Getting to profitability

Just wanted to document some things about my startup journey.

I'm no stranger to entrepreneurship, having a nice catalogue of failed startups aka great learnings under my belt.

2 years ago a friend and I (both software engineers) started https://rib.gg - a competitive home for one of the biggest emerging e-sports Valorant.

Since then we've both been working fulltime jobs to try and fund the amazing team we've onboarded. We have a dedicated esports director who we brought on full time, and an amazing group of writers and data staff that help keep all our data up to par.

Phase 1: Subscription model

Initially we got access to the game's API and were able to put together some very interesting analytics tools that would later be used by almost every professional team at the top level to help prepare for their matches through a scrappy discord bot. The caveat to this is that there were only a handful of teams that were willing to pay the $100/month to use this tool. To date, almost 2 years after launching this subscription service, we have around 40 teams signed up for that plan.

We decided to try and appeal to a wider audience by porting some of the analytics over to web, making 80% of it free and selling a $15/month individual subscription for independent analysts, and competitive game fanatics who might not have the budget nor means to support a beefier subscription. That raised our MRR by around 15%, however we're still only half way to break even.

Now it's worth mentioning that my cofounder and I have been covering on average 50% of costs out of pocket for the past 2 years, and taking on a job in order to support that actually pulls us away from working on the company more than we'd like.

That's the issue we're facing right now. Currently we get around 70k pageviews a month on the site, and most of it is our existing userbase. We've been selling ad space for a decent amount, however the traffic is mostly young people and gamers who don't click on ads as often, so we've had to cycle ad partners a fair amount. Also Google's adsense rpm is extremely low for our niche haha.

Anyways, we're continuing to grow and slowly carve our place in the market.

All the top teams and personalities know us since we're a staple tool, but unfortunately for the larger more casual player base that follow the competitive scene, they use a site called https://vlr.gg which launched slightly before us, and people have gotten used to them. If I had to estimate, I'd say we only get around 2-5% of the traffic they do. So we've been trying to catch up to their features while also make enough revenue to support us on the way there.

Just wanted to share my experience - if anyone has any tips or ideas, let me know in the comments :) We really want to get from our current MRR = 50% of breakeven to 100% of break even that way we can go full time on the site without having to worry about keeping a job.