AI is increasingly touching every corner of the games industry, and one of the areas it may have the largest impact on is user acquisition and marketing. Today, host Aaron Bush is joined by Robert Huynh, co-founder and CEO of Reforged Labs, to discuss how AI will transform the way gaming creatives are made, experimented with, and ultimately convert consumers.

They dive into how the world of online content and digital marketing may evolve in the coming years, what Reforged Labs is building to help mobile game teams find greater and more efficient success, and how AI in marketing is a democratizing force for smaller companies. Robert shares multiple lessons learned as a repeat founder, walks us through the technology underpinning Reforged Labs, and we chat about why the future of AI content may not be as dystopian as many fear.

If you want to learn where the future of marketing is heading, make sure to give this episode a listen!

We’d also 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 

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

Aaron: Hi, everyone. I'm your host today, Aaron Bush. And if you've been listening to our podcast over the past year or so, you know that we've been super interested in unpacking what role AI is going to play in our industry.

Some of the discussion has naturally been theoretical, but there have been interesting pockets of real innovation, ranging from incorporating LLMs into games, using AI to accelerate quality assurance, rethinking NPCs, and more. for listening. However, what we're going to unpack today, the intersection of AI and user acquisition may be among the most powerful ways this emerging technology will impact our industry. Less on innovating the games themselves, but more about innovating around and democratizing how consumers learn about the games we make across the internet. And to help me break down this topic, I'm excited to meet with Robert Nguyen, the founder and CEO of Reforged Labs, one of Naavik's new open gaming research initiative partners.

We'll dig into how this market may evolve. Reforged Labs role in this change. And chat about entrepreneurship more broadly. So with that preamble out of the way, Robert, welcome to the pod.

Robert: Hey, Aaron. It's great to be here. And it's great to meet everyone too. I'm a long-time fan of yours.

Aaron: Awesome. Well, I'm super excited to have you on today, and it's a full circle moment of getting to know you several months ago and watching your story and Reforged Labs’ story just continue to march forward step by step over the past many months.

So super excited about this. We will dig into all sorts of details about Reforged Labs and what you're working on and how you see the market across this episode. But I think the best place to start would be for you to tell your story and we can break this down into a couple pieces. And I think first where we should start is just you telling your story about your journey from big tech in school to becoming a first time founder and what you learned from your first company.

Robert: Totally. Yeah, that's a really great question. I'm originally from Texas, born and raised on the Mexican border. And I decided to go into tech because I love gaming.

I started my career off at Microsoft. I was, working in their Xbox team originally in like this leadership rotation program. And fast forward after four years at Microsoft, four years at Google, I realized I always wanted to get back to my gaming roots, having grown up playing a ton of games, I realized that, hmm, this could be something that I could potentially combine with my passion for technology.

But I wasn't sure exactly how to do that. So I continue along, just kind of leveling up, building up my skills. A lot of the things I did in game, I applied to real life. Like for example, then maxing out my stats, try to figure out ways that I could get promoted and leveling up when you join these big tech companies, they give you like these Pokemon levels and of course I wanted to be level 100 and along that way, I realized actually what's the real game that I'm playing.

I'm playing this game of like trying to make an impact. And to do that, I needed to find my crew. I needed to find the right team. I went off to a business school. And after one year at Harvard, I realized that I think I found my team. Why do I need to finish all two years? Let's go do the thing now. So I decided to spend that summer instead of taking my internship with at that time it was right games.

I was super excited to work for my favorite video game company. I decided to actually say like, Hey, let's pause it. Let's do it in the fall. And I decided to start something with two of my classmates. We picked an area that I wasn't that personally passionate about, but I saw a huge opportunity. We were focusing on construction, real estate and the job labor market.

It's an area that I knew we would be able to make a huge impact. But fast forward, I realized that having traction is not enough to sustain you in the long run when you're building a startup, of course, you're going to excited when the numbers are going up, of course, you're going to excited that, like, people believe in you and they give you like tons and tons of investment.

But what I realized is that you needed a combination of like this, like real passion on making a difference. And it took me almost like two, two and a half years before I made the cut and decided to go and form something new. It was painful, Aaron, like my original co-founders, they decided to go back to business school.

I was like thinking like, well, what do I do with my life? And I had came across, um, you know, one of my good friends, we were talking, we were playing video games and we're like, Hey, actually, We're working on different startups. Why don't we do something together? And I think that was like the first like inkling that like, there was something wrong with the old startups that we were working with.

When you start to take all these side hobbies and side jobs and not think about your startup full time, you're like, Oh, shoot. I'm trying to just do things to keep myself busy. And we were trying to make a game, and of course, we also wanted to make money, so it became like a gotcha game. And at some point, we're like, wait, these are the games we hate.

We don't want to, like, create games like this for people. So, the story of Reforged really started with us trying to make a game, realizing that we're AI experts, not game devs. And when we tried to insert ourselves into, like, the game development process, A lot of the game devs were like, Hey, actually, that's the funnest part of our like job.

Why are you trying to take that away from me? And instead we met so much friction. Most of the game studios wanted to build the technology to develop games faster, better, and more fun in house. They wanted to just do it themselves. Instead, when we met one of the founders of a large game studio, King, the founder there told us that actually our biggest problem is in marketing.

And we spend the majority of our budget on making games stand out so that people can discover them, download them, and if we can come up with a way to make that a lot easier, then, hey, he'd back us. And so fast forward, we came back with a prototype. the first time we were like, whoa, he didn't like our vision.

He wouldn't help us, even though he had actually backed my co-founders last startup. We were really thinking through like, okay, how do we earn back his trust? And in that second iteration, when we realized that actually marketing is the area where game devs are not excited to touch, it's actually not as creative as people think it is.

And I know that could be controversial, but a lot of the work in making creatives is actually running variants. And the real creative work is not on the performance marketing side, but on the brand awareness side. And by focusing on these like really manual, really repetitive things, we could actually save them a ton of money.

And so that's what we did. We decided to level up game marketing. And that was the founding story of Reforged Labs.

Aaron: Awesome. And there's a lot of interesting stuff and wisdom to unpack there. I mean, I think the idea of men maxing life could be a podcast, probably a book in and of itself. Maybe, maybe in a few years you can take on that, that pursuit.

It's, it's clever. Also, I mean, definitely understand the idea of traction not being enough and, and sometimes, your shirt says make something people want, which of course is the famous Y Combinator idea, but sometimes too, you also just have to make something that you want, right?

To make it a sustainable multi year endeavor. And so there's a lot of wisdom in that, and I think how you just naturally kind of found your way with the right people into the right idea, into your, your new business. Yeah. It’s really cool and I'd love to before we kind of dig into the details of this market and what you have built, I'd love to just kind of stick to the entrepreneurial tune at the moment and just ask, like, with a timer.

Company number two here, like what have you been doing differently to make it more sustainable for yourself or to make it more sustainable for the team or to just make it more successful in general, like as a second time founder, what's, what's been different for you?

Robert: Oh gosh, Aaron, there's so much that is different, but I'll say the number one thing that is different is embracing failure.

When I was at Google, I was actually on a bunch of different teams. I start off on like our corporate strategy team, helping our CFO roofing through capital allocation. But then second part of my journey at Google was at X the moonshot factory. And that's where the founders spent a lot of time tinkering with these crazy breakthrough ideas with big problems and even cooler tech.

The key lesson that was taught there was like embracing and celebrating failure. And I didn't do that for my first startup. Like Knowing what I knew, having gone through the YCU program, I still made up excuses when things weren't going well, and I was like, oh, well, actually, maybe there was this, maybe there was this, and I kept on going, even though I knew things weren't working.

Or probably like 12 months into the startup, I realized like, Hey, things aren't really going as well as I thought they would. And I was embarrassed by that error. And I stuck with it because you know, that's what brought me to where I am today. It's like sticking through hard work. Like I'm going to be able to figure this out.

But what I've realized is that. In entrepreneurship, it's all about learning and having that like moonshot compost is what we would call it at X having that learning to be able to ship product out faster to build the connections in this network and reach our customers and like find ways to like bring their problems or pain point into a actual product and service.

These are things I'm actually doing now versus like trying to brute force of like hard work. And so the biggest thing that I've realized is like embracing failure, celebrating that with my team so that, you know, when we do something and it doesn't work out, the team doesn't feel bad about it. We're actually like, hell yeah, we validated this thing because it's a real experiment.

Whether or not it works or not, like we're happy with that outcome. As long as we can do it quickly and cheaply every single time you've run another experiment, you don't want to be spending tons and tons of money. You need to be able to get that learning as soon as possible to delight your customers.

Aaron: I love it. So much wisdom in there. And I'm sure I could talk to you for this whole episode about, um, lessons learned and the trials and tribulations and, the wins that come with, with being a founder and working with the team to, to build things from, from zero, but we should dial in on, what you're building right now and how you see the market.

And I think we should start. A bit bigger picture here and kind of zoom in as we go into what you're building, so first let's talk about AI big picture on UA. How monumental is AI's impact on UA going to be over the next decade or so? And I expect you think that you think it will be quite large.

So if so, like, what do you think the most profound Changes are going to be that we’ll experience?

Robert: Totally. Aaron, Ai is here to stay. There's so much stuff happening that it's hard to keep up with. And every single month, there are brand new breakthroughs. This is why, like, this week I'm out in Singapore for the OpenAI event to just exchange and get new ideas from even on this part of the world.

And when I look at, like, how I think about game development, how I think about UA and even, like, entertainment as a player, there's, like, so many different parts to that. There are more and more games being produced every day because the cost to ship out a new game Is lower than ever. You have great new coding tools.

You have great concepts and you have like smart people that are excited to build stuff for everyone. The flip side of that, it's harder than ever to stand out. There are tons of tools to help make your game. There are tons of tools to help you market your game, but there aren't tools to help you actually optimize your performance marketing.

And that's where we saw a lot of our angels spend their money. And so that's where we want to go into and address this area in UA specifically. But to give you a couple of predictions, Aaron, I would say that one, these privacy changes, they suck. It's hard to get precise targeting and the whole industry is feeling that.

With AI, you're going to get a lot more probabilistic targeting. That's going to get way more precise, increasing the amount of personalization that's happening. And you're already seeing that from like the big app platforms to, I would say that creatives is a huge space that's going to fundamentally change and that's the area that we're working on and three is always been a part of performance marketing and the auctioning, the bid spread, like all that stuff, the matching of where advertisers are and where they're trying to connect with players, that's going to fundamentally change.

And for us, we realized that these are all actually very interrelated. Or us, the net new thing that's happening. And the area that we're most excited for as gamers is actually on the creative part and helping games stand out because that's what's going to lead to whole diversity of new games and new concepts that you probably wouldn't see with the fragmentation and the consolidation that's been happening in the industry.

Like, I don't want just another sequel. I want like cool new concepts are coming out.

Aaron: That's awesome. And maybe you can help us visualize like what this change means. And then we can talk about the, the business implications a little bit more. So for example, big social media platforms, for example, where much of this digital advertising occurs where much of, you create an image or a video that might increasingly be AI generated is going to be.

Posted those platforms are going to go through a lot of change where much of their feed might turn more AI generated. Naturally the ads in there will probably become a bit more AI generated. It there might be changed ideas about like how how that could work in in walled gardens I guess where maybe you as a person or injected into the ad in in some way or it maybe is a bit more personalized To you, maybe not across platforms because of all the privacy issues, but maybe inside some, some walled gardens.

I guess my question to you, like in general is like, like, where do you see this going from? Like the user perspective, like as a user who's viewing ads and, , Is on all of these platforms on the internet, like how is there like what they consume like going to change and like impacts, like, like what these ads are, and I totally understand that that's like a big question, we don't really maybe necessarily know it's going to continue changing over the years, but like, do you have a directional sense of like what that might change, morph into?

Robert: Yeah, I think it's a really interesting question. It's not one that I have, you know, immediately have a strong response, as we don't think about it from like, Hey, what are these platforms trying to serve you? But my gut reaction tells me that it's going to be a lot more personalized. These platforms are looking for more engagement.

And AI is already here. AI has been creating fake ads for the last five years. And sorry, I'll correct that. Humans have been creating fake ads for the last five years. AI is only going to help you do more of what you're trying to do and save you time doing it. And so these fake ads that you're seeing are effective.

It sucks because it's changing the rules of the game right now. And a lot of players in the market are adapting to that. So you get like these long drawn out, essentially like a UA tutorial, if you will, because this game doesn't look like what you're advertising when you're looking at your feet in the future.

I would imagine that. It's actually not going to look that different than what people are doing today, except it's way more personalized just for you because of the costs of making content is going to dramatically get reduced. Just like how today we have all this editing post production stuff, even like filters, right?

AI is here to stay. And it's already here.

Aaron: Got it. Yeah. I mean, the reason why I ask is because like what, what ads often are, are a function of what these platforms. morph into and what they end up prioritizing just based on like you create a feed, suddenly you have ads for a feed, the idea of stories is created.

And now suddenly you have ads in your stories, and then tick tock pops up. And now it's like a new type of ad format. So understanding, or at least having some sense of like, where these platforms Are going and like, what's going to be important to them and maybe change in terms of what they feed users, I think probably has a pretty strong impact in terms of like how you would think about what, add products and the ads you're creating turn into, but I guess whatever that turns into, maybe you can kind of help us understand, like, what do.

AI ads or them becoming more AI generated. Well, like what does that unlock for companies that the, that today's way of operating does it. You mentioned personalization in some instances. I'm guessing there's some cost effectiveness, but could you like beyond just like what consumers will see that changes?

Like what is this like fundamentally change beyond just looking at it for, for businesses?

Robert: Totally for game studios. The way I see this playing out is that as you're going to get a lot more personalized when we talk to our angel investors, founders of large game studios, they tell us that they run a lot of ads.

And out of those, like, let's say 20 a week, only one of them is a hero creative. And that's the one that they're going to put their weight behind their budget the following week. But with a lot of ads, you get ad fatigue, you get ad blindness in the player base. And the algorithm starts to devote you and then you got to do this whole thing again.

Imagine instead of like using 20 ads, you can actually have like hundreds or thousands that are more targeted based on different sub segments and sub audiences. You would get a way better experience without having to do very targeting, uh, targeted base, uh, tracking because now you can actually like do large scale experiments instead.

Yeah. Two. When we look at the cost of running an ad, that is a huge barrier for smaller game studios to actually go and run large scale experiments. So those AB tests, those experiments to understand which, creative is most effective, or even which like platform and channels to use. It's prohibitively expensive for smaller studios to get into.

And I think a lot of that is because there's this convenience factor that is not available to a small studio. You don't have a marketing team. You don't have a creative director that's pitching you creative ideas. Instead, it's like you and maybe like two of your friends trying to make a cool game. And so leveling the playing field is something that I'm really excited for what AI is capable of doing.

Looking even further out, you have like new surfaces, like, virtual reality, and I've been a huge fan for the longest time I was a early adopter of Google Glass. I was on HoloLens back at Microsoft. Like, I'm super excited for this, even when it was called head mounted devices, and you can imagine that as you can be way more immersive, you're going to imagine that playable ads or interactive ads from be like super cheap.

The biggest thing holding us back right now is like having like really efficient code that you can run on HTML5 and being able to optimize for all those things like you're just gonna get a way better experience reducing CPI, helping get your game out there without this massive team. And so I'm pretty excited for what AI adds and lock for these companies.

Aaron: Yeah, I mean, I think that's super interesting. And I mean, anywhere you see democratization forces at play usually there's like a, something very big rumbling under the surface that, you know, give enough time is going to have a pretty enormous impact and the way that, that teams operate and give smaller companies a larger advantage than they've, they've ever had to compete more on a level of playing field, as you were saying, I want to talk about, you know, more specifically what you guys are, are working on at Reforged Labs, but I have one more like bigger picture question here that I want to ask you about this landscape.

It seems like every conversation that I've heard where people are talking about AI and advertising, it's always turned a bit dystopian and in its tone where people are a little freaked out by how like personalized it might be or like anyone can create anything and you can't really tell what's real or not.

I'm curious, like how you view this? Like, is it as dystopian as people are saying? Is there a responsibility to, companies across the ecosystem like yours to put in certain, like, best practices that, provide some type of, like, benchmark or threshold that doesn't dupe consumers in some way?

Like, how do you think about this from a, From that lens, because again, every time I, I see this talked about, I'm like, man, like, I, I don't know, it's interesting that everyone takes it down this dystopian path, but I'm not entirely sure that it is as dystopian as, as I've heard.

Robert: Totally. And I would say that this is such an interesting question.

And it kind of goes back to like, hey, how would the social media platforms think about having more AI in our beads? And I think it's really like, hey. This point of view on AI and ads is already here. This is why we have new regulation and privacy laws that prevent us from getting too deep into the way that these ads are being built.

But on the other side of it, I also see the market forces pushing us towards, Hey, how do we get stuff that people actually want? And on a generational level, I see tons of studies showing Gen Z and Gen Alpha really excited for personalized ads. Whereas like other generations, like you're like, Oh wait, that's too much of a privacy breach for what I'm focusing on.

And so this dystopian view, I think, is really different depending on who you talk to. And that a lot of the ads, a lot of the experiences and a lot of the games that you're seeing out there that perform really well are for really niche targeted audiences. And that's just a function of so much content being generated out there that you're able to cover the whole spectrum now at this point.

Aaron: Got it. I could totally see the, the generation point being real, which is not new to AI or this aspect of AI, but is pretty relevant to every technological wave that has ever happened, right? Where, the, an older generation thinks that a younger generation is, is losing, is losing it in some way or going down the wrong path with the internet, they need to go outside and touch grass, like with Fortnite, you know, you should go hang out with your friends and in real life, like this was messed up, like in reality, it's, it's a very natural evolution and doesn't actually break humanity, but creates like unlocks barriers and, you know, just innovates all the way that we can connect and do cool things together.

So I don't know, I, I lean more optimistic. With you, but it will be interesting to see what the dialogue, morphs into over the next decade. But anyways, enough with the big picture. Let's talk about what you're specifically building, Robert. So you talked a bit about the genesis of Reforged Labs, but maybe you can just tell us a bit more about like what exactly.

Are you building, like, what is the product and service? And you know, if there's any more details about like how you iterated into that being your company's focus, I would love to hear more of that story as well.

Robert: Totally, Aaron. And it's a great question because it's iterated. We've listened to customers.

They've told us some stuff and we built new things. Reforged Labs is building effortless AI ads, and the way that we do that is that we've created this creative engine that thinks and analyzes and understands ads and then deconstructs them so that we can get new ads that are being built. That's part one.

What the customer sees is that the new ads that they're building, we structure them as almost like templates. And the starting points are what customers will do. So what we built today, and we just launched our open beta in November is a way for customers to one, pick a template, a starting point for their video ad to upload any game assets that they might have.

Fonts video, like literally just give us anything and our AI will work with it. And three, just wait a couple of hours later, we'll give you your ad. And this is really exciting because when I talked to a lot of game studios, They don't want to write a design brief. They don't want to go through this elaborate process.

If you're larger games to you, this is actually very similar to what you might do as like a UA manager. You would wait for your creative director or your agency to pitch you new ideas. And you would kind of pick from the ones that you have. If you had an initial, initial starting point, you would write this design brief and like pitch this out to them to see what you get back.

We built this process mirroring off of what our customers have told us. And so there's always this like, Hey, how do I get up to speed on the latest concepts? ideating the best ideas to storyboard and kind of get a rough draft of what that might look like. And then three, I ship that off to my creative team.

Those are all areas that I believe are going to get drastically improved with AI helping games to use, get better return on ad spend.

Aaron: Cool. And maybe you can just share a bit more detail about like how the technology works or like, like what you built and how this came together. Would just kind of be cool to get a little peek under the hood of how exactly you're, you're innovating and building with new technology here to enable this.

Robert: Totally. So what I've realized for AI to work is that you need like three big things. One, you need like really good models. We source from the best models on the planet in not only the US, not only in Europe, but we're also looking at like Asia. There's tons of great models that are coming out. And I think China is an area that people often overlook.

With government funding, a lot of the key research over there, everything is essentially open source, and there's a lot that you can learn from the models in the east to when you need to build an AI system, you need great data. And when I was back at my last row at Google, I helped build one of the internal data annotation labeling services.

And so that's like thousands of, contractors that would help label data to teach our self driving cars, how to perceive and see the world, this data that is annotated and label is critical as a proprietary data source in order to help those car, understand what's around them. And for us, we do the same thing with our own video data set.

And so I'll talk about that in a second. And three, you also need to have lots of compute. And so that's more of a commodity service, but being able to source and have lots of funding in order to power compute needed in order to run these models is a big part of what makes AI work. So having the right.

Models data set and compute power is the secret sauce going into our processes. What we have done is that we've created this crazy AI brain. And this creative engine takes the Facebook ad library, the meta creative suite, and basically all mobile game ads. And we ingest all that in, we label it so that our AI has a deep understanding of what's trending on the market, deconstructing the visual elements and the structure of a high performing visual mobile game ad.

When you have that deconstruction, you can now create starting points, templates. That our customers are now exposed to. So now that we have this constant AI brain, that's analyzing the latest trends and spitting out recommendations for different game genres for different customers, customers can now just go and pick what they would want to see.

And wait while their game ads are being delivered to them.

Aaron: I mean, that's, that's super cool, and I'm curious to just, I mean, AI, when you use LLMs like Claude or ChatGPT, there are always these surprising moments where it's like, Whoa, I didn't know you could, you could do that. And then there are other moments where it hallucinates and it's, it's like, Oh, like, how did you come up with that?

Are there certain elements in your own models and process that you're building where, you've been surprised, like very much to the upside about like what the, the AI spun out that just, it wasn't programmed, but it sort of like on its own reasoning was able to come up with like really cool things.

If so, it would be cool to kind of hear an example or two. But then also to just like, like from like your side of just managing like quality control of what comes through and what your clients see, like, how do you think about that? So curious about those two things.

Robert: Totally, totally, Aaron. And so on the first part, when I think about, Hey, what are surprising things that AI can do? It. It's always surprising me, dude, like there are new stuff happening all of the time and what a lot of CMOs told me about ads have really stuck with me. They tell me that the most high performing ads are really surprising.

Sometimes they're basic, ugly, or both, and you really just don't know what's going to work until you run an experiment and look at the data.

Aaron: Yeah.

Robert: And so a lot of those hallucinations, a lot of those things that you'd be like, Hey, actually human would never design an ad like this. That's actually a great thing for an ad to do.

And so we take advantage of that by helping our AI understand different structures and create templates that you may not have come up with as like a human on your own. But often many times our AI is not best suited for the like real creative work. Rather, it's best suited for making variants of your best performing ads already.

And it's also really surprising to Aaron, like when we launched this, we wanted to focus on the smaller game studios. Because we were worried about having characters that were temporally consistent. Meaning that frame by frame, they look exactly like that Mario character, but the larger studios are actually really excited to use a tool like ours to our surprise, because it can help them actually create like a pretty high fidelity, design brief that they can send to their creative team to touch up and make fully real.

As a UA manager, you can now go out there and have this entire analysis of ads. Get pitched to you as potential concepts and you can say like, Oh, I like this. I like this. I like this shortening the cycle needed in order to ship out an ad into just hours or days instead of weeks. So that's actually been really surprising for me.

Aaron: I mean, that's, that's really fascinating how this can be used for small teams to iterate in a way that they maybe haven't been able to do in the past, but it also totally makes sense to me how larger, companies would be interested in this as well, especially over time.

You mentioned that. You're in beta now, and I just want to ask a bit more pointedly, like, who is it for right now? Is it for every company advertising a game? Is it for mobile? Is it for casual mobile? Like, like, how do you view what your, your market is right now and where you're, you're going with it?

Who should be using Reforged Labs?

Robert: Totally. We're excited for mobile game studios. And specifically, we've built our open beta to serve the small, mid-sized game studios. A part of what we've been hypothesizing is that by making the cost of video ad generation go from like 500 to 2, 000 per video ad in the US down to 50 USD per video, which is what we're charging today at a single unit price.

If you buy more, we'll actually give you a discount. We would be able to drastically improve the process of you as a small game studio to getting your game out in front of players. We're going to be able to get these variants in all sorts of formats, portrait, landscape for meta, for like literally any platform that needs to go after.

But we're starting with just mobile because that's where a lot of the performance dollars are being spent. We're focusing on mobile games because that's actually our training data set. No one is going to be able to build this without labeling a ton of mobile game ads and having this creative brain that's able to analyze and come up with new ways for your game ads to be imagined.

Got it. And so that's our initial starting point right now.

Aaron: Cool. And so, I mean, just to make sure I totally understand even what you're saying on the business model. So it's more of a usage based model where you charge 50 cents per iteration, essentially. And so the idea is, you'll scale up your business just by providing all sorts of these companies with more and more iterations to experiment with and increasingly see what works best for them.

Is that correct?

Robert: It's a 50 USD per video ad. And we'll drop down the price if you buy in bulk instead, we've also started doing a enterprise version just because a lot of large game studios reached out. And what we've done there is we started experimenting with like, Hey, let's give them more customization.

Let's give them unlimited ads for a fixed monthly price. And we've even decided to expose parts of our creative engine to help them come up with new ideas. And so for us. Being able to super serve our customer is like a key, key tenant when I was going through YC, I remember Brian Chesky, he talked about this concept of like five stars and getting to seven stars because by default, when you go do like an Uber or DoorDash, everything's a five star, but what do you need to do in order for a customer to give you a six star?

A seven star. And so for us in these early stages, like that's one of the key learnings for us is like, how do we super serve our customers, especially when they're asking us things that we don't fully understand because they're the end user and being able to trust in the process, being able to learn from our customers and being able to delight them like that's a key part of what we're trying to do.

So that's why we decided to actually open up, our open beta to some of the larger enterprises as well too. Okay.

Aaron: Yeah, I mean, that flexibility is great. And just focusing on what customers need and super serving that, as you said, makes a Makes a ton of sense for you guys. And honestly, probably most anyone listening with their own businesses too.

I love that you guys also recently raised a 3. 9 million seed round. So congrats on that milestone. I'm curious, how are you going to be using it? What are you going to be reinvesting in and building out?

Robert: We're hiring. So if, you know, great folks in engineering. And AI in gaming, like we want to talk to them.

Most of that 3. 9 million is going to be spent in getting the best people on our team. Uh, today I've hired like two of my old former roommate’s super smart. I met them at Microsoft. Another one went to HBS as well. And it's awesome because we all used to be in like a ranked team. I know they're not toxic or not too toxic.

And I know that these folks are like really awesome to be around. And so for us. We look at it as like going off on an awesome adventure and we want great teammates, great crewmates to sit, sell the other part of that 3. 9 million is going to be invested into infrastructure. So being able to create a robust like data labeling operation and data annotation is huge.

What I found is that instead of using like a, out of the box service, like scale. ai or like buying like solutions, like label box, they'll help you like create labeling software. We can actually do a lot of that ourselves. And drastically reduce the cost of it. Like instead of like half a million dollar min contract sizes for some of these labeling services, I was like, okay, actually I should just do this myself.

As long as you get the right people, processes and systems in place this is going to be a core competitive advantage for us as we think about taking that proprietary like data side, wherever we go with whatever data models that we come up with, and whatever models that we leverage from the market.

We'll be able to focus specifically on game marketing.

Aaron: Got it. So, I mean, maybe you could talk a bit more, too, just about the, the longer term vision. And so, you just hit beta, you're hiring, you're building up infrastructure, but, like, do you have an even bigger vision of what you're trying to build Reforged Labs into?

And what other parts might that entail over time that people listening could be, Interested in and want to keep watching you guys because of it.

Robert: Totally. I am really excited for just re-imagining that entire UA process and game marketing process with AI. So everything that you have to do from like ideating coming up with the concepts that you might have storyboarding, that like low fidelity prototype that you might come up with.

And then eventually generating that ad is a big part of what we're doing today. The latter part is integrating actually with the performance marketing. A lot of performance is critical to the success of a creative. So like a creative would drive like what 70, 75 percent of a campaign success. And depending on what the goals are, you actually have this like perfect.

You know, objective function that you can start to optimize against. So I can imagine like once you start to this, really amazing performance AI and merge that with this creative AI, you get this like feedback loop. That's going to be like crazy powerful for you to personalize and target players out there so that you can reduce your cost per install and find the most valuable players out there.

Aaron: Yeah, I mean, that's super cool. I'm also curious. Ad tech is pretty complex. It's always changing quite a bit. Think what you're building, and just what a eyes impact in general is going to be, could be, shake things up in interesting ways.

I'm curious, like, how you view your place in this large, evolving industry in terms of, like, who you partner with, who you compete against and, as you just think, like, big social media platforms, you know, are probably gonna create all sorts of tool sets that create random, like, new advertising.

Capabilities like, should they partner with you? Will you compete against them? Llike others like in the ad tech stack or, also helping people, deploy capital effectively and like narrow in on effective ads. Like how does Reforged Labs like fit into this broader evolving picture?

Would love just your view of kind of where you want to be in all of that longer term.

Robert: Yeah, definitely. Aaron. It's a really interesting question. Cause like our team comes from, I came from Google, from Microsoft, teammates have come from Apple and like, When we look at like, the entire landscape, I think it's going to be really exciting brands.

Advertisers are going to spend more with tools like Reforged Labs, and that's awesome for these platforms because they want people to spend more. We're helping them get more revenue.

Aaron: Yeah.

Robert: And by focusing on a specific narrow. Industry vertical. I think that it's very defensible. And on top of that, we know how fast large companies are able to move.

The other part of this is that we're working cross platform. So if you like, look at any of like the MMPs, one of their key advantages. And they're like measurement systems or like their ways to think about like incrementality is that they're not biased, right, their objective, and they're able to meet the customers where there are.

And so these customers are gonna be on every single platform. That's where they need to be to reach their customers. And so by obsessing over our customers, I think we're going to be in a really good shape. , No matter where we play in this industry, because if we're able to help, , media buyers deploy more capital, if we're able to be objective and even like agencies, right, agencies traditionally do a lot of the creative work that we're discussing, they could even be our potential users and lower their cost spaces as well.

And so by partnering and focusing on what we're good at, the gen AI part. I think we're going to be in a really good shape when we look at this entire landscape because it's a really big pie that we're trying to bite off right now.

Aaron: Yeah. I mean, that's what makes it super exciting too. So I'm excited to see how you guys continue to.

Evolve and build, and take over and the years to come. We do need to start wrapping up soon, but I just wanted to ask, is there anything else about Reforged Labs, what you're building, how you think about the market that you want to hit on before we start wrapping up here?

Robert: I think you covered the key points, Aaron.

For Reforged Labs, we're building effortless AI ads, and I'm excited because our best in class team are all AI experts. We're huge gamers and with the right team, with the right process and like the right mission of leveling up game marketing. I think that there isn't anything else that, you know, our audience wouldn't want to know.

It's just reach out. If you have questions, reach out. If you're excited to experiment with AI and your game marketing,

Aaron: Where should they reach out? What's the best place to get in contact with you or Reforged Labs more generally?

Robert: Yeah. Email me directly. So [email protected]. If I'm not responsive within like a day, add in our team alias, hello@, and I'm also still very active on LinkedIn as well.

Aaron: Sweet. Well, that's awesome. Before we wrap, I also just wanted to ask, I know you're super dialed in on building your own business and mastering your corner of the market, but what else are you excited about? Yeah. And the games industry right now, maybe it's other aspects of AI that are making an impact.

Maybe it's just games. You're excited for the holidays to play, but where's your, your head at, um, in terms of what you're excited about beyond your business.

Robert: Yeah. So honestly, I'm a huge trading card game player. So seeing the new TCGP, Pokemon game come out that's been really cool. I'm of course watching arcane right now.

We have no act three coming out next week. And so that's going to be really exciting seeing a League of Legends, my favorite game, go transmedia is huge. And there's of course the new TFT patch that comes on with it. Seeing how arcane, seeing how like even LinkedIn is like adding games into their product, it was just crazy to me.

So I think that it just shows that people are really excited for gaming and that when I was growing up in Texas, It was not cool to be a gamer. And I just think it's just such an awesome thing for the industry to embrace gaming. And have this be everywhere, even like “How to Train Your Dragon”.

It's coming to real life too. And Switch to, there's like so much stuff that's happening that I cannot wait for the future.

Aaron: Yeah. Super exciting times. I also can't wait for the future as well. Well, awesome. Let's go ahead and wrap up here, Robert. Thank you again so much for hopping on. I really enjoyed learning more about you, your journey and everything you're building with Reforged Labs.

And to all of our listeners, thank you as well for tuning in and we'll catch you next time.

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