The TikTok of Games

In this episode, host Kalie Moore talks with Charlie Blackstock, Co-founder & CEO of Remix.gg, the “TikTok of games” where anyone can instantly play and remix community-built titles. They discuss why instant, zero-install games resonate with Gen Z and Millennials, how AI is lowering the barrier to creation and enabling culture-speed hits, and how Web3 rails can power creator monetization at scale.

The conversation gets tactical on distribution, dives into the possible future of on-chain creator earnings, and how to create a platform for both Web2 and Web3 gaming audiences.

We’d like to thank Neon – a merchant of record with customizable webshops optimized for conversion – for making this episode possible! Neon is trusted by some of the biggest names in gaming and can help you sell direct without the typical overhead. To learn more, visit https://www.neonpay.com/?utm_source=naavik 

We’d also like to thank Lightspeed Venture Partners for making this episode possible! With its dedicated gaming & interactive media practice, the firm invests from an over $6.5 billion pool of early and growth-stage capital. If you’re interested in learning more, go to https://gaming.lsvp.com/.

This transcript is machine-generated, and we apologize for any errors.

Kalie: Hello and welcome to the Naavik Gaming Podcast. I'm your new host, Kalie Moore, and today we're gonna explore the trend of instant games on web and mobile that are thriving, especially with millennial and Gen Z audiences who favor quick snackable play sessions over longer traditional game experiences.

We're also gonna dive into the impact of AI when it comes to UGC on instant games, and how this tooling helps creators build culturally relevant hits. Joining us, we have Charlie Blackstock, who's the CEO of Remix, which is the “TikTok of Games” where players instantly play games built by the community launched just nine months ago, remixed, which rebranded from Arcade in July, already has 1000 games on the platform, 600K users, and 20 million games played on the platform. Charlie, thanks for joining us.

Charlie: Thanks so much, so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here.

Kalie: Great. So to kick off, why don't you start by telling me a little bit about your background and what was the spark that led you to create Remix? Was there a moment when you thought games should be as remixable as TikToks?

Charlie: Yeah. So, my background is, you know, I went to school for finance and accounting like about around 15 years ago. Then around 10 years ago, I really wanted to get into tech and a lot of it was because my older brother, who's my co-founder, Bobby, and I really wanted to make games. And so, we saw all these code schools popping up around Colorado and we both went back to Code School about 10 years ago to learn software, to eventually make games.

And then over that process we actually discovered crypto and got super into crypto and blockchain, like technology. And so, I went and worked at a big exchange called Shapeshift. Bobby had his company acquired by Kraken. So we were both at exchanges for a while. But we always just saw this pull to gaming and we really felt like crypto and gaming made so much sense.

And so we had built a couple products around gaming. And then, around September, almost exactly a year ago, AI started to become like a bigger passion of ours as well. And, we just noticed we were using AI more and more for like our daily life as coders. We were using it to help us write software, and we had this idea of like, what if, what if the next generation of content was user-generated games leveraging ai? And we kinda had this idea around that last September, and we thought it was gonna take a lot longer for this future to get here, but we thought it's going to need a, a couple more years for AI to get good enough to just, to completely write and generate code.

And it's gotten here a lot faster than that. And so anyone's really able to write and generate code. So it really just was this like pretty organic process to get in here and, one of the big things that we were really excited about and, and inspired us was we, we built some of our first games last February, so like a, a little over, you know, a year and a half ago.

And it was like one of the most fun things I had ever done. Like, I, I really loved the process of being the game. It was very fun launching the games and gaming kind of felt like this, like boys club where like if you didn't work at a big gaming studio, you weren't allowed to build games. And so we really disliked that and making games was so much fun and so remix was kind of this arcade at the time. But Remix is really this like passion project for us as well to like inspire people to build games. I think there's like this feeling that you're not allowed to do it unless like you worked at these big studios and that's just not true and that's not really the world we believe is coming. So it's really been something that was an amazing experience for us and we wanna give to everybody else.

Kalie: That's awesome, and we're gonna dive into both the UGC crypto side of things, um, within the interview, but I wanna talk about just instant gaming trends first. So, for our listeners, Naavik did a really good deep dive back in December of last year about just the web gaming market. So, the instant game market is valued at 3 billion this year, and it's forecasted to reach 7.5 billion by 2032. And we're seeing embedded games like YouTube, playable, chat-based mini games attract just huge and diverse audiences. Obviously, we know these type of games reduce friction, and we know that millennials and Gen Z preferred bite-size content, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on what you think and what you're seeing this underlying reason that people aren't playing. I mean, people are still getting five, but the younger audiences want something short that they can do really quick.

Charlie: Yeah, I think there's like some pros and cons to it. I think we're all just very busy, like we all like have this like infinite feed of content being served to us all the time, and I think our ability to want to sit down and take and just consume long form content is kind of just going down and down. And, and that's just been the trend over the last decade. And I think there's some pros and cons of that, in general. And so, I think for us, a lot of our remix was also an inspiration for my brother and I were, we don't have a lot of time.

We have like very little time. We need games that kind of fit into our lives instead of like trying to fit our lives around games. We spent a lot of time growing up playing like World of Warcraft and those types of games. You need several hours to even, like, turn the game on. You can't really just turn it on and turn it off.

And we need something that we thought was more exciting and we did really love a lot of the mobile games that existed because I think a lot of the mobile market today feels so, it, it feels like so perfect almost. It feels like, it's like this formula that every game has figured out, like dopamine hits this flywheels, loot boxes, and it just, every game kind of feels the same in a weird way where like, no matter what the game mechanic is, it kind of just feels like they've perfected these little, like dopamine, it almost feels like a casino like lottery. And so, we were excited by this new generation of gaming where it was unlocked by user generated content and something that I think fits into people's lives really well, which is Remix games. You can play them for minutes or even hours, but they just can fit into your lifestyle. And so that's something that we think is a huge just game changer and paradigm shift into where mobile gaming and gaming has been traditionally. And, and I think I'm really excited by more bite sized gaming content.

Kalie: Absolutely. Okay. Let's shift focus a little bit to the, to AI in UGC and the democratization of question. So I'm not a traditional coder. I've done high vibe, I've done vibe coding. My company is called High Vibe PR, and we've vibe coded like reporting tools, so when I, it's, yeah, it's a lot of fun. And when I was preparing for this interview, I used Remix to create a game about the lock-in trend that we're seeing on TikTok. Are you aware of it?

Charlie: Yeah.

Kalie: And though my prompt was, I just create a game, utilizing this lock-in trend on TikTok. And the prompt you guys gave me was guide an anxious little circle through an endless maze of closing doors and walls, and then to tap to jump between safe zones, which I thought was really fun. And then we were able to customize it. I did it with a team member too, and just to avoid, you know, social notifications, we just like little, like little Twitter notifications. And it was really fun. And we were able to do it in, I don't know, three to five minutes.

Right. And we are actually able to collaborate on it too, quite easily. I, I think that the big picture of this is that AI tooling is changing gate creation when it comes to UGC. The fact that I was able to do this in five minutes as a non-coder is, it's a huge game changer. Right. Yeah. I'd really love to hear your thoughts a little bit more on the big picture of how these AI tools, not just Remix, but broader, are really gonna change who's creating games.

Charlie: Yeah, I mean that's, that's like the big paradigm shift and, and you nailed it, which is you made a game in five to 10 minutes, or, you know, however long that took. And it was, that is the insane, like a year ago that like, that was not possible. AI still wasn't good enough even a year ago to do that. And then the last six months it's gotten so good that you can do that.

And then in the next six months you're gonna do even like crazier 3D games with more, more complexity and stuff like that. So it's, it's completely changing technology in the way that we know it exists when any single person can create software almost as quickly as they can think about it. Where honestly, I think it's gonna be harder and more demanding to make video content.

I think more people are gonna be favoring like software content and you'll be able to make games faster than you could make or post a video on TikTok. And I think that's just where the trend is going. And so, the analogy or like the parallel I draw a lot to is, the, almost like the YouTube or YouTube moment that we had, you know, a decade ago for consuming video content where everything before was high production, high quality.

It took teams of people, took millions of dollars and you kinda have this like everything was a Hollywood movie or a Hollywood production. And then YouTube came along and everything became more casual. It became more freeform. And I think it was one of those things that was hard to see 'cause you're like, why would you prefer this over like this really high produced show?

And it turns out there was. When you unlocked anyone's ability to create and generate content, you just got such a vast variety of like things that were interesting to people and you just had a lot more surface area for people to find niches and communities and content that they found very interesting.

And so, I think gaming's gonna go through that same revolution where everything's been AAA Studios, they've been Nintendo and Blizzard and Activision, and all these like really amazing studios making games. Now when anyone create games, I think we're gonna see a, a total revolution in gaming where people are creating really fun mini games that are dodging notifications or just like whatever idea you might have, you can just bring it to life in a game.

And so, I think that's what I'm really excited about is traditional gaming has become very formulaic, mostly because it's scary to raise like tens of millions of dollars to build a game that no one has seen before. So, everyone kind of falls back onto the proven paradigms. But now if individuals can make a game in minutes or hours that used to take years, like you're just gonna see the entire revolution of like what might be interesting and like just totally new types of games that we haven't really seen before.

Kalie: One of the things that I really love that you guys are doing, and when you can create games so quickly, you really can move at the speed of culture and stress. So I, I saw that one of the Web3 creators, I, they maybe you work with or maybe he just created content. Luke Franks, who big fans of launched a game called, it's just a Ball Carrot.

Capitalize on the viral moment that happened earlier this month when a middle aged woman came, and swooped in, and snatched the home run ball from a kid at a baseball game. And I think this was just such a perfect example of taking that moment, creating a game. I'm sure there was a, a, a viral moment to that, you know, with his great content shared.

And do you have any other examples of fun trends that you've seen creators jump on?

Charlie: So he, Luke, also did another one. When we showed him Remix, the meme at the time was the Ibiza final boss, which was like a guy in a clubbing in Ibiza that had this like very particular aesthetic. And so, he made like a game around that guy where he's like kind of bouncing through speakers of the club.

And I think things like that are just so cool and someone. Someone when the Coldplay thing happened, when those guys they think got caught, Coldplay, someone not on Remix, but someone made, basically made a game where you have like a magnifying glass and you're trying to like find them in the crowd, and that went extremely viral on X. And so I just think games are just content. I think like, right, they've always been, I think, quote unquote like movies. They've been like that type of quality and because they've been so hard to build. But now since they're so easy, I just think they're the next generation of content. Like I just think, you know, as first text, then images, then videos, then now I think games is the next evolution of it.

Kalie: I totally agree. One of the other things that I saw when I was researching for this interview that I really loved, is your fake Game Jam. Around with the pain point of seeing a cool ad and then downloading it and it turns into an entirely different game. Can you tell us a little bit more about the fake Game Jam?

I think this happened and did you see, did you see any interesting projects come out of that?

Charlie: Yeah, we're just going through all the games today actually. So the Game Jam was just last week and something that I've, I love that we do, like the Game Jams are a really great way for you to like, basically have a constraint around creating interesting content.

So, if you're, wanna come create a game and you're looking for something to do, the Game Jams are a cool way where, you know, you get paid or rewarded if you make the most compelling game. And so, we've done Game Jams with NFT communities. We've done, we did stuff with like Open Sea we have a, a couple really big ones we're announcing this week.

So, Game Jams is a cool way for anyone to build content around an IP. But the fake Game Jam was all around the, a lot of the origination of the arcade remix too was. I love TikTok and I find myself doom scrolling and there's always those little fake games and they just are so good at driving you mad.

Like you just like want to try it once or twice. And I was just like, why can't I just play the game instantly? And so that's, that was another thing that inspired us for the Remix, idea, was just the ability to, to swipe their feed and play games instantly. And so, the fake Game Jam was really trying to be like very on the nose about something that I think upsets a lot of people, which is all these fake games you see in these feeds.

And they're very good at like getting to wanna go download the game. And then that game doesn't even exist. Like that video's an entirely different game than the game that you go download. And so, it's this, this thing that I think is really maddening for consumers. And so, we wanted to like. Say the quiet part out loud, which is these fake games, like they're really good at like wanting you to come play 'em.

And so, we just wanted to do a Game Jam around making those games real and getting people to come play those games somewhere. 'cause we see them all the time and they're not actually playable. So wanted to solve that problem.

Kalie: Awesome. Okay. Let's shift gears a little bit towards the kind of more of the UGC and creator economy.

So I, I would love to hear a little bit more about the revenue model of Remix, and I don't think that you guys are doing creator earnings yet. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that's coming in your pipeline.

Charlie: Yeah. So technically the creator earnings have come through the Game Jams, um, and things like that.

Our top creators have all made tens of thousands of dollars through these Game Jams already. So they're, they're doing very, very well compared to, um, a lot of people, especially since a lot of these people have never even made games before and have made tens of thousands of dollars in the first few months.

I think it's, I, I'm really proud of that because it's been a really cool way to like, pass through a lot of revenue that we're bringing in as a company through the Game Jams, 'cause we usually do big partnerships to bring those games to life, but the creator monetization, I think, is gonna look pretty similar to I think a, so a traditional social network.

And so, we definitely are leaning more towards like a X platform re revenue, where if you just create the most successful games on the platform, you'll receive a large percentage of platform revenue to you. If you just are creating viral games that take up a lot of attention, we want those rewards to feel very automatic.

And similar to like, if you're just, you know, monetized creator on X. I think it's a really cool thing that they've done is just make that so simple where every couple weeks you just get a paycheck because you've made something compelling. On top of that, um, we will be launching basically like customizable storefronts and shops for games, and so when you launch your game, you'll have the flexibility as a creator to create items that you can buy or sell, trade, any of that type of stuff.

The reality is, the thing that we're, we're working really hard to figure out is. A lot of these things are mini games and are meant to be maybe only fun for a couple of times. And so, we don't want every builder to have to figure out how to make a storefront and manage I all the items like those are, that's not really matched up with like the use case of our games.

And so, we wanted a monetization that was very similar, sim, similar or seamless. And, I think it's like more akin to like a Twitch subscription or a YouTube subscriber more so than a, having the every creator need to build out an entire like mini game with storefronts to be monetized. We really want every creator to be able to monetize very, like, very quickly.

And like one of the main reasons for that is one of the top games on the platform is called Geo Crush, and it was actually built by my sister. And so, I wanted something that like is works for her. And so, we've explored a lot of our, things like people launching tokens and like all that stuff, but that stuff, it scares me a little bit when I have, you know, creators on the platform that don't know anything about crypto and I don't want them to have be like, well, what's my market cap? Why am I managing market cap and trading volume and all that stuff? I just would love to get paid by people who want to pay me,, in a way that feels very seamless.

And so, that's a lot of like what we're trying to balance right now is like making it very easy for the creators that are building very simple games, but then also give the depth if you want items and inventory and stuff like that. Give them a way to do those things.

Kalie: That's great and I'd love to hear a little bit more about your distribution.

So, as I told you, I made the game on Remix, but I didn't go further. Like when I was checking you out, it looked like could I immediately kind of port the game that I created to like a Telegram mini game? How does that work? I know that there's talk about you joining like the Coinbase app too. Is that Live now?

Charlie: Yeah, all that's, I think that's one of the coolest parts is when you launch a game, it's immediately distributed to all of our platforms and so we're available on Telegram, World, Forecaster and the base app and our mobile app, which it we're make like announcing very soon, but it basically is alive instantly on all those platforms, which we think is just really cool because a lot of our builders are from Forecaster and they don't even know about World, and some of their games go viral on World App.

And so, it's this really cool way for builders who like don't even know that we're even necessarily on that network, but they're getting gamers from a network they're not even aware of. So I think that's something that I'm really excited about is you get distribution from all of our platforms just instantly by, by making a game on remix.

And so, it's something that we're, we want to keep pursuing. We're looking into like, even more interesting things like getting things on Steam, which is like the biggest PC platform where we'll have our, our own native STEAM app and your games will now be, you know, deployable and, and, and instantly available on Steam.

And so, we think distribution. It is just about casting a, a wide, wide net. And that's what we're trying to do is just like try to have remix be available on any platform where, where we believe there are gamers. And then for a builder, all you have to do is just build a game on remix and then your game is available anywhere.

Kalie: What platform is the most popular right now?

Charlie: Uh, so World App and Forecaster are the two most popular.

Kalie: Interesting. And how does that compare to Telegram? Is it like significantly higher? I'm just curious,

Charlie: There, it just depends. Telegram, we haven't done any marketing on Telegram. Well, we've, we haven't really done any marketing in general.

It's all, it's all of our growth has just been word of mouth, and just being on these, these networks. But, I think the Telegram’s definitely the biggest. Telegram is the hardest to grow in because everything's a little bit more isolated and a lot of the ad networks and some of that stuff feel pretty shady to us.

And so, we love, we love, we love that we're on Telegram because we spend a lot of our time, time on Telegram. It's easy to share games and play them instantly, but it's. it is just a hard network to grow on 'cause there's not like a social feed or like a network to grow there. So, we've had more success on Forecaster and World because there's uh, you know, World has an app store that we can get featured on, and Forecaster has like a social graph and a social network to get, be visible on. And same with the base app.

Kalie: Yeah. Okay. So, I wanna switch into a little bit more, uh, web3. Yeah. So when token, getting on that one, but I love to hear, I mean, we've talked about the creator monetization and what that looks like, but is the plan to, is the plan to add a tokenization component to the monetization for creators in the future?

Charlie: Yeah. A hundred percent. So, the tokenization is gonna be, the tokens will be a large part of how we monetize and reward creators for everything. Like I think the big thing that we feel like is something we've learned as being engineers is monetizing and sharing revenue with a large user base is incredibly difficult in web2.

And this is like some of our past businesses where we wanted to help content creators be rewarded. Having them set up a Stripe account or business accounts and doing pass throughs with credit cards and chargebacks. It's just really a nightmare. It's, it's really like quite remarkable. It's as big as it is because of how difficult it is to build reward systems at scale to thousands or millions of users. It's a really, really challenging thing on, on web2 monetization rails. And so that's just something we think web3 is perfect for. And so, we want a system where all the spending and rewards are in tokens, and all that stuff can happen automatically through smart contracts to build rewards and incentives on our platform.

And so, as a creator, you'll be able to actually create items and like NFTs and assets and you'll be able to do that all with just vibe coding. You don't need to actually know how smart contracts work. You don't need how to do any of that. We'll do all the on chain stuff for you, for your game. And then the cool part about that is all the marketplaces and all the revenue.

It makes it super simple for us to pay out creators and reward creators. And then when we launch our own platform token, the thing that makes it really cool is we'll have things like buyback and burns tournaments and a lot of stuff that takes like small percentages of all marketplace and those fees, they'll go to, you know, creator rewards, buy back our token to, basically, supporting prize pools and tournaments that happen automatically. So those are all things we're really excited about with the tokens. It is just how seamlessly you can program the money moving through the system. And so that's, that's what we really want to do. I think we're definitely exploring other things like creator coins and things like that where people can invest in like what we're gonna call, what we basically call studio tokens.

So, allowing people to invest and speculate on the best builders in the platform. The reality of that is we have just been playing that a little bit safer. Again, I think the, the biggest use case or the biggest issue with us launching that stuff too soon is we have creators like my sister and people like that who we really wanna help monetize their product.

And having them launch their own tokens is just something that I think is a little too, I think it's a little too difficult for them. Like, I just think that's like not the world that they're used to. And I think that's something we wanna make even simpler than even launching a token.

Kalie: One of the things that I liked about your platform was obviously there was the option already connect your wallet, but I found it also to be very web2 user friendly.

Like, of course there's, it's, I mean, we know who your ambassadors are, right? The platform distribution platforms, you're on it, but it doesn't scream like web3 crypto game to at all. And do you wanna keep that balance moving forward? Or do you see yourself, like once there's a token launch really going more into the web3 world or will you still be a place for web2? I don't even wanna say developers. Game developer. We can say that.

Charlie: Well, so it's funny, I mean, we launched Arcade. Arcade was really gonna be a very crypto forward product. Like the Arcade was meant to be like almost a Forecaster. Only every game was gonna have its own token. Like, so every game was gonna have its own coin that had its own market cap.

So, like the buying and trading was gonna be as much of a part of the product as just playing the games. But Arcade just really took off. And the thing that like made us most happy was like. The amount of dms and stuff I got from people being like, I just created, I got, I got these from two separate people.

He is like, I just created a game with my child. And it was like one of the best bonding experiences we've ever had. And like now that our games been played tens of thousands of times or hundreds of thousands of times, like, this dad's like my daughter comes home and checks the stats every day to see how many people have played it and all of this stuff.

And so, I think the reality is, is I think Remix, there's, to me, there's a very obvious gap in the market with AI and the fact that people can vibe-code and build games, and then there's not really a home for those games yet. So, to me, I think we pivoted away from being a hardcore web3 product into something that we feel like is just a great product and we wanna leverage web3 for what we think it really excels at, which again, is like these reward systems moving to money and having like a global user base and monetizing the global user base, which is very, very hard to do in web2. So, I, I think there's a chance where similar, similar to like mythical games and some of these other things where you can have like pro sumers or people who are really graduate into like, you know, the online marketplaces and the buying and holding is speculating on assets within our platform. I think there's gonna be a room for those types of users in the future. But the other big user cohort we're going after this fall is students. And so, like high schoolers and college students, we think Remix is just a, an amazing tool and something that we think can grow really fast.

And so, we don't really want kids launching their own tokens and launching their own marketplaces. We really want, but we want them to have ability to monetize their games. And so that's like, I think the weird place that we're sitting in, which is we love all that stuff, but we just don't think that's the best use case for remix at this time, which is like, we just want it to feel more web2 and leverage web3, for monetization rails.

Kalie: What percentage of users have connected a wallet, would you say are like OG web3 user?

Charlie: A hundred percent. They're all, they're all wallets? Yeah.

Kalie: Wow. Okay. Interesting.

Charlie: Yeah, so I but it, it is funny 'cause so every, everybody has been, it has come from web3 mainly, 'cause again, we're on Forecaster and we, we, we, I market on Telegram and some of these other channels we marketed through Telegram, our Telegram networks, which are all crypto natives.

And we are doing like a pre, we're still like pre TGE, so we're still getting a lot of people who want to, to farm points and those types of things. But, it, it's one of those things where I thought we were only gonna have crypto native audience, but then all of a sudden a lot of people who made games, they wanted to go share with their friends.

And so, I think a lot of these people have their friends downloading Forecaster, Telegram to go play games. And so, like even my sister, Forecaster is her most used app every week, but she's only using it to play Remix like every day. So, she's just using it to launch the mini app and play the games. And so, we're hoping that our mobile app is actually gonna convert even more people on web2 'cause that's been the biggest broken part of our flywheel for really growing even more than we have.

It's been like a hard hurdle for people who aren't in crypto or, or who are not already on these apps, is if they want to play Remix, they've had to go download Telegram and then open the tele or the Remix bot, where now they can just go download the Remix app and start playing instantly there.

Kalie: When will the Remix app be live, and is that a big part of how you're gonna be targeting students this year?

Charlie: Yeah, so the app is officially live on iOS. The Android version should be coming out in the next month or so, and so I'm really excited about that 'cause that was, again, like a, I feel like a huge broken part to like our growth system was there's a lot of people that we wanted to attract that aren't necessarily in crypto or have these other apps, and we felt a little dependent on those ecosystems.

So, our iOS app is live and we're gonna be making a big push for that iOS app on schools and campuses and, this fall 'cause we really wanna start attracting younger audiences and younger, you know, students. And not only do we think Remix is just a really cool product for them, but we also just believe vibe coding is such a good skillset.

Like I do think it's like one of the more important skill sets to be learning is like using AI, prompting AI and like I, I think that's gonna be something that students are very, very good at. And so, if it's something that I'm also excited about is not only gonna be making games, but also think they are genuinely gonna be learning a skill set that's very valuable.

Kalie: Absolutely. And I saw that you've done some big partnerships with like web3 brands, like doodles for instance. Are you also exploring partnerships with web2 specific brands?

Charlie: Yes, we have, we have some more very big web3 brands we we'll be announcing soon. And we're in talks with like one of the biggest web2 brands in the world right now to do some game jams.

So that one I'm fingers crossed. It's still early stages, but like we're in in talks with like brands that I, I honestly can't even believe we're, we're talking with. Like, it's something that when we were brainstorming this idea a year ago, we were like, wouldn't it be crazy if X, Y, Z wanted to partner with us to like, build games and now we're in talks with 'em.

So I'm, I'm really excited about that. And, but we, we believe this is more than just a web3 partnerships 'cause a lot of these games are just content. It's just interactive content and there's no reason for them to just be web3. That has just been our go to market with the game Jams, but we're really, really excited by the potential IP and brands we're bringing onto the platform.

Kalie: Nice. All right. And then I have one last question. So what do you wish someone would've told you before you started building a company at the intersection of AI games and crypto?

Charlie: Oh, man. There's, there's been a lot of, lot of painful lessons as a founder. I think the most important thing when you're building that any intersection like this is not trying to be distracted by the shiny, the shiny toy. Like there's always gonna be a project that comes out that seems like it's an overnight success and maybe is easier than what you're building, or like there's just. It's so easy to get distracted by like the meta, like it's so easy to be like, oh, I need, we need to launch a do fun launchpad, or like, now we need prediction markets in our game 'cause that's what everybody's doing and they're doing really well. And I think it's, it's very easy to succumb to like the shiny car and as a founder, and I think the reality is you need to have a lot of faith in what you're doing. And that even if it's, you know, this is an old Steve Jobs quote where you need to have faith that what you're working on, like the roads are going to connect in the future. And like even if you're going off the well run path, like you need to have faith that what you're building is going to be big and that you love what you're doing and to not be distracted by what everyone else is doing.

So I think that'd be my biggest advice is if you're building in this space, which is have conviction in what you're building and don't, don't let someone else's success, success near you be like, distract you from what you want to do. Although I do think it's important to keep an eye on like the markets and what people are enjoying, but like, don't, don't succumb to the what I think,, very oftentimes it's like very short term success in, in crypto, a lot of these things, products don't have a lot ton of longevity.

The meta moves on very, very quickly, and so you gotta have some faith in what you're building that even if you know there's some shiny cars driving by that you'll catch them at some point.

Kalie: And then to wrap up, is there anything else you'd like the Naavik audience to know about Remix or anything exciting coming that we haven't discussed?

Charlie: Yeah, I mean, I think, I think we know we've been around for nine months, but I think the mobile app is, is kind of the steal phrase from our friend Jesse Pollock. A base is like, it's kind of a new day one for us. Like if, if we've been building a lot for over the last nine months, we feel like we've built something pretty incredible, as far as I know, we're still the largest vibe-coding gaming platform in the world. Even if we're just on these other mini apps and, but the mobile app is really, feels like a fresh start and like a whole new reimagining of everything that we've been building over the last nine months. And so, I think there's really never been a better time to get into our product.

And I think the mobile app is awesome and if you've ever wanted to build a game, I just really don't think there's ever been a better time to explore this creative outlet. And it's, it's just an entirely new world that we're entering into with AI generated software. , It's still in very early days and I just would encourage everybody to check it out and also to be persistent, like this stuff changes so quickly that like, if things were hard now, like building a game was too hard or you didn't like it, check back in again in a few months 'cause it might be completely different and way easier.

So, definitely check us out. The mobile app is live, and we'd love to get your feedback.

Kalie: Awesome. Well thank you so much for your time, Charlie. We really appreciate you having you on the podcast and we look forward to building more games.

Charlie: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

Kalie: Awesome.

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