![]() ![]() Incubators, such as YC or Techstars, fund a large number of independent companies, taking low equity with low involvement in each. Is it a studio model, incubator, or investment firm? With seed funding you can meet high consumer expectations, move faster, explore more ideas, and pay yourself and your founding team. It can be expensive to prototype an idea to a viable level of design and feature completeness, and bootstrapping may not always be a financially feasible or desirable option. By the time I left we were spending millions pre-launch to produce each title. When I joined Zynga the social space was very new with many indie developers earning millions of dollars from apps that took mere weeks to develop. It has been over 10 years since mobile, the most recent mainstream consumer platform, was introduced, and break-out indie successes are increasingly rare. Everyone has an “idea shelf”Ĭonsumers expect a relatively high production value for the applications they use.Īs time passes from the introduction of a new consumer platform, the average production value of apps on the platform goes up. You become a magnet for your friends’ good ideas.You set expectations with employees and investors.There is no shame in a “pivot” because it’s by design.You can be more objective / lower-ego about the success or failure of each idea.Setting the intention up front has many benefits: Why explicitly set the intention to experiment? The most common questions I get about the search lab model, directly or indirectly, are the following: I hope that offering my perspective here can inspire other founders who want to take the same approach. I know a few founders who have run this model but none who have written about it publicly. Most people I meet aren’t familiar with the concept of a search lab. I wrote about those efforts in more detail here. This is my 3rd search lab after Curiosoft (which found Dope Wars in 2007, the precursor to Mafia Wars in 2008) and Liquid Labs (which found Gigster in 2014). The name is inspired by the concept of search funds in private equity. Early team members at a search lab are highly entrepreneurial, often choosing to join forces rather than pursue their own startup efforts. It can start with a pre-seed or seed round and, if more funding is required, can advance with a proper seed or series A. We are running a “search lab” model, testing ideas in areas like social networking, travel, and premium services, then building an enduring company around the winner - a product that improves life for millions of consumers.Ī search lab is a full-time, funded effort to systematically launch and test business ideas until a promising candidate for a company is found. After 5 great years at Gigster, I am thankful to have that opportunity again with fantastic backers including Founders Fund and many of Gigster’s early investors. I’ve missed working in consumer since the early hypergrowth days of social gaming. I’m excited to announce I am starting a new company in the consumer space - Untitled Labs! ![]()
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