UserWise Vision

What does that mean?

We believe that entertainment and relaxation is an essential part of every human life. Games, and especially the evolution of games into video games, take us to faraway places and allow us experiences we could only have dreamed of.

We want to give every person something to look forward to each and every day. We want to help people feel better mentally by giving them the opportunity to take a break from stress and monotony: be it work, family, worries about finances or health or anything else. Games not only give respite but encourage joy and wonder and we aspire to push the medium forward.

In ten years’ time, we want to be touching the lives of over one billion people every month.

How do we do it?

Looking back over the last ten years, gaming has seen a steady evolution towards longer game lifespans. Previously only the realm of massively multiplayer online titles, more and more genres are able to not only launch as a success, but continue to grow and scale for years onward.

The crux of a longer lifespan is being able to continually engage your users while balancing the costs of creating new and interesting content, more generally referred to as “games as a service.” This live-service model has been incredibly valuable in an industry prone to being hit driven. With live-service games, studios can create and release new experiences to their players and start to enter into stable, consistent, and recurring revenue streams.

As studios large and small approach live-servicing, potentially for the first time, they are left to discover on their own how to build a live-servicing ecosystem. Pieces of legacy tools, mobile app tools made for apps not games, spreadsheets, and editing raw json have created a recurring costly error prone nightmare of development, with games from a single studio using multiple different methods. The largest studios have spent millions of dollars building internal tools to varying degrees of success, with vast inconsistency across their titles. This leaves smaller studios to try to keep up, recreating tools, or even cutting features that would better serve their games.

What if there was a way to operate your games from a single platform, to only need to train up your team once for all of your games, to spend more studio time on the game itself - to future-proof your live operations. What if players started receiving personalized game experiences tailored to them rather than a one size fits all approach?

 We created UserWise because there were no platforms available to actually operate your games in this way. We believe that every studio deserves access to a game operations solution to run their games and grow their business.

Why UserWise?

Different people enjoy different kinds of games. Within a single genre of games, there is even further variety of gameplay. This doesn’t even account for the different motivations and goals that players may be driven by. That’s why we believe in empowering creators to be able to deliver customized experiences. So each and every player can have the best possible experience for themselves.

Customized experiences cannot happen without segmentation, by defining (and constantly redefining) where players are in your game, the actions they have taken, and may take in the future. UserWise is built on segmentation. This allows you to customize every part of the game with relative ease rather than constantly diving back into code. By streamlining the live operations (liveops) of your game, we want to help you step away from the content treadmill and sustainably operate your games for years to come.   

In metric-speak, UserWise gives you the ability to easily scale up your interactions with your players in new and novel ways. This reduces churn, increases retention, and adds potential long-term value.

Our Company

We want the best possible people on our team. The A or A+ players. We want the people that can do ten times what a “good” employee could do in half the amount of time. We want our partners and competitors to be blown away by how much we accomplish.

We hire and retain this high quality of people in several ways.

We pay people what they’re worth from the start. What they’re truly worth. Raises aren’t set at some arbitrary number. If you’re at the top of your game, you should be paid as such.

None of our employees should ever have to worry about health or money. Worrying about sticking to a tight budget takes away headspace that can better be spent solving difficult problems.

We profit-share as a team. The profit-sharing program allocates 10% of pre-tax profit distributed evenly to employees. Everyone knows what everyone else is getting. This encourages us all to hold each other to a higher standard.

Hiring is distributed. What that means is that the founders will find the first set of employees - folks that are better than themselves at development, marketing, sales, etc. But then each of those employees will in turn be responsible for finding people better than themselves in their respective roles. Over time we keep getting better and better.

We hire the right people. People that believe in our vision and embody our core values. People that are:

• Creative

• Accountable

• Masterful

• User Focused

We believe in a culture of diversity and inclusion where we look for A+ team members with different backgrounds and perspectives. This allows us to come up with creative ideas that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.

We believe in a culture of openness and feedback. Bringing up concerns or issues is encouraged amongst everyone, from the newest team member to the CEO. And no jerks - no one wants to work in that environment.

We believe in a team culture. We are able to rely on each other and know that we have the same responsibility as they also rely on us.

We embrace the culture of freedom and responsibility. We don’t have complex rules and processes around things like expense reimbursement, travel, or vacation. Employees are expected to act responsibly and given the freedom to make their own choices.

We value work-life balance. We encourage employees to spend time with friends and family and actively encourage using vacation. There is more to life than work. We want our employees to actually live.

We love reading and time and room for headspace. We realize that as a creative company solving tough problems sometimes needs having an “ah ha” moment while walking on a trail or reading a book. We encourage folks to do so. We encourage learning and improving oneself through things like conferences and coursework.

Leadership embraces and embodies these values. They frequently block time on their schedule for reading, walks, vacation, and time with family. They constantly call out employees for demonstrating our core values so that we can all have examples of what to strive for. 

Our growth

Everyone in our company loves what we do and believes in long-term success. 

To that end we want consistently profitable growth of 30-50% year over year. Keeping growth at this level prevents us from compromising the quality of our team and our platform.

We are bootstrapped and profitable, maintaining a 30% EBIT every year. This allows us to have a healthy balance of cash. We keep on hand enough cash to run the business for three years with $0 in revenue. This allows us to weather any storm and give us room to pivot and survive if needed.

Our profit margin also allows us to engage in profit sharing with our employees where they see sizable bonuses each year. These are even more outsized due to the fact that our team is small for our total revenue. This is only possible because we hire the best people that are capable of achieving so much. 

Our product

Design is at the core of everything we do.

We invest massively in the quality and thoughtfulness of our designs so that they “just work” for our game development partners, who release titles among every game platform and genre in the marketplace.

We are a developer first company. Everything we create has full API access. We make minimal use of SDKs and strive to always be server authoritative and server driven. We create tools and systems that other developers find a delight in implementing. We strive to have a Stripe like integration experience and documentation over a black box solution.

Our modules are easy to use and extremely fast for both software engineers and non-technical live-ops and QA teams. Through ease of use, we significantly increase what a game development team can accomplish, while also reducing costly errors.

UserWise modules are built with game developers in mind and we actively work with teams to identify feature improvements and new modules. We maintain an active knowledgebase to consistently improve the functionality that game development teams gain from UserWise.

Our partners

Our partners love us; they rave about how amazing our product is; how much time and money they save by not having to rebuild the same tools in house over and over again. We know our customers love us because we don’t have a giant sales team. Nearly every new partner comes to us via referral.

We maintain close relationships with each studio. We play their games. We collaborate on tests and features. Our goal is to make every studio that uses UserWise successful so that they can keep creating more games. We receive glowing feedback from studios that they wouldn’t dream of launching a new game without UserWise, backed up by a 100% integration rate of new games that they launch after first becoming a UserWise partner.

Our average studio pays $10,000/mo with an average of 1M monthly active users (MAU). In three years we have 200 studios live, resulting in $20M average recurring revenue (ARR). Our partners are elated at the value of UserWise to improve their games, and reduce costs of multiple tools and the time to use each separately, developing and maintaining their own tools and servers, and additional salaries of the team to do so.