In today’s episode, we talked with Taric Mirza, Founder and CEO at Arrive about user acquisition and how he's going about product distribution as a second-time founder.
In today’s episode, we talked with Taric Mirza, Founder and CEO at Arrive about user acquisition and how he's going about product distribution as a second-time founder.
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Hatchet Ventures website: https://www.hatchetventures.com
Hatchet Ventures LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/hatchet-ventures/
Chet Lovegren’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chetlovegren/
Connect with Taric Mirza on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/taricmirza/
Check out Arrive's Website: https://arrive.gg/
Listen on Spotify: https://tinyurl.com/36ub3fpy
Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://tinyurl.com/ystuxubt
Listen on Google Podcasts: https://tinyurl.com/bdee8y9h
1, 2, 3, 4. Are you a founder, co-founder, aspiring entrepreneur, or just someone who loves to hear about how companies are built? Then join us as we talk with founders and CEOs who have been there and done that. Welcome to the Founders Formula Podcast sponsored by Hatchet Ventures and now your host, Chet Lovegren.
[00:00:31] Chet: Hello and welcome to the Founders Formula Podcast, the show that's designed to bring you the latest of greatest insights from founders and CEOs worldwide. I'm your host, Chet Lovegren, and as always, this podcast is sponsored by Hatchet Ventures our podcast partner. Um, we're excited to bring you this new episode today.
I'm really excited because, um, we're actually bringing, uh, someone who is a Hatchet member and their company is actually part of the Hatchet portfolio. And, um, specifically, uh, As it pertains to what they're doing, it's really in line with right now the gaming industry. And for those of you that know, even though I have three kids and a wife and I run a business and have these podcasts that I do, uh, I still try to find time for my guilty pleasure once in a while, which is gaming.
You know, some people like to go out with friends, some people like to go on vacation, some people like to do Netflix, uh, binging. I'm more of a gamer, so I'm really excited to talk to our guest today. He is the founder of, A company called Arrive. You can check them out. arrive.gg on the internet. Please welcome to the show, Taric Mirza.
Taric what's going on, man?
[00:01:39] Taric: Hey. Hey. Well, thanks
so much, Chet. Awesome to see you again. Uh, thanks for the enlightening discussion before we, we had chatted through some B2B to B2C kind of channel distribution. That was really helpful, so appreciate that. And of course, like you, I'm a, I'm a pretty hardcore gamer and, uh, excited to get into it.
[00:01:57] Chet: Yeah. And I know this is your second venture, so we'll get into a lot of the details today for all the listeners. Um, your first venture that you founded was Haste. It was a company in the eSports category, which we'll talk about. But before we do that, the first part of the show is we really wanna learn a little bit more about you and your experience up to the point of that first company that you founded.
So tell us a little bit about your background and what got you up to the point of founding your first company prior to Arrive, which was Haste.
[00:02:23] Taric: Yeah, so the, you know, there's two main tracks in my life that probably got me to starting my first company Haste. And one is I've been a, a gamer, um, not just as a player, but also a game developer since I was, I'm not sure exactly, seven, eight years old, something like that.
And, uh, that's always been my passion. That's like, got me into, Uh, you know, into computers, really, it was just, I wanted to make computer games. And so I've been making my own video games, uh, all along, uh, specifically networked multiplayer games, uh, before I, I started making multiplayer games at a time when there was actually mostly single player games, but it's evolved to a point where now there's probably more multiplayer games than single player games, it seems.
And then on the other side of the thing, Um, after college I got into software development and pretty quickly found my way into the startup scene and have been doing all this, nothing but startup since. Uh, and, uh, all of these things had came together when my favorite game League of Legends hit a huge amount of lag or internet slowdowns.
And, um, I wanted to take my skills that. Put, uh, that I developed in my own personal video games to see if I can fix this problem for League of Legends. Mostly just for myself. Initially, I didn't think it would be a business at all. I think I'd bank out some code in a couple weekends and be back to playing games.
Uh, but like many engineers, that forecast was a little bit off. It took me about two years, or like year and a half or so of nights and weekends. Um, but I was excited about the commercial possibilities because while I was coding away at this solution. Legal luncheons was in hypergrowth and it was growing from 5 billion players to like 200 billion or so, and a ton of them have lag.
So, um, fast forward a bit and once I had kind a prototype out, I reached out to a former startup executive I had worked with and. He became my first investor who helped fund our first patents. And uh, he came on as CEO and then the two of us spent, took us almost a year to raise the seed round. Um, and we raised about 800, 900 k or so.
And, uh, and then, You know, it was kind of like the rocket ship started to launch and that's kind of what kicked off by first company Haste.
[00:04:39] Chet: Yeah. That's really cool. And for those that are listening that might not be in the gaming world, maybe we can take a pit stop here to explain. When we talk about the word lag, what does, what does that mean, Taric?
Because I'm sure they, I'm sure they experience it on their Zoom calls or you know, when they're on podcasts or things of that nature, but maybe they, they've experienced it, they just don't know what the term is. So maybe we can explain that a little bit to the audience.
[00:05:01] Taric: Absolutely. Like if you've ever been on Zoom and it cuts out, you can't hear people talking, the screen goes blank, you got disconnected some, something terrible like that, that's lag.
Uh, your, the internet is typically, that's like an internet connection in between you or what other people on the call that. Things have gotten bad in the spaghetti that we call the internet, and you have a very frustrating experience and just like that's frustrating when you're on conference calls.
It's incredibly frustrating for all these video game players, uh, because today's games like League of Legends, you might play these 45 minute matches and they're competitive. You get like rankings like you do in chess. So people really, really wanna win. And literally in a 45 minute game, if you get lag for a 10th of a second, or even like, even 10 milliseconds or something at the worst point, that can cause you to freeze and lose a key fight in the game and then completely ruin your experience.
So, mm-hmm. Um, like, you know, it, it's about as bad as like watching a, something like a Super Bowl or something like that, and having it cut out, cut out at you with like 10 seconds remaining in the game, and you don't really see the ending until 20 minutes later.
It's, it's that frustrating. And so that's the problem we're trying to solve.
[00:06:15] Chet: Yeah, and it's, it's probably like, I mean, low hanging fruit is probably professional gamers, right? Because that they need that instantaneous reaction ability. But for casual gamers, I know that I experience lag sometimes and I get frustrated.
It makes me maybe not wanna play the game, and now I'm not hanging out with my friends and doing those things. Even in, even in the world of business, right? You could have a Zoom call. And you could miss an interaction with a potential client. You could miss a, a verbal cue. You could miss, uh, a visual cue.
Um, and that would, that would, it's all about that human interaction. And the more delay there is in that human a interaction, the less authentic it is. So I think it's, uh, something we've all probably experienced. Maybe some of us just weren't really sure like, uh, how it was defined or what it looked like.
But let's talk a little bit about Haste. So you're working your butt off, you're, you're putting together this code for a year and a half. You've, uh, you've untethered and figured out this problem that you can solve. You're raising some funds. What was kind of the trajectory then from haste before you ended up moving on to arrive?
What did that look like as a first time founder?
[00:07:16] Taric: Well, it's pretty interesting. We, we actually went into, uh, we, we hired some key people who were just amazing on the technical side. Um, one of them had been, uh, involved in helping invent some early, early parts of the internet protocols and things like that.
Um, and once we had this solid engineering team, we developed our core products. And then we got a couple, uh, well by a couple, like 30 or 40 alpha testers from various local colleges who we were talking to you constantly getting feedback on the product. Um, and then at a certain point we're like, okay, we've got past all the, the, like the worst of the bugs or whatever.
We now, we just need more network data so we can refine our network and improve performance. And so to quite, we're like, we need like a thousand or so users. And, um, we kind of helped pioneer some of the early influencer marketing that people, people do now, at least in terms of like the small and medium tier YouTube gaming influencers.
And we saw amazing success with that. So instead of hitting our like you know, a thousand or 2000 person or whatever, target. We almost immediately hit 5,000 and then it went viral. The people who we acquired, um, those gamers were telling their friends they weren't leaving, and pretty soon we were at 25,000.
With almost, um, with non-linear growth. And, um, we kind of made a mistake at that point, at that point where we, uh, we initially thought we'd be free for two or three years, grow to like millions of gamers and only then try to monetize. But we're like, wait, we're seeing such high, uh, user growth, let's go ahead and monetize now.
This is, this is awesome. So we put on a $10 a month paywall. Unfortunately we lost some users there. And, um, Uh, what we ended up doing at that point is we almost tried to raise some serious VC money and just go free again, issue an apology and basically grow to hopefully billions of users. Um, but instead we ended up at the same time, being introduced to Ericsson, who was really excited about what we were doing, and so we kept.
Fully pivoted to the B2B side, got a commercial deal of Ericsson and um, did all sorts of stuff with the ISPs. And so that was really exciting. And we had an exit a couple of years ago, and that's kind of what, uh, led to a, what led to Arrive was after all of that went down, um, I still saw huge demands in the market where this kind of, um, tech, you know, some sort of solution could be used to fix problems.
Cuz even with all the um, competitive efforts and new initiatives out there, lag was still just this massive problem. It was getting bigger and bigger. Now you even have like the 5G folks who wanted to solve lag for gaming and things like that. And so I you know, came up with a whole new take on the business model for Arrive and applied the lessons that we learned through that.
And, came up with, you know, that this is basically the next iteration of our business.
[00:10:10] Chet: Yeah. And I want to jump, uh, I want to jump into Arrive, um, because it's, it's an interesting concept and you're building something really cool over there and you're seeing some great traction. Before we do, I want to make a, I wanted to take another pit stop real quick and talk about, um, when you became a first time founder in this journey, um, that you were just talking about through that whole journey that you just told the, the, the viewers about, what did you find was most challenging as a first time founder?
What was like the biggest learning curve that you had that you were like, Hey, I figured this out now I'm, I'm set to go. That gave you extra confidence or padded confidence walking into your second venture?
[00:10:47] Taric: Well, you know, there, there were so many things, but, um, I, I, there's probably hundreds of lessons, but just a couple that come off the top of my head. Are we, we were raising our seed rounds and not getting anywhere. Um, it took us, we ultimately succeeded. It took us like 10 months, but it was pretty, uh, it took a lot of effort and a lot of time.
But really what unlocked our success there, um, was uh, was at first we were making this huge claim. We basically built a second version of the internet that's better. That's essentially what we were telling people. And we have investors like, okay, that's, um, that seems like hard to believe and what really made it possible and got us past those, uh, kind of objections are we recruited some of the, um, some of the people who helped pioneer the commercial internet and, uh, had a lot of just technical chops and business chops on that side.
And once we got them involved, um, it, it kind of checked off a lot of boxes on the tech side and we could get into things like market sizings. That was just the first lesson. You hear this all the time. It's like, Early investors are looking at team, and it's just completely true. It was, it was 20 times easier to fundraise after we brought those people on board. Um, and then the second thing too was I, I, there were some instances I wish I listened to my instincts better.
Uh, they're like, when we charged our customers, uh, money at the point, you know, there, it, it didn't feel quite right to be. I was coming up with some other options, but you know, a lot of experienced folks, uh, you know, we all had came to consensus that like, hey, this is the right thing to do. The demand for this is overwhelming.
Um, but you know, it turned out to be a bit of a mistake. And so like, kind of listening to what your customers are saying, listening to your instincts, I think that's pretty critical.
[00:12:33] Chet: Yeah, it can be, um, it can be a pretty big downfall. I was listening to a podcast the other day and, um, Leslie Greenwood, uh, uh, an advisor in the Hatcher community. She has a podcast and she was telling someone who was talking about community. It's like, if you're creating content for your community, you're doing it wrong.
You should be creating content with your community because that's the content they want to see. It can't be what you wanna see or what you think they wanna see. You have to create it with them. That's the huge part of community engagement. I was like, oh, that, that's a, that's a really good concept. Like, and then you integrate those people in community.
So that's a similar thing, like listen to what your audience wants and get that feedback, because ultimately they're gonna be the people that you know. When you do put up that $10 paywall, you can have more confidence moving forward cuz you're like, this is what you told us you wanted and this is the resource that's gonna require us to make this thing what you want it to be.
Um, so I'm glad that you're seeing that success with that. So Arrive, it's kind of built off some of the things that you recognized while you were running haste prior to your exit. You exited the company and said, Hey, there's a different version of this. There's a new, uh, way I'm thinking about things that I want to help the gaming community with.
Let's talk about it. What does Arrive, what does it do? We've kind of clarified a little bit of who it's for right now. Um, but yeah, talk a little bit more about that, that spaghetti. I like how you say that all the time. You say that the spaghetti, the internet. Um, so explain that a little. Absolutely. More for our listeners.
[00:13:55] Taric: Yeah. So, um, so one of the issues we had at, at Haste was, while our tech worked and helped stabilize the internet for a lot of people, I think, you know, really smoothing out your problems, improving your experience. It consumed a huge amount of, uh, internet bandwidth. So part of what we've done at Arrive is where, uh, we've, we have some new innovations that I see as our, basically like the next major step forward in internet optimization, where we're getting really great performance, but without consuming this massive amount of bandwidth that can drive up, up costs and things like that.
Um, the other thing too is just on the, on the kind of user side is we are really inspired by what Discord did. And I, I'm a strong believer that we're possible in the gaming market, you should almost always do freemium.
That that's where like 90% of the revenues are generated these days or free that, that kind of pricing model and, um, in, in fact, I would take it a step further and you see. It extending from gaming into non-gaming. That's, in my view, that's what PLG or product growth, that's, to me, that's just freemium.
It's just like what gamers have done for, you know, five 10, well more like 10 or 12 years or more, um, on the gaming side and apply to like B2B businesses. And it's basically like, Hey, if we have like a load of cost version of this product, we can provide instead of like, make if you go through like talk to like 50 sales, call people and, and spend like 50 hours of your time, why don't we make something that in two minutes you can get this product and test it out, and it's been super effective.
So I'm just a huge believer in PLG and freemium and I, I think that's one of our disruptions is working backwards and saying, can we make a product that is twice as good as anything else out there? Instead of it being 10 bucks a month, make it free. That's kind of one thing we're doing. And then on the B2B side, of course, there's certainly a lot of power users who want the absolute best optimization tech possible, and we're working with enterprises to build that.
[00:15:56] Chet: And then let's talk a little bit about, uh, you have two co-founders, Tomas and Ricky. Let's talk a little bit about how the, how you three came together, how you met. What, where do the responsibilities fall with each of you? How do you kind of structure that wheel of responsibility? Where's the synergy?
Where's the overlap? If it was like a Venn diagram, I guess we could say, uh, how does that look and, and what do each of you kind of take on in terms of responsibilities?
[00:16:19] Taric: Yeah. So we, uh, we met at a startup event. About, I guess that was like seven years ago or so. And, uh, Ricky was a co-founder for another startup and we just immediately became great friends and his brother is Tomas, who as, who Ricky introduced me to is like, you guys are, get along great and mature enough.
Uh, Tomas and I immediately became like our main gaming buddies on League of Legends. And so the three of us would talk about all sorts of stuff, not just, not just gaming, but like business ideas, things like that. Over the year as well, while I was at Haste and uh, and then also, uh, Tomas was involved at Haste. He came in.
He helped run marketing operations for haste and, and did an amazing job. And so, you know, he had hands-on knowledge of when we were in hypergrowth and the kind of things that worked and the kind of tone it takes, you know, to really succeed in this space. And, uh, yeah. So in terms of like a Venn diagram, it's pretty interesting because all three of us have both business angles and technical, and I've never seen that before at any other startup I've ever heard of.
I'm sure it's happens that just, you know, usually when I meet other founding teams. You'll have someone like a very technical founder and a very business founder, and they're like kind of siloed a bit. Um, but for us, all three of us have, uh, we kind of came from the more product and engineering side and different subspecialties, but then we layered on.
That business kind of executive, uh, side of things, like over time. And, and where that gets really fun is we can, uh, you know, sometimes put on our product hats and jump on a product or engineering problem. Then other times they'll just put on kind of more of like a marketing branding kind of business deal hat, and it's, uh, come a, you know, we'll tackle like it a completely different set of problems and it just feels really great that the three of us can, can come together in all these different ways.
Um, And yeah, Ricky, Ricky does a lot on the DevOps side. He does a lot with like, kind the client programming side, and Tomas comes at it from sort of the branding and UI aspects. Uh, and then I, I have more of like the backend, the network programming, the database side of things.
[00:18:29] Chet: That's great. And so let's talk a little bit about.
I guess essentially like marketing or like go to market strategy. So it's interesting to me because if, if you were selling like a straight B2B SaaS product, or even if you were selling like a services product to companies and add a sales team, like I could definitely like go on all day long about marketing strategy and initiatives and then how to turn that into paying customers and all that.
But you're, you're basically selling for the most part to consumers. You have this B2B model that you're following as well, but how do you stand up the marketing for this? Like, how do you take this to market? Has there been like a partner that you work with in this space to help distribute this? Um, what are like, like how do you stand it up?
It's really interesting to me because the way I come across things like this in the gaming or the content creation or the social media community is. Strictly through like mostly like TikTok videos or something I might see on YouTube. Um, so I'm curious if you're like pursuing like content creation or if you're leveraging old connections from Haste or if you've made some new connections and you have distribution partners that you're working with, like what does that look like for Arrive and how are you pursuing that, that marketing strategy?
[00:19:33] Taric: Yeah. So that's, that's one of like the key differences for, versus what we did at Haste is we came out the gate with a corporate co-founder, uh, or pre-seed investor. They're called Overwolf. Um, they're amazing. I've, I've chatted with their CEO multiple times over the years at Haste, and he's always been super supportive.
We always did the deal at haste. Never worked out exactly, but at Arrive we made that a huge core to our like business plan and I'm really happy with how it's going. So for Wolf, they have 35 billion gamers and most of these are, are ideal customer profile. Exactly the kind of people who we hope to recruit as customers once their products ready.
And uh, they also help monetize by, they have the, uh, an ads network that lets you kind display ads and make money for free. And so you can probably see how this is all coming together. And with Overwolf it's like not only, not only can they bring us tens of billions of customers once our product is ready, but they can also help us monetize through ads.
And of course there's subscription stuff as well, but they just check so many different boxes. Um, and you know, it's funny, like there's kind of memes around the internet. Where like a first time founder you're very product focused and you're like, oh no. How about got customers a second time founder? It's kind of like a lot of times you'll start with a big customer.
Uh, or distribution partner. And that's exactly what we did. So we came out the gate with Overwolf and, uh, just really excited about that.
[00:20:57] Chet: That's great. And I, I love that you, you basically, I can just leave the podcast and let you run it from here cuz you just segued me into what my next kind of question or curiosity was gonna be, which is, you called out the first time founder, focused on this second time founder focused on that, so that was great.
So first time founder, you, you had these challenges, these things that you never saw before, that you dealt with. You dealt with a lot of 'em. You took that experience over six, seven years into your new venture. What is something you learned new in your second venture that was a lesson for you? Even though you had already been a first time founder, what was something that you can call out recently where you were like, oh, this is kind of a unique new problem, or this is a new thing that I'm facing, or something that I have to professionally develop to learn, or an obstacle that I have to get over that you didn't originally experience as a first time founder.
What can you share with the audience?
[00:21:44] Taric: Well, the, the main, the main thing has just been on my personal development. You know, I came from a technical background. I got more and more into things like talking to investors, uh, working on leadership teams at companies. But, uh, as a CEO that's a different role.
And so much what I'm doing is investor pitches directly of course, but also sales. Um, and that's, That's been one of like the more interesting areas for me is, uh, like while we have the B2C side with Overwolf, that we feel really strongly about longer term. A lot of our revenues that come from enterprises such as ISPs and so, uh, some of that is, uh, a little bit away.
It requires like a more powerful project before we can. Come out of the gate with, uh, go to market with some of these ISPs, but we're doing some early relationship building and that kind of thing. Now, some people I called ISPs customers, others would call 'em B2B distribution partners, B2C uh, cuz ultimately you're taking our product and distributing them to the customers.
But the, either way it is a sort sales process. So, um, that, that's been from a personal growth point of thing, probably the skill that I think hopefully has been raising, uh, at a really rapid cl um, clip. And, uh, I, what I really call it the Hatchet Ventures folks, uh, some of the best sales people I've ever, uh, you know, met, uh, some of the best, most talented, uh, sales leaders who have won awards and things have been giving me tons of personal help.
So that's been, that's been pretty awesome. Um, the only other thing I'd add too is just in general, Uh, so many other startup founders, um, and potential partners, some of which are being formalized, have really been super helpful. And, uh, like I, I really feel like we've been leaning into a partnership strategy, if that makes sense.
It's like we're almost constantly talking with amazing new potential partners.
[00:23:36] Chet: That's amazing. Taric we're rounding out the episode here, so I wanna make sure that we get a chance to get your Founder's Formula for Success. So in your experience, what is some advice or a formula that you would give? For success to a listener who's either a first time founder or maybe even a second or third time founder having another go at it, experiencing a new set of problems.
What would be the, I guess if we put this at the front of the episode in a, in a 45 second, 60 second clip, what would be your Founder's Formula that would be the highlight of everything we've talked about today?
[00:24:10] Taric: Well, I'll, I'll actually give two things that I think are critical and uh, I would say the first is don't focus on user growth or revenue.
And I know this is controversial and I might get blamed for it, but I honestly think none of that matters and is the wrong thing to focus on. Until you have product market fit. And that's things like, until your customers are telling other customers to use your product until your customers are sticking around for years, decades, you know, then, then it's like none of this other stuff matters.
And you're gonna be just throwing sales money to try to boost your numbers and it's just gonna be not working really well. So you really want product market fit. But beyond that, the, the number one thing I'd say. Is, uh, is, is working, you know, coming out the gate with, um, a, uh, a big partnership, or maybe I'm contradicting myself a little bit here, but a, a big customer if it's like a B2B product and, um, they can, you can learn so much about the product features.
You can refine your products and. That, that is the way to go. And that's a very different angle than I did, um, at my previous startup, which was so product focused. You know, there we were kind of like, Hey, here's this awesome product that will hopefully change the world. Now let's find customers here. It's more of like, Hey, we've got this awesome distribution partner Overwolf.
We're having great chats with customers and what's work backwards to make the best product possible that that is gonna work for everybody.
[00:25:34] Chet: Yeah, you hit on something interesting though, and I don't think it's, uh, I don't think you're contradicting yourself because I think what you're really getting at is your Founder's Formula is it's the way in which you go about user acquisition.
And when you think about, especially like a product that's typically made for consumers or that's your. You know your product market fit right now, your MVP is really made for that. There's a huge difference between spending your time to go get a thousand users versus finding a distribution or partner or a big customer that can get you those thousand users.
I think it just makes more sense with the time you'll probably spend on that user acquisition. So I think that's really your formula is like, how fast can I get my user acquisition? And there are means to which I can do that better than on a one-to-one basis. Um, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, all the time in sales, it's like people want to go outbound.
It's like, do you need to go outbound though? Are you creating valuable content for your audience? Turning those people into community members are, do you even have an inbound funnel at all? Are you creating evangelists within your community? Do you have partners that you have a referral network set up with?
Like what does that ecosystem look like? I mean, you don't just dump all your stock into Airbnb, right? Like you, you diversify your portfolio. And I think it's interesting how often we fail to diversify our go-to-market strategies, right? I think the go-to-market strategy is the overarching idea, but there are all these sub-buckets and initiatives that we need to think about.
And so I think when you talk about your Founder's Formula, yeah, it's definitely about thinking about like. What's, what's the most efficient way that I can get to user acquisition for the model that I'm in?
Taric, if people wanna engage with you or Arrive, how can they find out and learn more?
[00:27:14] Taric: Well, the best thing is our website is Arrive.gg, and my first still email is Taric that's T A R I C at Arrive.GG
[00:27:25] Chet: awesome. And if you are a listener and you're interested in engaging with Hatchet Ventures or The Founders Formula Podcast, or even myself further, um, please check out the, uh, description of today's show.
We'll also have a link, um, to everything that we talked about today with the Arrive's website, um, access to Taric and its email, as well as our LinkedIn accounts, uh, that you can connect with us and our website as well. You know, the drill. Uh, we release episodes every single Tuesday at 9:00 AM Eastern, and we will see everybody next week on our next installment of the Founders Formula Podcast.
Thank you, Taric have a beautiful afternoon.
[00:28:00] Taric: You too. Thanks.