Mark Flood CTO / Founder of Origin.gg

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:01) Today, we are talking to Mark Flood, the CTO and founder of Origin, a company in the esports space. And we discuss identifying and bringing value into a market, the billion-dollar growth of video games as a spectator sport, and how Gary V is sometimes my spirit animal. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:27) This is the Modern CTO podcast. So you're going to be a platform that's going to allow people to sell their esports. Explain this.

(Mark Flood at 00:00:47) Yeah. So if you're creating an esports organization and, sorry, I'm going to assume you may or may not know much about the space as a whole, but I'll assume that there's at least some knowledge there. But basically, if you're going to get into the space and you're going to create an esports organization, it's really, really hard. It's just basically like starting any other business, and there's lots of aspects to it.

(Mark Flood at 00:01:08) So in theory, if you wanted to start an organization, you would be recruiting players and competing in events all across the country or all across the world, and that should be your prime focus. Unfortunately, there's a lot more to it than that. You have to engage with your fans, you have to create a website, you have to manage your social profiles, you have to create graphics, you have to manage flights, you have to manage sponsors. You have to do all of these other things besides the core competency. And so the overall premise for Origin is to take those things off the plate of people wanting to get into the space and to handle that for them. So we have our short-term plan, which gets us into the market and is really not that complex or sophisticated.

(Mark Flood at 00:01:54) And then, of course, over time, we've got our larger long-term goals. But in short, the idea is to allow someone to set up their esports organization, take a load off of their plate from having to deal with all of the other stuff. And then, that's one part of it, right? That's the organization side.

(Mark Flood at 00:02:16) Then the kind of LinkedIn component, if you will, is for individual players. So whether you're a streamer or an actual competitive player, you can create your profile and have that be your home base, for lack of a better word, so that people can discover you. So for example, if I enter an esports team, I don't really have too many places I can currently go to to recruit players. Well, this platform, if you've already set up your team on it, it's going to be really, really easy for you to search and network with individual players to perhaps join your team. Likewise, if you're a sponsor looking to get exposure in the market via sponsoring players, you can also use our platform to browse through our network as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:08) Okay. So I'm trying to wrap my head around this esports thing. I'm going to give you some of my experience here. Big gamer back, I don't know, fifteen years ago. I was playing on Xbox Connect before Xbox Live.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:22) Right? I don't know if you're familiar with that, but we had all—

(Mark Flood at 00:03:25) Oh, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:25) Okay. Cool. Cool. Cool. So I was in it back then, and then Xbox Live came out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:32) And then I got on Team Compete, and I was playing Rainbow Six Three, Call of Duty, those types of games. And my—yeah. I can't remember some of them, but, man, they were—I'm sorry. This is nostalgia just happening to me. I'm at a loss for words.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:48) All of these things—I can still remember some of the maps of these games. It's like, oh, you got to hide behind the embassy. If you dig there, there's a glitch. Oh, so, so great. So all that's flooding my brain right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:58) But we would compete with each other in that fashion, then Team Compete. And then eventually, way late to the game, Xbox actually came out with some sort of team management systems inside of some of their games where you could join clans and do all this stuff. Is this kind of what we're talking about? Like, these teams of players?

(Mark Flood at 00:04:15) Yes. To some degree. So, interestingly enough, I actually just gave a quick lunch and learn on the space as a whole. But to sum it up as briefly as I can, basically, what's happened is a competitive scene has developed. There's lots of reasons for that, but the probably most important one is the proliferation of broadband internet.

(Mark Flood at 00:04:39) And so now you're starting to see games be specifically made for competition, and then you're having leagues be created around them. And so most recently that probably gets the most media attention is the Overwatch League. Have you heard of Overwatch? No. So Overwatch is an Activision Blizzard game.

(Mark Flood at 00:05:02) They launched it probably eighteen months ago, and there's already a league in place for it. The game was built specifically for competition, and the franchises were sold for $20 million a piece. I think there was seventeen franchises sold. So these teams are—you know, metaphor would be a pro sports franchise. They are out there and competing in these leagues and creating content and building up fan bases and interacting with the gaming community.

(Mark Flood at 00:05:36) And so the marketplace as a whole is just exploding at an incredible rate. In fact, I'm going to email you right now the pitch deck. There some of it won't make—not a pitch deck. Sorry. Just the presentation I gave.

(Mark Flood at 00:05:52) A lot of it won't necessarily make sense because it's meant to be talked through, but it'll give you an idea. And there's at least some images that will provide some context for you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:04) So these—basically, it's just exploding from what it was. When I was experiencing it, I was just baby version of it, and now everyone's becoming—to be an esports individual is to play competitively games. Correct?

(Mark Flood at 00:06:22) Correct. And to take it a little bit further is that, you know, to officially have that title, you probably need to actually be competing in legitimate events, you know, where there's a prize pool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:34) Okay. So here's where it got me. Here's where it threw me from my intro into the industry back out and then looking back on it is—esports was directly tied to sports-only games in my head. So that was my bad, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:50) So in my head, the only time anyone would use esports is when we're playing Madden or something like that. So I'm like, wait. Is this just like football? And then people keep using the words leagues, and I'm like, wait. Because the stuff I don't play—sports games.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:01) Sorry. I'm not interested in them at all. I am a first-person shooter guy. That's what I do, right? So when you said esports, I love that it's referring—the term has matured and grown and adjusted, and now it's referring to anyone who's playing digitally. Is that correct?

(Mark Flood at 00:07:17) That's correct. And, actually, it's so funny you talk about the sports games because there's kind of two factors to it. One is PC gaming versus console gaming, and that is its own little section of—you know, PC gamers kind of hold their nose up at console gaming to some degree.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:38) Oh, I'm in there.

(Mark Flood at 00:07:40) Yeah. Likewise, the people who play League of Legends, DOTA, Counter-Strike, Call of Duty, Overwatch, the actual technical esports titles also kind of hold their nose up at those guys who play sports games as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:57) I love how diverse it is. It's just like life, right? Like, everybody segments, and then they all—my way is better. So it's super interesting how they all are falling under the—and I love how money has gone into this. Like, I love that we live in a world where this is a thing.

(Mark Flood at 00:08:16) Oh, man. It's not a little bit of money either. It's a whole lot. So I just shot you the deck for the presentation I gave. You don't have to go into it in detail, but I think the second or third page in it is a picture of Madison Square Garden.

(Mark Flood at 00:08:33) That was the League of Legends championship, sold out in four minutes. The entire arena is sold out to watch these kids compete.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:41) Whoa. Just to spectate.

(Mark Flood at 00:08:43) Correct. There's way more spectators now than there are players.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:47) Yeah. When I started playing around with Twitch and I noticed this is a phenomenon for me—the spectator concept and why, you know, at the same time, I would sit there and play games all day, and people would sit on the couch and not play and watch. But I'm a player, man. I'm not a spectator.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:04) I'm a player.

(Mark Flood at 00:09:05) Absolutely. And Twitch, man—Twitch has just got—Amazon bought them for a billion dollars maybe in 2014, I think. And talk about a steal. Twitch would probably be at least $5 billion, if not 10 or 15 by now if they were still a standalone service.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:22) I saw one of the services—they stopped because of they stopped taking Bitcoin because of all the issues with the increased transaction fees and stuff like that. And I think they switched to Ethereum or Litecoin. Does Twitch accept any of the digital currency?

(Mark Flood at 00:09:37) That's a good question. So I only subscribe to one channel on Twitch. And in fact, that one channel actually—the guy, he's probably one of the most popular—he is the most popular streamer on Twitch. He just had this breakdown on his channel and—he basically admitted to infidelity and took his stream down.

(Mark Flood at 00:09:58) So now I canceled my subscription, but mine is just set up with a credit card. I'm not even sure if they accept—I wouldn't be surprised if they accept Bitcoin. I think Amazon accepts Bitcoin as a whole, so I'm pretty sure that probably works.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:13) Is crypto a big way to communicate value or exchange value in the esports world?

(Mark Flood at 00:10:20) You know, it is, but I would say it's only marginally more widespread. Like it is more widespread than just in the general population, but not that much more. I think there's kind of a misconception that if you're involved in esports, you're more technical. Really that's—I have found that not to necessarily be the case because, you know, just because you're a gamer doesn't really mean that you're into all things technology. You're typically just into building a really awesome PC with cool components and making it look cool.

(Mark Flood at 00:10:56) And so there is—there's a ton of potential use cases in esports for crypto, just like there is for use cases in everything. But it's probably a little bit more widespread in the gaming industry, but not much.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:12) Interesting. Yeah. Because, I mean, when it comes down to it, sports are your ability to move your body, right, and synchronization with your other body parts. And there's no computer code or anything super technical about that. You can move your body to kick a ball.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:26) You can move your body to press a button. Right?

(Mark Flood at 00:11:29) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:30) Yeah. Look. I hear it. It looks like—I'm opening the PDF you sent. It looks like close to a billion dollars in esports revenue streams globally.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:38) That's going to kick up a lot.

(Mark Flood at 00:11:40) Oh, yeah. On one of the slides right before that, I just made up a graph. I'm like, we love up and to the right. You know, I mean, honestly, you can just put a generic hockey stick curve for basically everything.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:52) Oh my god. Your handle's Cash Flow. Yes.

(Mark Flood at 00:11:55) Yeah. It's kind of funny. It took me a while to fully commit to that, especially—you know, I'm going to send my email to a really sophisticated investor at, you know, Andreessen Horowitz or something. And they're going to be like, wow, this guy is an idiot. But you know what?

(Mark Flood at 00:12:10) I went—I said, look, I'm in the gaming space. If someone doesn't like that I use my gaming handle as my email, well, then they're probably just not a good fit for me anyway. But, yeah, I went all in. And some people call me Mark in real life, but on the internet, it's Cash Flow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:28) No. That's awesome. And, honestly, you know, you have to stand out and differentiate yourself. And if you can do that without negatively affecting your brand, then it's usually a good differentiator, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:39) So you're—it's not some sexual name, right? It's not some sort of offensive name. And, actually, if I'm an investor and I'm going to invest in any gamer handle ever, I want the guy whose name is Cash Flow because cash flow is on his mind. He wants to generate revenue.

(Mark Flood at 00:12:55) Yeah. What's so awesome is on Instagram, I have that name with no letters or numbers or anything. So I get randomly tagged all the time by just, either people misspelling the real word or whatever. But, you know, it's—I'm still amazed that I have it on Instagram without any letters or numbers, right?

(Mark Flood at 00:13:18) It's really hard to do now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:19) I know. It's like how Gary V has Gary. It's like, oh, you like him?

(Mark Flood at 00:13:23) Yeah. I do. I—you know, it's probably impossible to be paying attention to social media today and not have stumbled across Gary V. Yeah. And so I do like him.

(Mark Flood at 00:13:35) I mean, if anything, golly, the guy is—he puts out a lot of content, doesn't he?

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:41) He puts out a lot of content. You apply any of his heuristics or ideas to what you're doing with esports?

(Mark Flood at 00:13:48) Yeah. Absolutely. I think one thing that—you know, I don't know that I inherited this from Gary V, but he probably reinforced it, is that I've always been kind of a grip it and rip it guy. And so, you know, I will think about something for a little bit.

(Mark Flood at 00:14:10) And then if I think it's a good idea, I am going to do it. I have a severe bias towards action, which, you know, sometimes can be detrimental and not the—you know, it definitely can hurt sometimes to be like that. But, you know, I will get into something and go full speed ahead pretty quickly. So, you know, he kind of emphasizes that as well. And then I'd say the other thing that I kind of get reinforced from him is that, you know, I don't really have any natural talents or abilities.

(Mark Flood at 00:14:43) Like, almost everything that I do or that I might even be considered good at, I really had to grind to get it. And so I'm a big believer in one foot in front of the other, and you don't stay the same. You either get a little bit worse or you get a little bit better every day. And so, you know, repeated pounding at the door is something that I really hold to, right?

(Mark Flood at 00:15:12) I mean, I will keep going till I get there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:17) Nice. You're persistent. I often like to say Gary V is my spirit animal.

(Mark Flood at 00:15:21) Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's not a bad trait to have. I mean, you know, he's probably pretty demonstrative, and the way he does things is very much him, but there's certainly a lot to be taken away from it that can help a lot of people. And I'm pretty sure he does help a lot of people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:41) Oh, absolutely. I have here on my notes that you've got some experience with this MVP epidemic.

(Mark Flood at 00:15:50) Yeah. So that's actually how you and I met in the first place, chatting it up on the interweb. So good job on your content.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:59) We were talking in the comments? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, hell yeah.

(Mark Flood at 00:16:03) Good job on your content marketing because you targeted me, who is a CTO, and was on a topic that is very relevant to me. And so you scooped me up in that net very effectively, and here we are today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:19) It's all about bringing that value though. I can't go back in time and help myself ten years ago and give myself advice, right? Like, I can't do that. But there's another generation coming up, and it's only growing, and it's only getting bigger.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:30)
You know, there's only more technology people coming. And you can see with the growth in even your industry and every other one that's powered by technology, which is basically everything. Right? And then I want to give all those individuals value so that they can, you know—you can't do the work for them, but you can give them your experience and say, "Look, here's what I did, and here's how it turned out." And so, you know, there's your value. Right?

(Mark Flood at 00:16:56)
For sure. So what our conversation got—how our conversation got started is you had posted the article about the Spaghetti Code MVP and how, basically, people are launching a product and they're basically masking this crappy code base with the excuse that it's the MVP. Right? And I totally agree with that. I think that is an actual thing that is happening all too frequently. My—so what got me involved in the conversation was that for that specifically, I think the context of where that idea or product or company is in their life cycle is very relevant to evaluating how much of it is actually making an excuse for crappy code versus actually trying to get something out there. Because for me, I know—so we are supposed to launch on January 1st, and we're behind. We're going to launch a week late, which, you know, in the grand scheme of things, not that big of a deal. But I can definitively tell you right now that our code base is not an amazing—it is not this perfect machine of well-documented and perfectly running code. We are going so fast right now because I need to get a product out into the market so that I can start building things based off what I know people need versus what I think they do. Right? Because right now, the concept is what I think people will like, but until it's out there and I have 100, 500, 1,000 people using it and getting feedback, I don't even know if what I'm building is the right thing yet. And so, you know, for me, I could sit here and right now I could delay launch by a month and go back and clean up and refactor and make our code way better. But I'm actively choosing not to do that right now because for all I know, in six weeks or two months from now, we might be like, "Okay, here's the feedback we've gotten," and to touch on another topic that you have written about, let's just go ahead and rewrite this whole thing now because we now have much more intelligence on what we actually need to be making.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:19)
Okay. So I love that you're bringing this up. This is going to be good. We're going to disagree, agree, and then love each other and high five. Alright, so there's two points. The first one is just a counterargument to doing things right the first time. So—and I'll explain. So if you had—and I don't know your composition of your development team. I don't even want to know right now if you're an engineer. I don't want to know. But if you had great people doing it right, then I submit to you that you wouldn't need to have major rewrites and need to even think about going back and cleaning it up. Second point would be—involving this is a thing that I do, and this is a mistake. So here's a mistake I was making, and here's what the end result was, the value that came out of it. I was building stuff and then bringing it out to people and saying, you know, "What do you think? What do you think?" And then getting feedback and going—I was able to shorten that life cycle by first going out to the people, bringing them into the sort of sketching, wireframing, design, and figuring it out then. I was able to skip a development cycle by actually not making the product and instead doing it with sketches and saying, "Alright, this is what we're going to do. How's that going to be useful?" "Oh, well, I don't want that. I want this." You know, things of that nature. So that was a little trick I accidentally stumbled into, and now that's how I always do it.

(Mark Flood at 00:20:47)
I think that's fantastic. So let me—so the first thing you mentioned about being built right the first time, I 100% agree with that. The caveat there is that you know specifically what you're building from the get-go. So, for example, we started this project probably ten weeks ago, but our scope has changed for several different reasons. But our scope has changed between when we first started and today. And so that, of course, can make things a little bit more complicated. And then to your point about the second part about going out and designing, that's exactly what—that's almost exactly what I did. I took wireframes out. I said, "Hey guys, what do you think about this? What are the things you need?" But to some degree, there was only—I probably spoke with maybe, I don't know, call it 55 or 60 people that I either reached out directly to on Twitter or in a Facebook group or something like that. And that was the basis for a lot of what we are currently making. But at—and I think that's really great. And hopefully that does save us some time in the long run. But in terms of getting to, you know, a significant growth stage or meaningful revenue or whatever—you know, those are kind of our particular metrics. But whatever you're trying to get to, you know, depending on what your price point is and all that stuff—again, even with 75 people, you may or may not have made something that's actually going to have product-market fit right as soon as you build it. Right? I mean, it'd be awesome if you made something right away and it's like, "Yeah, this is perfect when we build it the first time." I am probably not smart enough to do that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:38)
It's all a conversation. Right? And it's just—we're two completely different people just trying to bring it together and bring some value. So one point I like to make after having those comments in the Spaghetti Code MVP is I like to detach the quality of the code versus the value of the features that you're bringing to market. I look at them separately. So I can have a completely solid code base that's done reasonably well. Right? That's reasonably maintained in reasonable quality, balanced with time, budget, and skills. Right? And then I look at that detached from the features that will make my application bring value to the market because in my mind, they're separate.

(Mark Flood at 00:23:22)
That's an interesting concept. I don't think I've ever articulated that concept in my head before, so that's interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:29)
Yeah, because everyone merges them together. I didn't realize I didn't have that explanation till just now. That was on the fly, but that is what I felt inside. That's what I felt inside for so long. And thank you, Mark, for letting me get it out.

(Mark Flood at 00:23:43)
I did. So hold on, hold on. You need to write that down, and that is a great little piece of short form content right for an Instagram post right there. That's a little chunk of gold right there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:54)
Done. No, so—so then I think also with you in the market, I man, 75 people, that's a lot. That's great. I think that when you go through that, that was the most right thing to do. And I would be surprised if you were able to identify value that you bring into the market, and then you're able to build a version one and then bring it out into the market to test it and let people use it and it not bring value. Right?

(Mark Flood at 00:24:24)
Correct. Yes. That is fingers crossed. Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:28)
So you're—I don't think it's fingers crossed. I think it's logical. If you went out and you surveyed the market and you said, "Alright, well, here's where the value needs to be brought. Right? Here's where we bring significant value. Here's the gap that we're filling, the need that we're solving. Right?" And then you go build it. You will have a reasonable amount of success. I think the big variables there is how scalable is it in—this not in the sense of the code structure. How scalable is it in the sense of a problem? Like, how big is the problem? So if you go to design a tool that is only ever sellable to 40 people on this planet, you could have 100% market penetration and not be a company. You know what I'm saying?

(Mark Flood at 00:25:10)
Right. Yeah. No, absolutely. I guess it depends on how much you charge them. Right? If it's a million bucks a year, then that might be a halfway decent company. But yeah, I get what you're saying.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:21)
Right. Or maybe it's collectively you're charging them $10 a year, but your costs on it are $1,000. It's still a business. It's massively profitable. Right? But—

(Mark Flood at 00:25:34)
Yeah. I think so. Kind of what you're touching on there is—and, you know, it's so funny because you go and you talk—I've talked to—I talked to so many people and so many people have so many different opinions, and yet we're all our own person in the world. And ultimately, until we actually get in there and start mixing it up and doing it, all of the things that come around—it's so hard to take advice, especially from all these brilliant people. So, for example, Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, these guys talk about focus so much as a thing. Right? Yet at the same time as the CTO slash main—you know, I own the entire company. Right? I'm funding it all and everything. I'm in charge of everything. I quite literally can't focus on such a singular thing. And I'm using focus as an example tying back into all the stuff you hear. And so in regards to the market size and opportunity, or my general—the general, I guess, strategy, and then we can talk about the individual tactics here. But the general strategy is, look, I don't think the first version of my concept is enough to capture this massive market share and be this billion-dollar company. But I also know that we have to start somewhere. And if we try to go to global from the get-go, we might go horizontal instead of going vertical. My tactics are based on the idea that I need to embed myself deeply vertically, starting with some things that potentially don't even scale. Right? We've got this software platform, but there's going to be a lot of agency-type services that we're offering because I have to get people to love the brand. I will bend over backwards and spend way too much time on a single customer to make sure that the brand and myself goes deep deep there. And then, you know, now six months, a year out, yes, I have those big stretch goals and grand ideas that are always there, and we periodically check to make sure we are working towards that. But it's kind of a fine line. Right? I mean, if you go too wide, then you risk never getting any penetration anywhere. And if you go too deep without that grand idea, to your point, you're certain that you've got a product for $10 a month and you're servicing 40 people who actually find value in it, which just doesn't leave you much room to grow. So, yeah, it's just—there's so many things to factor and do. And, golly, just talking about it makes me realize why it's really, really hard to be an entrepreneur. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:23)
I agree. Super difficult, but let's step outside of it and see how we can simplify it so that we can actually, you know, get things done. Right? With all the distractions and all the shiny objects, where do we place our focus? And that's exactly what these billionaires that you referenced are bringing up. So here's how I do it, and it's by no means perfect. So I have this belief, this thing that I found to be true, that the only reason business exists and the only way it can exist is by bringing value to a market. So now we have this real simple concept, like Elon Musk's first principles, that we can then reason up from. We know that that is true. There's no healthy companies that are able to exist long term that do not bring value to the market. They all do in some way. You just have to figure out what type of value that is. Right? So—

(Mark Flood at 00:29:15)
Correct.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:15)
If you look at it from that perspective, I can look at any company and I could say, basically, if they have problems—and looking at companies with problems and looking at companies that are new and want to get funded are two things that I do a lot with some venture capital groups. So I always go in there with the same thing. I say, "What is the market?" And I use this analogy. I say, you have a lemonade stand. Right, Mark? You have a lemonade stand. You got two options. The first option is you can build the lemonade stand in a field where there is a path, and then you can go put a sign on the path and convince people to walk over into your big empty grass field and purchase some lemonade. That's option one. Option two is you can find a crowd of people, burrow your way through the center of the crowd, and construct a lemonade stand. Which do you prefer? You prefer the second one because distribution's the hardest problem anyone ever has. If you put that lemonade stand in the middle of that crowd, right, then you are solving your distribution problem. And so then—so that's what I like to talk about distribution when you're identifying a market. That's what I talk about. Find that market. Find where all the eyeballs are. Gary V says, you know, find where all the attention is and then place yourself, inject—create value that can be injected into the existing market rather than trying to create your own market. So the way you could—you know, the second part of that would be when you talk about the lemonade stand, that's when you have to identify the value. So the first thing I like to do is identify the group of people and the general idea. So if I were, like, esports company, I'd say, "Okay, well, I want to do something in esports, and here's the group of people." And there's a large, large group of these people and even sent me demographics, like, how many there are. And now I want to go stand in the center of them and start talking to them and find out what's the common theme between all of them. Where's the place where I can bring them value? And then once I figure out how to bring them value, then it's just an execution thing. Because we're relying on these basic first principles of thinking, we understand the principles of business—and that if you bring value into a market and the market deems it valuable, they will consume it. And then everything else is sort of fairly easy in the sense that you just have to execute it.

(Mark Flood at 00:31:43)
Man, I think it's so spot on, and I'll be gosh darned if you didn't—you know, I'm more—I'm—yeah. I go through—I'm like a roller coaster. Right? I'll go through periods where I'm real stressed out and then I'll have conversations like these or thought processes like these that bring me back down to earth and I'm like, "Okay, we're good." So I agree with pretty much everything you said. It actually leads me to wonder—so, you know, going back to all the information that swirls around all things—so the phrase "build it and they will come," I have no idea how that phrase is still uttered because it's just so not true in my experience. It's "build it and then make sure millions or billions of people know about it and then they will come." I don't understand how "build it and they will come" is still a phrase that's even spoken. Because, yeah, distribution is the key. Right? Yeah.

(Mark Flood at 00:32:39) If we all had unlimited marketing budgets, distribution's probably not that hard. But when you're on a shoestring budget and you're trying to bootstrap a startup, how can you actually get distribution effectively and get a massive bang for your buck is huge. And so for Origin, I am 95% confident that our current model will provide value for people and will be used. The existing options are not super great. And so yeah.

(Mark Flood at 00:33:18) I mean, I think you're really spot on there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:21) Yeah. So for each business that I'm a part of, I have in my mind, there's one thing, there's only one thing, there's one macro value that they bring. Okay. And then whenever they're stressed or I get calls from the CTOs, I get calls from the people and they say, oh, you're stressed about this, this, that, or that. I say, look.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:39) Alright. Deep breath time. What's the one thing that you do? Like, what is the reason that your company exists? We go back to that one piece of macro value and just say, look.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:50) In the long term scheme of things, does this really matter? Like, are you hitting that value? Put your focus off the details of what's going wrong and put it back on the value, and then see if those little things that are going wrong even matter. Like, do I need to put my time to this? Everything that we do, when we have a list of projects up on a whiteboard right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:07) And we say whenever we put them up, we have tons of ideas. We get distracted by little shiny objects everywhere. And then we're constantly taking things off the list and saying no. No. No.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:17) Because it doesn't match the one piece of value. And if it doesn't match the one thing we're trying to do, then we don't do it. And that's because if you go back to it, the only reason that the company can exist is by bringing value to the market. Now another thing for marketing budget. So you're lean.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:33) Right? You're a startup. Well, we can leverage the human experience because humans make human decisions. Right? Most purchases are made emotionally and not logically.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:43) Right? So they do things human ways. And one thing that humans do is they talk. Information can spread like wildfire through a network at an unbelievable rate. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:57) And that's free. Right? So all you kind of have to do is spark the wildfire. So if your value is good enough, if your business is relevant enough, if what you're trying to bring to market really has value, rather than you trying to convince the market that what you're doing has value. If it really has value, most of the marketing will take care of itself.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:18) You just have to do a few basic things and get that spark going. And John's gonna tell Mary, who's gonna tell Sue, who's gonna tell Mike, and everyone's gonna be like, you have to hear about esports. I'll tell you what. If any of these large companies that have distribution solved, if PlayStation does something, they're a hundred dollar press release away from the world knowing about it because they have distribution. But let me tell you what.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:38) If they did something that did not bring value, they put a press release out that did not bring value. We changed the color of our coffee mugs at PlayStation. It's gonna go nowhere. The information will not travel because it's not relevant. It doesn't bring value to the market, and the market will spread the information.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:56) So when I talk to people who have ideas for things, I say, instead of having an idea for something, have a need for something. Come to me with a need that's in the market. Say that this market is underserved. There's this need. We need to bring this value. That's way better than an idea to test or try.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:16) Because if the market already needs it, then it's way easier to build it and distribute it to the market.

(Mark Flood at 00:36:23) Yeah. Very, very, very true.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:26) So what is it for you? What's the—not to put you on the spot. What's the value that you guys bring?

(Mark Flood at 00:36:35) I'm glad you asked because I was prepared for that type of question. But Origin allows you to build your esports empire in five minutes or less. So in five minutes or less, you can get the basic structure and setup for your esports organization done.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:55) Explain. You gotta give me some more. I gotta understand better. So if I wanna start an esports organization, like, have players that I represent, like, I'm a sports manager?

(Mark Flood at 00:37:04) Yeah. So okay. So back to the industry as a whole. So if you wanted to create an esports team, right, you are going to have to create a brand just like the Philadelphia 76ers, for example. Mhmm.

(Mark Flood at 00:37:18) And you have to get players and you're gonna have to figure out a way, are they gonna play for you for free? Are you gonna pay them? And you're gonna have to get those players to competitions, then you're gonna have to create content around your brand, then you're gonna have to distribute your brand message and do all of the things that are basically required almost for any other company, except this one is just a specific franchise in the esports world. And so going back to what the value is for Origin and potentially initially doing a lot of things that probably don't scale in an effort to go deep, go vertical instead of horizontal, is let us take care of all of that stuff. Right?

(Mark Flood at 00:38:02) We, you'll set up your platform with us. You need graphics? Great. We can handle that for now. This is not really a long term plan, but as an agency, we can create graphics for you if you need them.

(Mark Flood at 00:38:17) All of that stuff that is tremendously stressful, especially if your main focus should be on recruiting good players and practicing and getting those guys to competitions. We handle everything else for you. And so yeah. I think a good example, pull up rocketsesports.com. These guys will likely be one of our first customers.

(Mark Flood at 00:38:46) They're not on the platform yet. We're not quite—like I said, we're a little bit behind on launch, but they'll be one of our first customers. And you can see their existing platform. And they used Shopify for it. You know, it's not bad.

(Mark Flood at 00:38:57) It's okay. It's pretty good. But they had to do all that stuff custom because Shopify doesn't—it's not made for it. It's not made for esports.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:08) Oh, is this for the team to kind of represent themselves, their victories? What is, explain Rockets. What is Rockets?

(Mark Flood at 00:39:17) Rockets is an esports organization. I think they've got a PUBG team. You can see if you click teams, it'll show you what teams they have on there. I can't remember off the top of my head. Yeah.

(Mark Flood at 00:39:28) But yeah, they consider them—you know, they're not a tier one organization. They're not like an NFL franchise, but consider them like a minor league baseball club.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:39) No. Totally. Yeah. Now I get it.

(Mark Flood at 00:39:42) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so they, you know, they go around, they compete. They wanna become an NFL franchise.

(Mark Flood at 00:39:49) That's their ultimate goal. And so Origin's ultimate goal is to help them do that. And so as you can see right here on their site, they handle all of that stuff in-house. Them having to deal with everything that you see on that platform takes away from their core competency.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:10) Interesting. I'm liking this now. Alright. There's a problem that it took that long for us to communicate this.

(Mark Flood at 00:40:16) Yeah. So if you know nothing about the esports industry as a whole, it's very difficult to wrap your head around. I've had this—so funny with Gamer Wall, we spent way more time talking about the industry than we ever talked about what we were doing inside the industry. And so yeah. So what you're seeing right there is the Shopify portion of it.

(Mark Flood at 00:40:38) Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:39) Mhmm.

(Mark Flood at 00:40:40) The part that you're not seeing there is the LinkedIn part of it. And to be honest, I really hate using those types—like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:48) I get it. Yeah.

(Mark Flood at 00:40:49) We're the Uber for—

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:50) Oh, you just—I just cringed. Yeah.

(Mark Flood at 00:40:52) Yeah. Yeah. I don't like doing that, but at the same time, I'll be darned if sometimes when you're talking, it happens to be pretty effective at getting the general concept across. But anyway, the—I wouldn't even say the LinkedIn part, but whatever. The social side of it is that, okay, so they have these rosters of players.

(Mark Flood at 00:41:13) Right? So those guys are on this team currently, but there's thousands or millions of free agent players that are out there. Who's representing them? If I wanna go peruse a list of players that need to join a team, how do I find them? Where are they?

(Mark Flood at 00:41:28) I don't know. Does it really exist? And so that's kind of the—a little bit longer term goal. We will start building that stuff here in the next week or so.

(Mark Flood at 00:41:45) Hopefully have that piece done by February 1st, but that's kind of where we're going. Right? So, you know, you have the organization side, you have the individual side, and then those two are very commingled together. It makes it really, really easy. And then, you know, ideally, we become one of those companies that one, we're in the space relatively early in its growth cycle, which is always good. But then two, our priority is to make sure that our customers are successful.

(Mark Flood at 00:42:12) Right? I want our customers—if Origin doesn't have 50 teams be bought for $10 million or more in the next 10 years, I'll consider this a failure. Our goal is to make sure that we have teams that grow fast and they grow well, and we make it as simple as possible for them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:34) Well, here's a question I have for you. I'm gonna change it a little bit. Yep. We have the organization, like the Rockets. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:40) Yep. And then we have the organization beneath them, and the hierarchy is the collection of teams. Mhmm. So one value you have is you provide sort of this consulting style boot up of an esports organization. And another thing you're looking to provide is a recruitment solution for all the players that exist.

(Mark Flood at 00:43:06) Correct.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:06) Those are kind of the two core things that you guys are looking at. And then the consulting move, that platform would look more like brand creation, communication of results from the team. Right? Like, here's my team. Here's my players.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:24) Here's their stats. Here's my messaging. And that way, they can look like the 800 pound gorilla. Right? Yep.

(Mark Flood at 00:43:33) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:34) And so that's what your platform's kind of geared towards right now.

(Mark Flood at 00:43:37) Correct.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:38) Okay. Good. See, I'm getting it, man. I'm not dumb. I'm getting it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:43) So the platform you built today, what got this whole thing started was writing the code to do something along that nature, that route. Right?

(Mark Flood at 00:43:53) Correct.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:53) Cool. And then—you shocked me a little bit with the recruitment concept. So there's not a place? There's not a free agent roster that's cross platform, cross game, cross industry?

(Mark Flood at 00:44:09) There's a couple things out there, but there's just nothing that's really done it right. It's wide open. You know, it'd be like the Priceline websites back in 1997. Like, yeah, sure. There's probably a couple of them around, but—it's—I don't really—competition's never something that really bothers me.

(Mark Flood at 00:44:32) I'm more likely to kill this company from way more things besides competition. But in general, you know, I try to avoid competition when I can. And so yeah, that particular service is just—there's definitely no—if you were to ask a hundred esports teams or players where they would go to do that, you'd probably get a hundred different answers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:54) Oh, so there's lots of different places to go to do it?

(Mark Flood at 00:45:00) Yeah. Yeah. But not made for it specifically. They might hop on Reddit. They might go to Twitter.

(Mark Flood at 00:45:06) They might go to Facebook. There's not a ton of options that are platforms made specifically for that. No.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:13) There's no recruitment platform that's for all the esports players.

(Mark Flood at 00:45:19) Yeah. There are companies that are doing that, but they don't have any decent market share, I guess, is what I'm saying.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:26) So they're failing from a business—they have the technical platform to enter the data, but they don't have the numbers and the brand reputation.

(Mark Flood at 00:45:35) Correct.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:36) So there's the marketing play there. Alright. Now here's a question. How many potential customers do you think exist in your initial platform, the consulting? How many of these people are actually trying to create these organizations that have teams?

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:53) How many of those people are there?

(Mark Flood at 00:45:55) Yeah. So for one thing, it's really important—that number is growing super duper fast. But in terms of a flat—of course. I put that around half a mil—yeah. 500,000, 500,000.

(Mark Flood at 00:46:06) Of those, I anticipate that maybe 20 to 30% of them would actually fall into the paid sales funnel. Right? Because I think it might have been on your blog actually that I read it. It's just really hard to win the feature war game.

(Mark Flood at 00:46:29) Right? Because there's just—I'm not smart enough to create a truly patentable technology. And so we're trying to avoid feature wars. And so our pricing model is not going to be based on features. Everyone who signs up gets the full suite of features that we have available. Our pricing model is based on usage.

(Mark Flood at 00:46:55) So of those, we're kind of anticipating on a rolling basis, maybe 20% of them actually falling into the paid category.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:06) Interesting. So you got 500,000 people out there that are trying to create these organizations to have teams, these entrepreneurial type people who wanna create these brands and have teams under them. Of that, maybe 30% are seriously—have some cash to start the organization.

(Mark Flood at 00:47:24) Yeah. And I mean, our pricing is most likely gonna be around $50 a month. So it's not like when you say have the cash, quite literally, yes, have the cash. We're not talking about, you know, arms and legs here. $50 a month to host the platform and everything that we're gonna be offering for esports specifically is, you know, we might move that up or down a little bit, but it'll be right around there, which, you know, hopefully, that's not too much of a deal breaker for people that are like, yeah.

(Mark Flood at 00:47:51) We actually want our own domain instead of a subdomain. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:55) Oh, yeah. And be able to hook it up. So that's the platform that you built then?

(Mark Flood at 00:47:59) Correct.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:00) That's something that looks good. Do you guys have a free version to collect those other 400, 300,000 people?

(Mark Flood at 00:48:06) Yeah. The entire platform is free. So one thing, one decision that we just made recently was we are not going to do Google AdSense on the free platform. There's not gonna be any of those cheesy ads even on the free platform. What we are going to do is, you know, it's funny about this.

(Mark Flood at 00:48:27) I'm telling you everything we're doing here, but I don't even care because ideas are a dime a dozen. Anyone else listening to this in the future? Hey. Do you want to—if you want to take the same idea and run with it, let's go. I don't even care.

(Mark Flood at 00:48:38) Yeah. Go on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:39) Bring the value.

(Mark Flood at 00:48:40) Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I'll take myself on an execution race any day. But anyway, so what we're going to do is—so a big part of an esports team is gathering sponsors.

(Mark Flood at 00:48:52) So one of our kind of consultancy agency services that we actually have a plan to automate once we get a little bit more feedback will be helping these people acquire sponsors. So when you're in the position that you're actually ready to get a sponsor, that also means that you're most likely ready to start paying for the platform. And so all of our free tier websites will have sponsor sections like who they're sponsored by, but that's controlled by us. When they upgrade to a paid plan, they control that section and can put whatever sponsors they want there. So they can easily get a sponsorship for 5K a month from Razer mouse company or whatever, and then put that logo there and they're only paying us $50 a month.

(Mark Flood at 00:49:34) Right? Sweet deal. Whereas the free people will have those same sections to display their sponsors. Like I said, we control that. So let's say that we have 50,000 free accounts, active accounts that are doing this.

(Mark Flood at 00:49:51) Well, we're going to know a couple things about these people. We're going to know what kind of games they have. We're going to know what their rosters look like. We're going to have a little bit of data on their behavior and stuff. So we, as the owner of all that stuff or the superseding agency above it all, can go out and go to sponsors ourselves and be like, hey, you want to be displayed on 30,000 of our esports teams' pages. Right? And we will sell those spots ourselves. And, you know, that's going to be a little bit harder to start creating revenue than it would be if we just plugged in Google AdSense or one of those other ad platforms.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:28) Don't do it. Yeah. No. Never do that. No. No. No.

(Mark Flood at 00:50:30) We're not going to do it. And so, yeah, that's kind of the revenue model for the free—you know, so we can actually cover our server costs for all the people that are using the free stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:46) But here's an idea. Bringing value as much as I can. So there's this guy who has a podcast, and he is a popular musician. And I can't remember his name right now, but he produces music as well. And he started a podcast, and he's got a notable name. And what he does is he brings young emerging artists onto the show, and he interviews them and he talks with them. And 80% of them just pass through, but what he does is he signs some of them that he really likes. Oh. He gets to talk to them. He gets to interview them. Whatever he hears is their music, talks music, talks everything. And then he—so his business is really like, there's no ads on the podcast. It's very smart. But what he's really doing is he's creating a funnel by providing them value, a platform to speak. And then he learns them, provides himself value by learning them and, you know, experiencing what they're like as artists. And then the ones that he likes, he cherry picks and signs them and actually puts them on a label and gets them some money. Right?

(Mark Flood at 00:51:47) So what you're talking about right now, that's so interesting you bring that up. I was having lunch a couple weeks ago with a buddy, and I was talking to him how I see a really strong opportunity to invest in esports teams that aren't quite at the major level yet. There's so much arbitrage at the secondary level that I think there's a really good opportunity to make money if you can make a decisive—like choose your metrics that you're judging these teams by wisely. And so I kind of use Salesforce as an example. How great would it be if you're in a private equity company and you—let's say you're Marc Benioff, for example, and you can dig into Salesforce's data to see all the underlying data that all of these companies that use Salesforce. So if I'm trying to buy a company and they use Salesforce, I would love to have an inside peek at what it looks like under the hood in their Salesforce deal. Same idea with Origin. Right? If we have 30,000 esports orgs, to your point, we're going to have a lot of insight on what I think and the company thinks and anyone else who's involved with it thinks are the best teams that might be worth acquiring or signing to a label or whatever we decide to do there. But, yeah, that's a really great concept that I think has almost unlimited upside, assuming that we can get to that first part, which is actually getting all those customers in the first place.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:16) Yeah. And how do you do that?

(Mark Flood at 00:53:20) Well, one step at a time. You know, the first step is getting one. We've done that. So then the next step is getting to 10. Right? That's not much harder. If you can get one, you can get 10. If you can get 10, you can for sure get 100. And if you can get 100, you can get 1,000. So we're like—I think we've got maybe 15 or—I can't remember how many we actually have, actually signed up, using it, our very first version, which was kind of crappy, and so we're redoing it.

(Mark Flood at 00:53:53) That's why the launch is a little bit delayed. But then we've got tons of people who were interested in signing up. And so I did a kind of a pre—what do you call it? Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:05) Preregistration type thing.

(Mark Flood at 00:54:06) Yeah. Preregistration. So I've got maybe 100 to 150 individuals on that list. And so yeah, to your point about growth, you know, word-of-mouth is something that we'll rely on a lot. But in the meantime, you know, the amount of customers that we're looking for to validate this concept is not so huge that it's out of this world crazy. Right? You know, if we're six months down the road and I can't get 1,000 people to be actively engaged with this thing, then, you know, I'm going to really, really sit down and rethink everything through quite a few times. But, yeah, in regards to gathering customers, initially, it's going to be a very manual process, which I personally, you know, enjoy quite a bit.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:59) Yeah. Well, it's again—I don't think you'll get to that 1,000 people and they're not engaged because from each individual that comes onto your platform, the only reason why they're going there is because you're providing them some sort of value. And then it's just up to you to screw it up, up to you to not deliver on the value that they anticipated because everyone anticipates the value before they sign up. I only—no one signs up for anything just to sign up. They think, oh, there's some value here. I'm going to sign up and create an account because I have—there's a need that I have, and this looks like it provides value to my need. Right? It's the answer to my need. And then it's up to—then it's identifying and removing the distance between those points to make sure that what they anticipated is what happened. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:43) Yep. So because that's the value. They anticipate a certain value, and then they take action, and they either get that value and they're a huge fan, or they don't get that value and they die off. So just focusing on that part right there, that little slim area is really the difference between the success and the failure.

(Mark Flood at 00:56:00) Yeah. And I mean, I'm such a sandbagger. The amount of value that I've promised is way less than what we're planning on delivering. And so, you know, looking back on Gamer Wall, one thing that I wish we had done a better job of was staying more in touch with our customers in terms of what we were working on. And so I'm pretty excited to use a public—actually, I can't remember the company that I saw that was doing this. I was like, wow, that's really cool. They had a public Trello board. I use Jira for our stuff, but we'll have a public Trello board that kind of shows what we're working on, because, you know, the idea here is we're going to constantly—we are working on behalf of the teams that sign up with our service. Like, I am working for them to make sure that they are successful. So, like, in quite live time—like, right now we don't even have a test server, right? Like this is getting pushed to production. Let's go, go, go. So these guys, for example, our first early customers—hey, would be really cool if we had this—done two days later. Like, hey guys. Guess what? It's up. Check it out. You know, customers love that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:16) We are over our time. But I like talking to you though, Mark.

(Mark Flood at 00:57:22) Man, I appreciate it. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it as well. I listen to Night Speed podcast. It's so funny listening to the guy and so many of the—we're all just—anyone that's doing similar stuff, we all encounter the same problem. So your podcast and the content you put out is pretty helpful.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:40) Oh, awesome. Thank you. I actually saw that email come across, like, two in the morning. We had a thunderstorm, and I was like, uh, I'm not sleeping. So I look it up, and I'm like, oh, sweet. Listen to Doug's podcast. There you go.

(Mark Flood at 00:57:49) Nice. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:50) So, man, we learned a lot. You understand the MVP epidemic. You guys are bringing massive value to the esports industry, and you're making sure that everything you do continually brings value to your users. I wish you the most success in your launch. And, yeah, it was absolutely fantastic.

(Mark Flood at 00:58:09) Yeah. I appreciate it. And real quick, what was that little chunk of gold? It was—oh, yeah. Separating the quality of the code versus the actual features that the users experience. Those are two separate things. That was great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:22) Yeah. Oh, that—yeah. There we go. Awesome. Thank you so much, man.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:32) Thank you so much for listening to the Modern CTO Podcast. Share this. Get the word out. Thank you guys so much. I couldn't do it without you. I appreciate it. You guys are the absolute best.