Building a Virtual World from Berlin: Smeet CEO Sebastian Funke (Part 6)

Sramana: You now have a solid revenue stream and a good user base. Where do you go from here?

Sebastian Funke: We don’t see Smeet as a single game. We see it as a social interaction platform. You can enter it through our website or through our application. It is a cloud of different rooms which have different games. One account and avatar gets you to all of those games. We leverage the social graph by posting and requesting out of our product even if you don’t come through Facebook. We want to create more applications on Facebook which all lead users into the Smeet platform.

Sramana: Let’s examine some of the Facebook applications you are seeing right now. What does your current Facebook application let users do?

Sebastian Funke: Basically it is just an entry point into Smeet. It does not have any specific functionality. We are working on game applications which will be able to stand alone but will be able to integrate the user into our platform. We think gaming and social applications will be very strong.

Sramana: What is your financial roadmap? Are you profitable, or do you need to raise more money?

Sebastian Funke: We have been profitable. We have decided with our current investors to focus on growing the team. We have 110 people now, and we are building on those application. We are focused now on getting really good people. I am hiring people from Electronic Arts and other quality companies to work on our new product. We are looking for more funding to bring this company to the next level. What we have done over the past three years has brought the company to $13 million of annual revenue with an investment close to 4 million euros. That is decent efficiency, and now we face the issue of scaling. We will continue to develop our Facebook products as well as some mobile products.

Sramana: Is your development team in Berlin?

Sebastian Funke: The development and product is in Berlin. Our New York office focuses on marketing and helps us to understand the U.S. market.

Sramana: Do you provide different languages for all the European markets you cater to?

Sebastian Funke: Yes we do. We even use native speakers in our office to help with translations, marketing, and community management. It is really important to us to do that.

Sramana: Where are you going to raise your next round, in Europe or the U.S.?

Sebastian Funke: Most likely in Europe. We have spoken with some U.S. investors but is seems like they want a larger presence in the U.S. We currently have about 10% of our user base in the U.S. which is not big enough to gain significant interest in that country.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Building a Virtual World from Berlin: Smeet CEO Sebastian Funke
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