GameFounders' Kadri Ugand explains the power of an accelerator

okay it's Pocket game over in hinki for free your play conference we trying to find to finish people but they're finding they're all drinking somewhere but so we found we found found some from Estonia hi what are you doing what are you doing how think you what's going on in Estonian this Estonian game scene uh well the Estonian game scene is just lightening up with different initiatives uh happening there we have uh game Founders already active for a year and now I GDA for a few month so tell us sorry introduce yourself and tell us what game Founders is about let's so um I'm grians and I'm running the uh game founder startup accelerator and uh what is special about us is that we are focusing 100% on gaming startups so we work globally uh with gaming startups from all over the world we have so far reached 47 countries with our applications and uh we have invested in 14 companies from uh nine different countries so it basically works as I

remember you have a 3mon kind of incubation in your offices in Talon Y and you're just about to you just finished your second round about to start your third round so yes what what you you get a lot of applications what kind of what kind of things are you seeing what kind of companies are applying to is it just games guys is it bit different is it um uh yeah it's it's of course it's mainly games guys we do also do gamification so it's a bit of both but the majority is games guys and the majority of that is mobile uh we do get some uh some consoles uh we do get uh quite a few online games as well but the majority I can see the trend moving towards mobile and um usually the kind of startups that we get is that have made a game published a game but are not making money with it so these are the kind of uh startups that we can actually help by bringing them in and uh tapping them into our um 90 plus Mentor Network from uh all over the world as well so what kind of

what does it actually mean when someone kind of has a game I mean how do you how do you kind of get into the next level that's what accelerators do is it taking you to the next level business mind well I mean usually they have a game they have launched it they even at some points have half a million downloads but they're not making money so the first time they come there we have a lot of people that are looking at the game that are seeing the mistakes the first mistake like a basic thing that we have seen with our both Cycles is that nobody's using the metrics or if they're using metrics they don't know how to interpret that and how to make business decisions based on that so that is usually what we do the first week and uh and also you know from then on different uh different kind of advice based on the game but it's uh it's usually just um relatively um even easy things but a lot of things and if you just fix them all then the game becomes more smooth uh better user experience and also turns into a Better Business and are you surprised that I mean Estonia is a

lovely country T's lovely city but you're getting people applying from India and Italy and America and just globally um is that surprise no I mean no because that is our Target uh our Mentor Network is also Global so I think that is how we got into all those countries because our mentors are looking for startups for us and um in Estonia the the market is not that Lively yet we don't have that many Indies so so far we have accepted only one company in our first cycle none in the second so you know fingers crossed for the third because we do want to do something for Estonia as well but um I think it's a really good thing to have a mix of uh startups from all over the world because they also interact with each other during the three months and they help each other and they have different practices and they can also advise in different markets and uh so all in all it's a good thing although the ones the ones from Italy and I have to be careful when they're in Estonia for the winter that was that was a shock for something was um I think it was a bigger shock for the Indians who came

and and saw snow for the first time and we we taught them to ice skate and then we had we had loads of fun with them so I mean it's it's a it's an experience for everybody thanks each