Any eSports fans here? What do you think of these 2 ideas? Any other ones to share?
Hope you could take a quick minute to give some feedback, share initial thoughts, etc. Also, please let me know if there are other players in the game that are doing these already that maybe I don't know about..?
Esports Team Manager - Team management platform for amateur and professional esports teams.
- Manage team roster
- Manage team schedules (streaming, practice, registered tournaments/events, etc.)
- Management revenue streams (sponsorship deals, guest appearances, tournament winnings, etc.)
- Future feature: Ad/Sponsor Finder (announce that your team is looking for sponsors or have stream/website/uniform space to display sponsor/ads)
Esports Ads - Ad platform for buying/selling sponsorship and ad space on your esports stream (Twitch, Mixer, etc.), youtube channel, or other source.
- Create a profile and provide details about your channels, average viewer count, etc.
- Post details about what ad space is available (logo overlay on stream, logo overlay on video (youtube), verbal shoutouts, logo/text on profile/bio, etc.)
Agree with @Janva, start by talking to people in the business and learning about their pain points. How do they make money? How do they spend money or waste time? What could help them make more money or waste less time/money?
After you have a clear understanding of these things, then you should work backwards from that to figure out what product is worth creating and what features it should have. Ideally, you'll have some customers lined up, too, since you would've been talking to so many of them already. You can also calculate the economics of whether or not what you'd build would be financially viable, which is important given that parts of this market are incredibly small.
This process will save you countless months of your life that you'd otherwise spend building something that people might not want.
I can talk about this topic in general a bit before I get to your two specific ideas.
A few years back I built a custom web app for a pretty prominent personality in the Dota 2 scene and he and I kind of tossed around the idea of making it into something more than just for himself and opening it up to more pro players.
The idea never went anywhere mainly because of two concerns I had:
As for your ideas:
The team manager idea I think falls pretty squarely in my first concern above. Very small market so you'd have to charge a lot to justify your time but maybe there's opportunity there in games with big financial backers like OWL.
The ad platform might be interesting if you opened it up to more than just esports but streamers and YouTubers as well.
Thanks for the feedback. I agree with a lot of the points you made, sadly.
As for the ad thing, I think there's definitely some opportunities there but I haven't looked into it much or tried to validate it yet. I'm a bit nervous about it too because I don't know what would be the best approach. There's so many different options for this type of thing:
Charge streamer/youtuber a fee to list their channel, letting advertises/sponsors know they have Ad space or sponsorship opportunities available (doubt they would ever pay for this)
Enable streamer/youtuber to list their channel for free, but have the streamer/youtuber submit their personal contact information (phone OR email -- not public), but charge advertiser/sponsor a fee to get an email containing the streamer/youtuber's contact info. Again why would they pay for this, since they are paying for the contact info but there's no guarantee a deal will be agreed upon with the streamer/youtuber.
two-sided marketplace: charge streamer/youtuber to list and specify price, charge sponsor/advertiser to "buy" the winning bid and I provide a cut of the total to the streamer/youtuber.
I don't know - none of the options sound very great and all seem difficult to implement.
Being the middle man is always tough. I think the big upside you could offer people, with a lot of legwork, would be access to advertisers beyond the five or six companies you seem to always see on streams.
If you were really interested in this I would start by just cold emailing people. Almost every Twitch streamer that pulls good numbers has a business email address listed on their profiles or Twitter bios. I would start by asking those folks how they go about arranging advertising deals.
High end YouTubers are most likely part of a network that handles that kind of stuff for them so I suspect you'd need to target less popular individuals to get good feedback.
Good luck with your idea if you decide to move forward.
I generally think that teams would be interested in getting sponsors & it makes it easy to understand how you get paid.
In general, anything that helps the business get money in the door is a pretty easy sale. Just my .02
It’s a really hard space to be in
The first two bullet points for the first ideas sounds amazing for teams who aren’t even amateurs. What about open It up to anyone? A manager can organize teams and stream links maybe a team page.
Not sure if that already exists though. For league it would have been amazing back when I played.
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