Grant Farwell is the Chairman and Co-Founder of Matcherino, an esports platform that helps game publishers and tournament organizers run successful esports tournaments.

Prior to Matcherino, Grant founded Barc, a social web browsing experience for people browsing the same web sites. This was before the rise of services like discord and slack and offered some of the same functionality. Grant says that while the team had a solid technology base, they struggled with sales and monetization. This led to the eventual shutdown of Barc and the start of Matcherino.

In this episode, we talk about the esports industry and challenges tournament organizers face, we talk about doing sales in startups, and we talk about brands and sponsorship in esports.

Quote

And it was really like an aha moment… All these fans wanted to donate money… and to not just financially, but in so many different ways, contribute to this event that was happening.

– Grant Farwell

Notes

• story behind the camel
• economics, crypto and financial platforms
• Barc'ing up the wrong tree
• listening to customers but not taking suggestions literally
• matcherino and techstars
• esports, tournaments and payouts
• sustainability in esports
• how brands navigate esports
• present and future of esports

Closing

• inspiration
  • being at esport tournament with fans, seeing communities getting together and helping support it
• surprising fact
  • life is quite boring at home, mostly working
• principle
  • treat everyone like how you would want to be treatedk- closing notes
  • if you want to engage with esports fans, matcherino can help you reach these audience and drive whatever KPIs you're looking to drive

Links

• Matcherino: Grant's company, esports platform to help game publishers and tournament organizers run successful tournaments
• Techstars: Startup Accelerator

These shownotes are also available at http://folkstories.org/21

• folkstories.org
• @kevins8