In this episode, host Alexandra Takei, Director at Ruckus Games, sits down with Robert van Hoesel, co-founder and CEO of First Look, now part of Pragma, to explore how studios can own and scale their player relationships. Robert’s journey from founding a SaaS company to building First Look began with one simple insight: game studios are some of the most passionate users a software builder could serve, and the games industry desperately needs the dream stack for connected distribution, player communications, and analytics.
First Look acts as a CRM for games, helping studios streamline playtesting, gather player feedback, and grow grassroots communities. The pair discusses why these capabilities have become essential as publishers pull back, competition increases, and self-publishing becomes the norm. Robert shares how First Look enables small teams to punch above their weight by automating data capture across platforms like Steam and Discord, transforming scattered playtest feedback into actionable insights, and shares the full suite of offerings First Look provides for studios today.
They also unpack First Look’s acquisition by Pragma and what it means to unify the backend and frontend of game development. The episode closes with practical advice for studios: start community-building early, close the feedback loop with players, and reward engagement to create sustainable, loyal audiences.
We’d also like to thank Levellr — the Discord community intelligence platform — for making this episode possible. Learn more about unlocking real-time community insights at levellr.com.
This transcript is machine-generated, and we apologize for any errors.
Alexandra: What's up everyone, and welcome to the Naavik Gaming Podcast. I'm your host, Alex, and this is the Interview and Insight segment.
In some ways, gaming has always been on the cutting edge of technology, graphics, networking, hardware and devices. With the goal decree, something imaginative, gaming has usually always been ahead of the curve, but there are some places in games where we're woefully behind, tech, e-commerce, retail, and some other industries, and that is in building valuable tools that help a company own federate and analyze the relationship with their players, their customers.
As most know, the gaming market has become challenging and saturated as of late. You know, one of the ways that studios are trying to break through is building an early grassroots community, which can be done in a variety of ways. A team is usually fighting for every wishlist, every play tester amongst a sea of highly competitive content across PC console and Roblox ecosystems.
And so today on air, I’ve brought the CEO of a company who is currently helping studios with this problem. My guest today is Robert van Hoesel, co-founder and CEO of First Look. First Look is now a part of Pragma, the founder of whom joined me on air many years ago. But it's my absolute pleasure to welcome Robert to the show and I'm super excited to talk about this topic. Welcome, Robert.
Robert: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Alexandra: Yeah. And before we get started, I do wanna disclose that Ruckus, my studio, which is not, not under Naavik, but my other, my other real job is a customer of First Look. I also run play testing for our title The Holdouts. And thus, not only are our companies partners, but I'm actually an individual power user of First Look.
And so, audience, you can kind of take this maybe as a first witness testimony as to how important this sort of tooling is for the future of the games business and a small studio, and an assessment of the fact that there are true, happy paying customers. Ruckus has a very small business marketing and community team. And First Look definitely helps us punch well above our capacity. So, but before we start, I wanna get some background on you, Robert. I actually think this is gonna be awesome because you aren't someone who traditionally classifies yourself as a gaming veteran. So I'm gonna ask you a few questions to help the audience get to know you, and there are about five of them.
And so, the first is you founded and ran a company for 11 years called Crowded. What was that? And tell me a little bit about it.
Robert: Sure. I think Crowded is pretty interesting because it follows a similar founding story as, as First Loop does. Like I was building a community of, I was pretty young back then below 20, if I remember correctly, building a community of fellow like teenagers and young people building companies and trying to make a living for themselves.
And there was some pain because we wanted to have our own, like online hub or community place. And there was no software for that at that moment. So we built something ourselves and that turns into a standalone product called Crowded, which eventually transformed more into enterprise oriented community platform for them to have wide label destinations for their stakeholders, their employees, their top customers to share resources. And all those have discussions amongst each other.
Alexandra: Interesting. And so, you ran this company for 11 years. And, and I guess, I guess walk me through a little bit of that journey of starting something when you were really quite young. You, you said below 20 to running this company for 11 years.
Robert: Yeah, well, many things happened. I think important to highlight is that we decided to run it as a bootstrap company, so really focused on the bottom line profit building based on the fact that, you know, your customers want your product, there's demand for it, and you're building it for your current customers and for the future valuation of your company.
And we went from a very local business startup trying to like, make bespoke community platforms into a real wide label high skill enterprise compliance ready improve platform, which is very dry and boring stuff to do. But we ended up working for like the biggest banks and governments across the world and made a huge impact.
It was super interesting. I learned a lot there about building software, about running companies, about sales. Basically everything that you wanna do if you have a product that you wanna build and get into the hands of people. Super inspiring. At some point I did get a little bit burnt out because one thing that I noticed, and that's maybe also a bit like step two, what I did afterwards is that our customers, the, the, the job that they were doing to our software isn't something they were super passionate about, right?
It's just part of their job description is to communicate with their customers. But they had a lot of other responsibilities, and no one really wanted to be a power user. No one would like respond proactively with feature requests or ways that really drove the quality of the product. And I myself am real product builder.
I get excited when I notice that people like what we're building and they're happy about it. They were making their lives better so that the lack of that kind of feedback loop made me start thinking about the next adventure. Looking elsewhere. Took a bit of a break from Crowded that still exists.
It's still running. It's a profitable company. Still out there having customers, but I expanded my horizons and started to think about what I want to work for. What kind of audience? What kind of market? And one thing I knew for sure I wanted to build for a kind of niche, small market with very concrete problems that are passionate about their job and their work and the products that we make.
While, spoiler alert, that whilst that's the gaming industry, you folks, people building games, developers are awesome people to have as a customer, there's so much impact that you can make as a software builder actually. So yeah, that's, that has been a really interesting shift for me.
Alexandra: Yeah. And I mean, you kind of already kind of jumped forward to my second question, which is what took you from the typical SaaS world to, to founding First Look? And it sounds like a lot of that was driven by actually having passionate users for your software. And as someone who has made many feature requests, absolutely. We are there ready to suggest how to make things better. And maybe that's also something that. We're always very used to a lot of people that obviously work in the gaming industry are typically players, which I think is a very different maybe than from the SaaS world where you may not be actually be a user or a fan of the business or the product that you actually are using.
And so, in the gaming space, we're very used to being very vocal about strong, opinionated feedback.
Robert: Exactly. Yeah.
Alexandra: But, yeah. So maybe I kind of wanna shift to that journey of, you know, you, you, you finished at Crowded, how did you meet your co-founder and you know, given that you weren't a big gaming expert, how did you discover games?
And then finally tie that all together with how you fully managed to bootstrap this company. And then we'll get started on what problem First Look is trying to solve.
Robert: Right? Yeah. So one of the things I did when taking a break from, from Crowded was a game actually, and around that time, Age of Empires IV was released. Famous RTS and I really loved that game. I struggled with understanding the intricacies, like all the details, unit steps, buildings, technologies, how they work together. And at the same time, I wanted to improve my skills as, from that developer because running a business, you don't always get to be that close the code, uh, anymore.
So I started to build, a little hobby project that allowed you to like explore all the different buildings and, and civilizations and how they interact together. While I was doing that, I met my co-founder Rene, who was building a leading board for Age of Empires IV. So, we decided to bundle our forces, created a website called aefourworld.com, um, which still today and now is like the biggest community website for people that play Age of Empires.
So that was all really a hobby from passion project, where we spent a lot of time in, but that also became our road into the gaming industry because other studios took notice, especially RDS studios, and we built some relationships with them. And one of them, First Giant Studios, who's also a customer, they were at the beginning of their game called Storm Gate, and they were looking for help building their community, but especially onboarding all their play testers, Kickstarter backers, creators, anyone that should get an early access and preview of the game, get them their, their steam keys and get them into Discord.
And at that moment we were like, well, heck yeah, we want to do more for games or around games, so let's just build a small tool for that. And that bespoke to be game, the beginning of First Look, because actually what we were building was already kind of a product and other studios reached out and told us, Hey, we would like something like this.
And actually we, we started telling other CEOs, we're building this, this product, this play testing tool. Sign up whenever you want and it's gonna help you. And after like five or six months actually people started reaching out and then we're like, oh, okay, let's start building it. And this is like January, February, last year started building First Look as a play testing onboarding tool, also more as a side project. We were like, if we create something of value for studios that allows the student network with them and learn more about what they're doing, the problems they're facing very quickly became clear that play testing is a really interesting way to start building your community early on as a game developer.
And if we already have that list of play testers, we know who they are on Discord and we know the Steam account, that creates a very interesting foundation for our product, which is now First Look. And that's how we started that I've been building that for a while and a half years now.
Alexandra: That's amazing. Yeah. And I love that the journey to First Look was actually built alongside, you know, a studio. You know, when I did the intro, a studio that was struggling with exactly that problem. Right? Which is like cultivating a really early community. And so, you know, I think very much so. A lot of times in the startup world, like you're, it's, you know, the number one thing is like, know your customer, right? And one of the great things about having a customer is that you can just ask them what they need, um, which is, you know, and they give you feedback and you can help them. And I think it's a very, like, cool way, especially on the product side to just always constantly be informed by what's valuable, and revisit your hypothesis, and see how someone is using your tool and then pivot based on that information.
But now that the audience has got a grip on your background, I wanna dive into the core of our subject, and I loosely alluded this to this in our intro, but I wanna hear in your words what problems specifically is First Look trying to address in the gaming market?
Robert: That's a great question. We are asking that ourselves over and over again because I think essentially studios face a thousand little problems when it comes down to publishing and distributing their game and getting it into the hands of players.
What we wanna do is help studios build successful. That's our vision. That's what drives us. And the way we do that is through helping studios build community, build direct relationships with their players to better understand from them, learn from them, activate them in promoting and sharing your game and getting their friends to play.
Basically everything that we've, all around the relationship that we, that you have with your players as a studio, we want to improve on that, extend on that, and make it work for you and help you build those stronger relationships. Essentially, we are like a player relationship management tool, like a CRM for games.
Alexandra: Yeah, so exactly like, I think for me, like the way that I see it is there's, there's play testing, there's owning the relationship with your player, which is actually, I think, even more tied to something bigger for games, which is controlling your financial future. And we'll talk a little bit about this in, in, in the next question. But also building tools that help small teams scale big processes, as well as obviously some of the sentiment work that you guys have been doing for help games kind of cut through the noise. And I think all of those, like you said, like all, every studio is dealing with a bunch of little problems and those are potentially some of those little problems.
And First Look is kind of addressing those as you guys build and go along. But now that you've talked a little bit about the problem that we're trying to address, I wanna ask, you know, why is it important more than ever now to specifically address this problem? And I have a few hypothesis as well that I'd love to jam with you on, right?
Robert: Yeah, I think so. Let me take one step back on the problem because the other problem that Game Studios face is that there's just not a lot of good software being built for studios. Like the focus and emphasis of development and investment is going through the game and content, which is great, and we want you to keep on doing that.
But there's all these thousand little problems. You get a thousand little solutions and you end up with spreadsheets and Google forums and like, oh, and do science. And uh, just with play testing alone, there's a lot of waste and a lot of value being lost because you don't have the data in one place.
And you're know, like building a, a good view about who your core players are and understanding where they're coming from and why they're playing their, your game and what are the friends they're bringing in and what is the feedback they're giving and how are they responding to updates that you give.
And my, my IV or my like, basically big vision for game developers is that if you don't build a community from your, from very day zero before you start releasing the game or get it into the hands of people, you really miss out on building the like muscle and skill sets needed to know how to get your game to become better, how to promote it, understand exactly who your player is, and know who your core players are, what they like and that they don't like.
And traditionally games are being built in isolation, but iteration is very slow. You create one build do research, which is great. Then you digest that research for a couple of weeks, then you think what you can improve and three months later there's a new build. And what we're hoping to do, what I hope that we can do true First Look is make it much easier to test early and often and get small bits of feedback in.
And if you have a community, you don't need to work just around builds. You can get feedback on art, you can get feedback on ideas that you're considering and all of that helps in the development phase. But then if you take it to after release, there are so much more. As a studio, when you own that relationship with your players, it's just a gold mine and helps you prevent taking unnecessary risk.
It makes, if you have a great play test and if you have built a strong community, you've tested everything from distribution, adoption engagement around it, retention potentially. And that will mean that once you launch and go into early access, it's less of a gamble. There are still all the market forces around it, but you have much more confidence because you have essentially already released your game before you announce it and released it to everyone in the world.
Alexandra: And why, I guess, so you described again, more of the emphasis of the problem and what it allows studios to do, but why do you think that there's demand for this now versus maybe five, ten years ago?
Robert: I think primarily there are, everyone knows there, there are a lot of games being released, but there is an interesting market shift where both capital development and as well as customer player demand is there for more games, for indie games or smaller titles. People care about the AAA polished experiences. We founders of millions of budget behind it, but they also care about just having new content to play and new concepts. And getting games out is difficult as it is, like development isn't easy.
It's, it's interesting trajectory. I don't have a lot of experience myself, but I get to hear all your beautiful stories., But then distribution and, yeah, just selling your game. It's, it's actually becoming more of a science. You can't just build something. And this is actually something that in, in startups, in technology, startups and software is something that's just common knowledge.
Like you never build something a way for the customers to come, like you start early on with validation and understanding if your game makes sense and, yeah, only if you've provided that value and people like what you build, it makes sense to scale it up and invest into it. With games, you have much less opportunity to like put a prototype out there and then extend on it and grow it and into a large business over time.
But you still need the data. You still need to really, really know and believe that what you're building makes sense and that people want it. The whole distribution model around publishing is shifting a lot. Like many studios, I think the majority of our, our customers at First Look and we have over 100 studios actively using the product.
The majority of them is looking to self-publish. And if you're going to self-publish your game, you're missing a lot of like business support that you used to have. Certainly you're running your marketing operations, your research and intelligence, your fundraising, uh, you are community management.
All of that comes on you as a studio. And it's impossible as a smaller studio to like hire five, six hats for that. So you need to optimize and be smart about how you run your community in communication marketing as a studio. And, while we First Look, we're hoping to make that process a little easier by giving you one platform that does like tens of thousands of things, true.
Having all your players in one system and hopefully eliminate the need for you to have all those different hats in your company. And you as studio founder, you probably. I hope this resonates because you are like wearing so many heads and responsibilities and anything that makes it easier for you to perform all those jobs where if a traditional publisher model, your publisher would do that, or you would have like the backing of a bigger company behind you with business support, it's only you now.
And, the need to get numbers out to show, like there's so many things playing into this. Like, a lot of studios use the data that we gather, like playtime and retention and feedback and sentiment on discord as a, as a fundraising, model. So the reports that we generate, the data that's in First Look can be useful for you to get funding to.
So, in all kinds of ways, it just helps if you're smart and intelligent about how you approach building your customer database, your players, your community, and how you can use it to show and validate that your game has a reason to exist.
Alexandra: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's like really to me, like it boils down to, like, the first thing is obviously there's higher volume of independent studios as publishers have pulled back from titles and has it how it's, and as it's gotten easier to make and develop games with new tools, engines, engines get locked, et cetera.
And now more than ever, it's super competitive. So, it's like just pushing more and more and more grassroots. So, studios must now prioritize this for survival, whereas before they kind of had the luxury of being player agnostic, right? If I build it, they will come. That is no longer the reality today because the market is so competitive.
And like you said, building an analytics pipeline that allows you to measure audience and playtime habits earlier, earlier in dev means that your team is gonna be smaller when you start doing that. Because simply that's just the beginning. And you also have no publisher to do this for you because publishers are retreating from the games market is they're becoming increasingly ever risk averse.
And before, like, and that's was also one of my questions, which was why do you think this has not existed in the past? And that's because the publishers owned majority of this responsibility. And now even on the publisher side, right, which is a business that hasn't scaled that well. It's been mostly like a people scaling business rather than like.
Enterprise tooling, scaling business as what's you're building, which is just publisher if they need to smart more games, bigger fixed sales and marketing headcount, et cetera. Um, whereas you guys are tackling it more from the enterprise level. But I wanna ask you some questions specifically because you have a background in, in SaaS and B2B, you know, you said it yourself.
First Look is a CRM built specifically for gaming. And it's crazy because in the SaaS business this has existed for a very long time, like Salesforce, Zendesk, Monday, whatever else, there's a million tools that you could possibly use to do this. And now you've arrived in this space and you're building like the Miracle Tool and you've been at it for a bit.
And I'm curious what surprises you about building A CRM for gamers and studios, that might be very different from the CRM SaaS products and for you, so like what are the differences and what are the parallels?
Robert: So, I would say that my biggest surprise was that while in gaming there is I think a lot more data about, about your users than there would be in traditional SaaS businesses.
None of these systems are really integrated or working together, so, is great software in the game industry also for helping you run play tests or getting sentiment or working with creators. But none of these tools really talk to each other and there is no or actually even, even at larger publishers and like big gaming enterprises, this is a struggle for them too.
Like they have to set up their whole player data platform or something to like link all the data together and make it work for them. So, one thing that we're focusing on, the first loop is being really gaming native. So, your steam library and wishlist data, your playtime, all the other platforms console that you can be playing on.
Your Discord account is linked to your steam account, is linked to your email address that you signed up with to play test is linked to your Reddit account potentially, or whatever, where we go into the future. And if you're a content creator that's linked to you being a player in that system again, and if you want to respond to a survey, we can All the data is linked together in a way that can really, really make it work for you.
So, if you're looking at survey responses, you can filter it by onboarding questions asked when they sign up for the play test for demographic data, or when you're looking at sentiment, you can narrow it down to filter out specific cohorts. Like, I don't want to, I don't want to learn about the sentiment of the noisy players that are shouting a lot on social media.
I want to know from the players that are no longer player but actively talking because those are the voices that I care about. So that was my biggest surprise, and something that, it's not trivial to tackle, but it seemed pretty obvious that investing in creating that data layer, creating a good view on your players is really, really important.
And in that way it's very similar to traditional SaaS. It's just not interconnected. And then another big difference, which has a lot to do with the distribution model is that it's just notable that there's legacy amongst game developers that they don't want to own or know or have any relationship with the player.
They wanna build their like box model game, put it in a store, and maybe respond to reviews and read to that. But the, the value in like driving your own marketing. Running ads out there, seeing why people click and what interests them about your game and if they're interested to sign up for a play test is really valuable.
So there's a, there's a real, like, I would almost say like cultural lack of interest in, having a deep understanding about marketing, building relationship with your customers, and being smart and intelligent about it. And the parallels, I mean, it's all technology, it's all development. It's, in many ways very sim It's more similar to, B2C, which I, I, I have done B2C companies, but my com, my previous style startup, obviously is more focused on enterprises.
Although our customers there are problems, were B2C. So, there are some parallels there. But I think the, the primary difference is really that that studios and studio founders. They just lack a curiosity about really understanding with our players and, and building relationship with them and the inverse, the founders that do, and our customers that do.
We see that they make so much progress and get so much value about out of their like community and out of building those relationships and their, their updates are so on point and get very good reception. And when they had to release, they're so confident and excited because finally they got to celebrate with their community that they build an awesome game together.
And, yeah, I think that's, that's a beautiful like thing in the inverse because ultimately all game developers are super passionate about what they're building traditional, like SaaS businesses generally aren't. So, getting to share that and, and co-create with your community and audience is, super valuable even though it might be daunting. Or even scary because you have your own creative ideas there.
Alexandra: Yeah. Yeah. I really like that because I think that there's, you know, there are things that gaming does very well that it's far superior to SaaS, right. And I think maybe the joy of building the product is there in games, but perhaps really absent in SaaS.
But then there's the flip side of that, which is just the curiosity to like learn from the players to do to, to, to enhance the building of your product, which I think is absent of a lot of video games. And that's changing today. And I mean, it already has changed for multitude of studios and platforms like mobile.
And that's been, that's always a very present in SaaS. Like you start from day one with a customer putting in their hands. And so, I love that you kind of box those parallels together. And I guess what we're trying to obviously probably do is you're trying to take the best of both worlds and put them together in, in First Look, right?
Robert: I think in there I'd love to now, one thing to add to that, there, so a growing part of our customers are mobile studios. Mobile game developers are actually much more like sales than PC console games. And they are very like, uh, oriented on optimizing the funnel and understanding where people drop off and how to get into convert.
And we get to implement a lot of their best practices in a way that they make sense for PC and console games and vice versa. And I, I, I do think I, we get to learn more from mobile game devs on behalf of our, uh, console and desktop game devs than that we do from traditional business apps.
Alexandra: Well, I'd love to actually shift from, now that we've understand the kind of macro problem that First Look is trying to address, you know, owing the relationship with the player, cutting through the noise, you know, putting team, putting together tools that enable a small team to do quite a bit.
Tell me about like what a studio is actually buying in terms of feature set when they sign up for a First Look. So, you know, you already mentioned how many studios are working with you guys. It's about a hundred, and we'll talk a little bit about the First Look pipeline and how that's been growing for you.
But just, you know, when you sign up today for First Look like what's available, like feature set, hit, right?
Robert: Yeah, typically, our customers will sign up for play testing. And what that means is we give you a really smooth, frictionless experience for your players to sign up, show interest, using a wait list, get invited by you, and then they can sign NDA, provide additional questions and then we give them a product key so they can, can start playing the game instantly.
They get into your discord, get onboarded, and throughout all of that we're building up a profile on the player. You get to learn about their wishlist status, about how they signed up, where they learned about your game. There are some friend invites, referral links, all that you like, try and build growth and get more people to sign up.
Actually, people that use that functionality, about 25% of their play testers are going through referral links and friendly invites as a mechanism to like grow interest for your game. So that's another part of, of tooling that we're building, is helping you run campaigns, distribute your game, drive wishlist.
But lately we've been shifting a lot more into feedback and sentiment and data around your game, 'cause it's also relevant when you are done building your game. You never done, like for live services, game games, getting insights on what people are saying on Discord, what they're saying in surveys.
And another social channels is really important. I think we're one of the few companies that really helps you do in-game surveys in Native and real UI really, really well, so that's another thing. We do analytics on not just the game and playtime, but also engagement on discord, web traffic to your properties by people are signing up.
We have newsletter functionality. And we're now extending into running your Creator program to First Look, because the way I see it First Look is really built for your core community, like the top 5% of your gaming audience that's interested in building that relationship with you as well, and wants to give feedback and grow your gain.
Creators are an essential part of that. So we want to facilitate that process and make it easier for them to get onboarded, be a part of your community, and get the right incentives and rewards for doing so. And that also brings us to our latest, newest edition that we released this year, which is rewards specifically for community activity and good behavior.
That helps you build retention, not just in the game, but also in your communities. And if people are posting feedback, they're being active in Discord, weekly or daily, that you get to reward that and help them shift to higher tiers. Become like more of a VIP member of your community. Maybe get some advanced access or be in more private channels, get SW or whatever you want to do to be grateful and thankful for the players that help you build the better game.
Alexandra: Alright. Obviously a lot in there, but the bulk of it comes from play testing, analytics and surveys. And then obviously some of this creator work that you're doing, which is building relationship with maybe your early, like, you know, vocal VA creator, vanguards. And so I just wanted to make sure that it's accurate that, you know, the average place in the game development lifecycle that the studios are approaching you is very, is early and when they are struggling with play testing. Is that accurate?
Robert: That used to be accurate. I think nowadays we're talking a lot more with bigger franchises as well. We're talking with titles that are released but struggling. We're talking with titles that did great and just want to strengthen their relationship. I think ultimately, play testing is one of the best moments to start building your community. People are eager to maybe give up more of their information.
They are interested and excited for what you're building and their drive to give feedback and get their hands on games that aren't released. That is, is really big reason for people to join your community. So, it's really powerful that First Look is super relevant once you launch. And the same thing still come.
Like people that want to be part of your community, that want to improve your game, that want to share it with their friends, wanna play together or meet other people doing. So that's who we for and more and more that's where our customers are coming from. But play testing is our core. I think it's something we do really, really well.
And we help you save a lot of time with it. So it makes a lot of sense for studios to sign up for that specifically. And, they're absolutely welcome to. We love to.
Alexandra: Yeah. Yeah, and I mean, I really like that because I think I, I'm, I guess I'm just genuinely passionate about like how people enter the product.
And there's this really, there is an interview that I was listening to by, by Dara, and I'm gonna butcher the last name. He's the CEO of Uber. So, I'm just not even gonna say his last name. But Dara was really interesting. You know, obviously Uber's running a two-sided marketplace and so, there's obviously the, the driver side, right?
I am an Uber driver, and then there is the supply side, which is I am an Uber traveler. And it's really interesting because both, both of their core flagship products, Uber, Uber, Uber Drive, right? So, like Lyft, like the taxi, Uber, Uber taxi, and then Uber Eats really reinforce them one another mutually, where they basically onboard the, the driver's side from Uber Eats because the requirements to drive food, goods, et cetera, are significantly lower than the requirements that it drives, drives people you can onboard into Uber Eats really quickly as a driver. And then the on the supply side from the, from the, from the PE passengers, right? Everybody needs to get somewhere. And then because the passengers are already in Uber Taxi, then they migrate to Uber Eats.
And then the people, the drivers are in Uber Eats driving and then they migrate to Uber Taxi., And both of these are like very self-reinforcing loops. And so, for me, I was curious because I think that when your players onboard with you for play testing, right, they're coming to you for this very specific entrance, right?
And then you're able to supply to them this whole portfolio of other things, which helps 'em stay. Just like Uber Taxi help them stay in the First Look ecosystem. And so, I find that to be just like really interesting that many of the customers in your early customers were coming to you for. That's a good reminder.
Robert: Interesting needs because basically we did start this product. We're experimenting a lot. We're just trying to identify ways we can be useful to studios. One question that we got over and over again is, can you help us get play testers? Traditionally there are play testing agencies that have our own like database of players that they will source and invite to like physical locations to test the game.
And we didn't have any of that. So, we started our first, first loop player network, which is a community of play testers that are interested in playing more games. And the way we grow that is by people on our free plan or that are starting out on First Look. We display a banner where they can. Sign up for other games instantly because we can prefill all their, like email that we verify the social data and make it easier to join other play tests.
And in that way, all the studios are helping each other too. Like I give some of my, uh, hard earned traffic and players that I felt for and try to get eyeballs for. And I get to promote my game to other players as well that I came and came in from other studios. We're not really sure like what the business model is behind that or how we want to grow or accelerate that.
All we know is that it works. And just today we got the message from a customer that was like, oh, I opened the dashboard and I was completely shocked by the fact that we had like 30 new players sign up for our play test and they just gave fiat first loop. They didn't have to do any outreach. And that kind of movement is really something that we're after and hoping, hoping to build. That's just one of the ways that we, we can add value. We have all the tooling, we can make this easier. We can provide the platform now, and hopefully we can scale this into something that helps, maybe not every player in the world, but absolutely the players that are interested in making games better, to, to get them into your games and learn about your games as well, even before you have a Steam store.
Alexandra: Absolutely. And that's exactly like similar to the Uber taxi, Uber Eats relationship, right? The demand side is coming from the studios and the supply side is also coming, is coming from the players and they're kind of meeting in the middle, and the more studios you have, you're bringing the fans and you're transferring them into basically being in the First Look network.
And then they can potentially be useful for other studios because maybe I'm, I'm building a game that's similar to your game and maybe I have a player that's passionate about both of those games and wants to play both of them, which is extremely exciting. So that's how that network effect is kind of stacking for you guys.
I wanna talk a little bit about the future of First Look. We've talked a little bit about the, the feature set, what you guys provide, et cetera, And because I'm a customer, I also know that you guys are moving insanely fast. All of these things that you've described have basically been built in the past year or coming online as we speak.
You guys are shipping new features. Some of them are small, some of them are big, left and right. And so, I have a couple questions kind of about how you're doing this in a, you know, an, in a scalable way on the internal side. Right. So the first is, how are you striking the balance between white glove support and scale?
So, you have a hundred studios and they may have a thousand questions. And how are you basically helping onboard studios into the tool and answering all their questions in a way that's sustainable for the staff at First Look has? And the second is, is that you're probably at the point now because the studios are very passionate and give you a lot of feedback.
Like someone like myself who was like, where is this button? You're probably at the point where you have to prioritize with a Razor's edge. And so how is the team and you determining what gets worked on next? And is there a way that you measure the value of a feature before you move forward with building it?
Robert: Right. You're very accurately describing like my current job description or like what's occupying most of my mind. I think we only have like, scratched the surface of what we can do for studios and it feels like there are a lot of opportunities for us to a lot more value and, and make the data that we have for you do more stuff and be really cool.
So sometimes we can approach it from what do we have and how can we make the data useful. And rewards is a really good example. When we will release the rewards functionality, it'll work for all studios without any configuration because everything that you may want to reward or that you may want to drive by default, we already have the data.
There's no need for people to go in, sign up for our platform and connect that all, all their accounts. Now they're already onboarded to your play test, right? Your community. So, then giving them XP or points for that, that gets them to do more exciting stuff. If your game it, it kind of comes naturally.
So that's an example where the, the ID or the value is really clear. We just need to build it. And it also has been asked over and over again, and we did some prototypes with customers around this to, to try it out. So that's, I think those come pretty easy. Just like you yourself, if you have a feature request, you raise it.
You're usually not the first, like there are two or three other people who have complained about it or asked about it, and then it makes sense for us to just add that and bring that value. Actually recently we created this a separate, role. Every engineer at First Look one. We rotated every week, but they have the firefighter role.
And, basically, what that means is they only get to work on feature requests and issues that come up during that week. So, in that way, we can guarantee that if you have a bug or if you have something that's easy for us to make, but usually it would fall outside like our roadmap and planning. And because we have a lot of stuff that we wanna build, we are prioritizing a lot of stuff, but it means that sometimes we don't have the opportunity to improve the easy wins that people will share with us.
So, we have someone dedicated for that at any time to just build other small features and improvements. And then on our like, new, newer stuff, it's really a combination of finding new business opportunities. I think our software is relatively cheap, but it's really hard to like turn that into viable long-term business that really, really works and has a right to exist.
So, we also need to explore things that drive like our bottom line. Then we're just looking at other things in the market. Like creators is an example where I think the existing tools and companies are pretty good. But I think we can do it better or make it easier to transition into that. So if you are, another example is your marketing website for your game.
The holdouts. I don't believe you have a website. Like it doesn't make a lot of sense to invest in that. Early on you maybe have a steam store page, you already have your play testing going on. And for us, it, if you're already a customer, you already signed up, you have all your data in there. We own your signup form, we already have a new thing going on with your newsletter.
It would make sense for us to also help you with your marketing website. So those things are really bigger bets. And then we just try to have conversations with our customers and also leads and learn about their needs. But ultimately, every decision we make and everything we build is either super validated, or no, it's always validated.
We never build something without knowing that the market wants it.
Alexandra: Yeah. Well, I mean, it sounds like it's driven by two things, three or three things, rather. Like one, there's like someone just simply asked, right? You had a client that was like, Hey, I really need this. And you were like, you know what?
They want it. The client is always right. Well, that's what we say in the finance world, but the client is always right. And this will take us two seconds. So, I have this firefighter staff that's building these quick things. The second is basically, hey, like we think that this is a feature that is going to meaningfully alter the bottom line of First Look in our opportunity.
And the second, and, and the third thing it sounds like is, hey, like there's these really interesting things that maybe other products are doing, but we have a, there, there's gonna be some synergies here. If we were able to vertically integrate this entire pipeline, so, and then, and if it's one of those three, basically it adds business value, it adds ease of ease of use value to the client, which is basically gonna add also business value and then expansion of the tool set, which is gonna add business value, right? And it's validated. That sounds like it's, that's generally the way.
Robert: That's generally the way, but I think the, the first one, like someone asking you it's not the norm, sadly, that if you have a feature request as a customer, or if you want something improved that the company listens, you may share it.
But as a company, we really need to build a culture and we need to make customers not just know, but feel and experience that if they have a problem, that can be improved by us, that we actually take that opportunity to do so. So we're really, extremely on point. Like if we have a lead or someone that's signing up for a free, free account, you asked about our approach to white glove support.
We, we treat them similarly to like AAA publisher signing up and if they have a feature request and we realize that we can very early on let an experience that we care about what they want from our product and we can solve that within the same day, then for life, we will know if they figure out a book or something is wrong, that they will tell us and we know about it and we can keep on improving it.
For a company, it's not a given that you'll get customer feedback for a game too. Like if you don't let your players feel and experience and know that if they raised an issue or if they raised feedback and you're implementing that on like an adequate speed and you're thanking them for that and closing the loop, we help you do that with First Loop.
Then down the line they will stop giving that important feedback. So, I think that's really one of the key things that we aim for and why did firefighter role exist in the first place.
Alexandra: Yeah. Yeah. It's very cool. Okay. And before we kind of go on to our, our last topic, I have two more questions. The first is, how many people are actually supporting First Look now?
So, if you had to like lay out the org, right? Engineers like the firefighters, right, and then customer success, et cetera. How many people would you say, like are in the First Look nexus?
Robert: Right, so we got acquired by Pragma, at the beginning of this year, and we were just two people then. And, obviously for a lot of the roles that you mentioned, we benefit from sharing that with Pragma’s backend engine.
So, sales and customer support. Um, in total heads, I think we're around 20 people working on First Look now across engineering and business services. But some of that is obviously shared with, with Pragma and it's actually really amazing to get that much resources to work with and like build all these things that we want.
It's the only reason we can do it. But yeah, it's, it's around I think 15 engineers in total working on the product in.
Alexandra: Okay. I see. And then, and we're gonna talk a little bit about Pragma. That's how we're gonna close out. But I am curious, we've talked about so many of the different things that studios need today — play test, support, relationships with creators, analytics, reward systems, things that basically help you grow audience really early. What do you think are, now that we've kind of exhaustively talked about the problem and the First Look platform, what are the risks to this, to, to First Look in the platform?
Like what goes wrong in the game industry, in the gaming market that kind of cracks the thesis of what you're doing?
Robert: I don't think as a, of it, as a realistic risk because everywhere the, the regulations are moving in a different way. But it's, if the more platforms own the relationship with your player, the more it hurts not just our ability, but also studio's abilities to build those direct relationship with players and know about them. So, if you look at mobile game development, they suffer a lot from the fact that there are only two stores and you can only drive people to that specific store. And that removes all potential for you to build that relationship.
And I think that's really key and one of the, the main reasons why we exist and why we want to do, but luckily, I think we're shifting towards a completely different direction where within a year or two years time, maybe the majority of games being released have their own out of game e-commerce, places where they can drive revenue and build their business and are independent on just a one time purchase with a 30% like fee on one of the platforms. That would be like a, that, that would really hurt the gaming industry and has heard the gaming industry. And if trend doesn't change, then that would also hurt our potential as a business.
Alexandra: Hmm. Okay. So, for you it's mostly consolidation around platforms and storefronts. So, like Steam, like EGS, obviously consoles are, you know, there's only three, we only got three options. So, okay. Interesting. I guess what do you, I think one of the things that I was thinking about is a lot of these studios are basically like using this for play testing. And you, there's a, obviously an extremely large generation that's growing up, mostly just playing on the Roblox platform where all of this stuff like doesn't necessarily maybe, and then this is need to exist, right?
So, play testing for example, in Roblox is very simple. You just hit release and you start, I've done it right. It's very simple. How are you thinking about potentially Roblox as a platform and potential and how maybe that would relate to First Look or not relate to First Look?
Robert: I think eventually we'll make a natural transition to supporting that because what we're like, like I said, our, our value is actually rapidly shifting away from play testing.
The play testing is one of the best hooks you have to build community around your, your game. But the, the true fact is that building on Roblox is very low risk. So as a studio, you raise some capital, you build a team, you're spending two, three years of your lives trying to get a cane published. So, you want to hedge that risk and the importance of a product, like First Look in, in your game development is really, really high.
And platforms like Roblox do something really well what mobile platforms do too, the speed of iteration at which you can like build something, release it, and know it didn't work, and learn from that and then try again with something that does work. It's just much higher than the markets. Marketplace dynamics there are completely different from traditional games.
But ultimately they all want to build community. They all have real users and they are, benefits from things like rewards and creators. But I would say that platforms like Roblox have done a much better job at building those things right inside the environment where people play and hang out.
Alexandra: Got it. Okay. Yeah, probably more to unpack there, but we we've got a lot for sure. Yeah. Alright, so in the last 10 minutes, I want to talk about some lessons in entrepreneurship. And so like you said, you have this huge potential to build the, the dream stack for studios when it comes to from the very first play test, signup to purchase to becoming a creator to player behavior and Discord, or across consoles or across maybe social media at some point. And that brings me to my question. You know, you mentioned there's a team of you, and Renee, two people. And recently, the beginning of this year, you were acquired by Pragma.
And so, I wanna know from your guys' perspective of, you know, why do this inside Pragma and what it, what lessons can we learn from entrepreneurship in a very early sale like this?
Robert: Right? Yeah, you're absolutely right that it's a very early sale. We were, it was basically for us the option between spending a lot of time fundraising or continuing the momentum that we already had, and bringing value to studios.
And the reality is that the product we had already was great, but our distribution wasn't so like, we didn't have the sales support, customer support, so that was very appealing. And then the resources, and like PMA has a really well funded company with a solid business. Um, and it would allow us to build out our ambition in a much more exciting and, and compelling way.
And it really was like that. We built it as a side product. We realized there was value. People came very early to us with all, basically our entire roadmap up until this point has been completely driven by feature requests., So at some point you, you want to do right by your customers. Like if we, if we wouldn't put First Look in like the resources that Prema offers, but take the traditional VC funded route or even bootstrap route, we just wouldn't be able to unlock the value that we currently doing.
And I'm not sure what a lesson learned there is, but I, I particularly know myself that if what's making you passionate is getting your product to really show its true value and get it in the, into the hands of as many people as possible and really solve their problems, you gotta make sure that you prioritize how you're gonna do that.
And this model is really appealing. It has worked super well for us. We scaled very rapidly and now we have an amazing team to build super cool stuff with. So that's the story.
Alexandra: Yeah, no, I mean, I think that is the lesson. I think you, well there was a lot for you to benefit from, from Prima's scale engine and because you're prioritizing building the best dream stack for studios, right?
It's, you had a higher chance of doing that and building your goal of being the ultimate CRM for games inside Pragma than outside of Pragma. And so I think that that's. I think to me like at least that's what I hear from you when, when you tell that story. Which means that your North Star is very much the product.
And I think that that is a great lesson and for entrepreneurship. I guess my question other to you is, you know, what do you think Pragma sees in the acquisition that's, you talked a little bit about what you saw from the First Look side. How do you think Pragma thought about it?
Robert: I think it's very simple.
Like Pragma runs the backend of your game that ultimately the vision of Pragma First Look are very similar or they're the same now actually, which is ensuring that games that get built are successful. And you can do that by just doing the backend part of a game. Like you can build the best backend API for a game.
But if the content isn't great because the game or the studio was unable to get feedback early and often and, and build a game that does perform really well and. Stays alive after launch, then what is your backend business worth? So ultimately, there's just this very strong drive to help studios across the whole stack and everything that we can do.
And the type of thinking really translates within First Look too. Like we're not just doing play testing, we're trying to do everything that we can do to help you build a successful game. And that's what PMA is in first, Luke, and why we're building it in the way that we are.
Alexandra: Yeah, I mean, I agree. I think that there's a lot of, there's, it's very symbiotic.
Not, no pun intended, but they are the backend and you guys might be the front end to start people in their journey. Right? And again, there is no backend business if the game doesn't ship or launch on time, and you have a higher chance of having a successful game with, you know, a strong and healthy CCU or DAU if you have a strong audience on the front end, right?
And so, I very much agree that that is the way, I guess, the way that I guess. One would think about it when it comes to this kind of, this kind of M&A.
Robert: It’s also like a very practical level. I'll keep that short, get that one short. If you wanna do rewards like in-game cosmetics or if you want to get better data on what are people doing inside your game, having a backend that has all the data and there's no like overhead for developers to unlock that because we can just integrate that you put in the API key and it's done.
That's really cool. That's super amazing. Like, I wish we could do that for all games.
Alexandra: Yeah, no, it's a, it is absolutely super cool. It's definitely one of the things that, at least from our, my side, I've thought about because we are also private customers and it would be fantastic to know that's somebody on their discord or somebody on their Twitter did something and then we were able to reward them for some sort of player engagement at the account level it was actually something that I spent a lot of time on doing PM work on titles like Cornerstone or Overwatch. And you know, even for us across the, in the battle net ecosystem, we understood things, but you know, if we wanted to run a program that was like, Hey, if you did X in Call of Duty mobile, and you, and then we would do something for you in, in World of Warcraft, that was so difficult for us.
And it was just a way to give value to the consumer. Like if we wanted to do a bundle program or a rewards program or some sort of like, you know, cool tie-in, Hey, if you get this RAR skin here, you'll get this over there. And because none of those ecosystems were connected, even inside three buss of A, B, and K, and Activision Blizzard King, you weren't able to basically make any of those calls.
And, or even, even if you could do it, it was the governance of tracking. It was so arduous that it was like, wow, well we, we can't even go there. But, yeah, so I think I agree. There's a lot of, there's a lot of things going on there. I have a question though regarding maybe the fact that, you know, we're going to less, less about, the product synergies and the business value, but about the people.
Is there anything that you and your co-founder had to change about the way that you were leading First Look or the way that you worked when you were acquired? I'd love to hear a little bit about the integration between two teams and how you now feel as a founder working inside another company.
Robert: Absolutely. Yeah, of course. It's wildly different. Like we build our company on very, uh, indie business style principles. So, uh, no calls, everything. I think you work whenever you want. We're both do extremely high performance, so if something sucks, you can just tell that and it'll get improved While in a bigger, bigger company, filter matters a lot and planning matters a lot.
We can just on a whim, change something or get something done. So, the transition has been extremely. Challenging and interesting. But I think we know, we knew exactly what we signed up for and why we did it. So, it's a transition and a change that we absolutely welcomed and means that we're now able to sign AAA publishers get like all the favorite games that the biggest releases of these years are being, built on our software.
And the games that excite me as a, as a player are now able to use the, the stuff that we built. So, all of that, like all the struggle and challenges in that are absolutely worth it. And like I think inside PMA and the people we work with, we just see like excitement and motivation increase every day just because we get to see all the impact that we're making and mm-hmm the, the customer praise and feedback that we're getting is really, really high. So that, that absolutely makes, makes that struggle worth it because I, myself, I'm, I don't like being a manager. I'm not, not really a people manager. I like to build and I like to think about the product. I absolutely don't mind working with other people. Actually. It's really exciting to get, to build a lot of stuff, but I will forget or not notice that I'm being rude or that morale is important or, you know, like all these nuances to building out a great theme.
Luckily we have people in PMA that are great at that too. But ultimately, all of that does come into play. But it, we are seeing that it's working and whenever every change and every compromise that you, that you do, if you see that it's worth it, then it's easy no matter how difficult or challenging it actually might feel in the moment.
Alexandra: Hmm. Awesome. Yeah, and I think also like there's something that you call into, but there's like, to me I like describe that there's this difference between, you know, sometimes you have to slow down to speed up, , and there's a difference between like speed and, and velocity. And, you know, maybe just moving fast, maybe you are, you're getting a lot of output, but now with Pragma you're getting a lot of output in like a direction that is big and impactful.
Like you said, like some of the world's best games, you know, that are launching this year are being built on First Look software. At the end of the day, that'll be more velocity than even though it takes speed-wise longer to get there perhaps. Okay. So. Um, we're, we're unfortunately basically up on our time and I wanna ask you just one concluding question to close us out today.
You are seeing a ton of studios play test build communities and use First Look in, in probably pretty interesting ways. From your vantage point, what are three pieces of advice you'd give to a studio starting to build a community from scratch? And beside the point, you can't be like, just get First Look, but three kind of topical points that, that you would give guidance on for people that are basically at the beginning of their journey.
Robert: Right. I think it's really essential to start building, like the advice would be to start building community early. I think that that one isn't shared across everyone, or not everyone understands what that means, but that basically your friends and family that you're inviting to your play test or your investors, those are, that's your community too.
Like they are players, they are feedback matters, and if you can get them together. Spin a discord or maybe get them together in a Zoom call or like any place where you can have conversations and learn and listen in, helps you create a foundation on which you can build like your, your game. So that's, that'd be number one.
Really start building that community early on and we help you do that too. And, and the communities or the games that do onboard people to Discord when they sign up for a wait list are doing much, but they outperform the other games in terms of engagement and feedback. So that's number one.
Number two is actually ac actually do listen to your players. I mentioned it earlier, but if you want the best feedback in the world, you gotta show that you care and that you listen to it. And implementing that closing the loop is really, really important. So, make sure that you know what's happening and make sure that you let players know that you care about it or why you don't care about it, and that you build it and, and respond to it.
If you don't do that as a studio, you, you have no reason to hit that launch button. Like if you can't listen to the feedback of your community, if you deliberately ignore it or you didn't build that community in the first place, there's a super big chance that you won't make it as a game. And then the third one is actually rewarding and encouraging that type of behavior and positive behavior in the community, and make sure that people wanna come back and you build that relationship.
And it can be really practical, like sharing a newsletter or an update like your DevLog or any other thing that you can put out there to show what you're building and let people know that your game is still in progress and that your head's down when your head's down also talking to them. If people are making a positive impact or they're bringing in friends, give them more keys to give away.
Like build those, build that flywheel with our players, recognize them. And, yeah, in the end, in the engaged community is just so much more signal than a high wishlist count. And that would be like my biggest like point of advice. Like really, really focus on that community. If you do that well and that works and you have the engagement and the feedback, you would have so much more confidence going forward and you can test more of them, get more feedback, and really get that flag going.
Alexandra: That's awesome. Thank you, Robert. Amazing pieces of advice for your studio and you, listening, take heed. But Robert, thank you so much for coming on. This was such a pleasure. There's clearly so much opportunity with First Look and the value that providing to the gaming industry. So thank you so much for coming on.
Robert: Yeah, thanks for having me. I really enjoyed this.
Alexandra: Fantastic. Yay, me as well, of course. So, as always, friends, this is the end of our show. If you have feedback or ideas, please hit me up at [email protected]. I am always open to Robert's last point feedback. I listen. And with that, we're out. I will see you, guys, next time.
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