MegaDev is the software developer behind PLITCH, a PC game assistant for single players. With PLITCH, you can customise the flow, feel and difficulty of thousands of PC games to your liking.
Robert, in 2019 you pitched at VentureCon International. A lot has happened since then. What were the main milestones?
There really was a lot that has happened: with the capital from our last financing round, we pushed ahead with our international expansion. In September 2020, we completed a comprehensive rebranding process from MegaDev to Plitch, which we had been working on for two years. Contrary to everyone's often pessimistic warnings, we went through with it and it was a complete success: we have grown on all levels, there really isn't a single KPI that hasn't gone up.
User growth has skyrocketed, even though users have had to register with us since the rebranding. Of course, there was a strong increase at the time of the change, but the wave flattened out about three months ago. Now we have solidly rising numbers that are in the 10-fold range compared to before, traffic has risen by a factor of 5. We are close to a million users with user growth in the mid five-figure range per month.
We have also taken our team up a notch and have grown from 14 to 20 employees, with five more positions being advertised. So of course I am also very much involved in change management and organisational development.
The industry is booming, gaming itself has arrived in the middle of society. How do you profit from this?
Everyone is playing something, somehow, somewhere. The general awareness of the subject is now very high. Some games nowadays have higher budgets than a Hollywood film. Then the topic of Corona clearly plays into our cards. People sit at home, they are bored, they play games a lot more. These are directly measurable factors for us. In addition, a development on the hardware market plays into our hands: many people are returning to the PC. Among other things, this is because there are delivery shortages and delays in the releases of the new console generations.
Where do you still see further potential for your solution?
There is still a lot we can do to expand and open up entire new markets. On the one hand, this concerns expansion worldwide: we already have very large market shares in Germany, and things are already looking good in the USA. We want to push this further and, for example, bind users to us by further localising our offer. We are currently working on four more languages, which we would like to launch this summer. We also want to integrate more payment options into our platform.
Last but not least, we are already internally discussing and researching the development of further products in order to broaden our product range.
You are also becoming a business angel yourself. What is your motivation and what kind of investments do you want to focus on?
Apart from the fact that the general conditions are right for me at the moment, I don't have the time to start something new myself. But I have an incredible amount of fun supporting others with my knowledge and seeing something grow and "daydreaming" about what you can achieve. I'm good at building up companies. I am often said to have a good nose for simply tackling things and making something out of nothing. For my investments, I am explicitly looking for teams of founders who have a brilliant idea and to whom I can pass on my experience.
Did you already attend a first pitch event as an investor? What was that like for you?
Yes, three in total. Two of them came from the BayStartUP network and another external one. It's exciting to see what's happening in the ecosystem and how many ideas are out there.
You have extensive experience as a founder – how do you get started at being an angel investor?
I was very lucky that some of the business angels who joined MegaDev became personal mentors for me. Interestingly, one angel from the BayStartUP investors network stood out in particular, and I learned a lot from him. I couldn't reproduce the many, many lessons myself, but a good gut feeling developed.
Otherwise, I approach things by looking for a topic that interests me. Only now have I really understood why Harald Wagner always harped on my brief description in the BayStartUP coachings. If it simply doesn't say what I want to hear as an investor, then I don't look any further into the multitude of financing options. So I am really only looking at companies where I see that they can formulate their idea concisely. The clearer the idea is formulated in a few sentences, the more confident the team often is on the way to realising their vision.