simple tips they can get online, not only at ProGuides. Most users will then want to have a deeper level of learning, and start switching to our platform. You can think of it as a master class, produced with professional players they probably recognize, to learn more of both fundamentals and advanced details on games. We find that there is a lot of the user segment, especially the pro gamers, who go down the subscription path, because they really want to have an even deeper level of learning. After finishing a course, we've found they likely also want to find a coach. That's where InstaPros, which we launched two weeks ago, comes in. That allows them to find a coach to help them play better.
How much does a subscription cost?
Sam Wang: Our premium subscription, which gives you access to all of the courses, costs $60 for one game, or $120 for all games. It's only available as an annual pass. The subscription also gives you bonus points to use for InstaPro, our on-demand marketplace for coaches. We find that some users only want to get coaching, and those tend to be our more advanced users. If they just want to book a coaching lesson, it costs only $5 to get started.
Are those coaches all professionals, or are they just highly ranked players?
Sam Wang: We're looking for both pros and semi-pros, but we find most are professionals. They also have to be very good at communicating and teaching gamers. We've vetted a lot of them, and we now have over 150 coaches for League of Legends and Fortnite. We plan to release more games for InstaPros and finding a coach soon.
How is the company backed, financially?
Sam Wang: We raised our pre-seed round last year, led by the Amplify Fund in Venice. We also had participation from the Tracker Fund, Greycroft's seed fund, and also Quest Venture Partners in the Bay Area, and the GFR Fund, a Japanese e-sports fund.
What's the biggest lesson you've learned so far?
Sam Wang: We were bootstrapped when we first started about four years ago, and the most challenging lesson we had to learn, what we had to learn how to expand to more games quickly. We didn't realize, at first, that users that were coming to ProGuides were multi-gamers. That's something we didn't learn until this year. When we first launched, we only supported two games, League of Legends and Hearthstone. But, we quickly found out that gamers on our service weren't just playing PC games, they also were playing console and mo bile games. This year, we're putting a lot of priority into supporting more games, which has made lots of users want to sign up for our subscription plan.
Are the people signing up for the service interested in becoming pros themselves, or are they just trying to get better at games?
Sam Wang: We definitely have users who come to ProGuides, because they want to go pro. We've been driving a younger and younger audience, mostly males between 13 to 18, who believe they can go pro one day. An example of this is what they see in Mongraal, the Fortnite player who we partnered with before he became famous, and ended up going to the World Cup tournament where he has the potential to wins millions of dollars. We also see a lot of users, who are at a moderate level, but really such and just want to get to the next level. They're tapped out, they've looked at all the guides online, and need help.
Given the y ounger demographics of many of your players, do you find the cost of subscriptions are a barrier?
Sam Wang: The basic thesis behind why people buy ProGuides is very similar to why people buy virtual items in games. In Fortnite, you might spend $100 for a dance move or an outfit, which earns you social currency. For Gen Z, in particlar, social currency is not just that outfit, but also if you can be one of the best players. The way we see it, we're just like an in-game transaction. By going to ProGuides, those users are going to get better at the game, which is usually much more valuable tha a virtual item in a game they love.
Finally, what's next for you?
Sam Wang: We are going to be releasing six more games in the next eight months, and have a pretty big road map. We also will be expanding InstaPro to mobile, where you will be able to access the InstaPro marketplace for coaches on your phone. We also launched our iOS app in April, and will be launching an Android app very soon.
Thanks!