Transitioning from a Developer to a Distributor of Mobile Games: Lon Otremba, CEO of Tylted (Part 3)

Sramana: Where did your journey go after Muzak?

Lon Otremba: After I left I joined New York Angels and I was looking at a few other situations where I could be a good fit. In the mean time I became an investor and board member in both Internet media companies as well as medical technology companies. Bessemer Ventures called up and explained that they had invested in Access 360 Media. I started working on that as a project and it evolved into me becoming the CEO and raising capital. I grew that business from scratch and we ended up making an acquisition before selling the company.

A little over a year ago I was approached by a different set of VCs about a mobile business that had been started by a couple of engineers who had built neat technology. They wanted to the business taken to the next level and they asked if I would be interested in evaluating the opportunity. I thought the business had good potential and a good starting point.

The most compelling part of the opportunity was that it was at the vortex of three big trends in business media today. Those trends are mobile, social, and gaming. I thought that was a huge opportunity for me to jump into. It was raw and needed a lot of work. I knew I needed to pull a big team together and raise some capital. I decided to take that challenge and I have been here for the last year. We have been on a roll redeveloping the vision of the company. We renamed the company to Tylted from Cullufun. While we are still squarely in the heart of social and mobile gaming we are clearly in the middle of a broader opportunity. If we put the right pieces together we could build something much larger than a gaming studio.

Sramana: What is Tylted?

Lon Otremba: Tylted is a mobile-first social-casual game platform. Tylted has developed a catalogue of mobile-casual games and has used those games to attract an audience. Today we have around 10 million unique players on the mobile web every month. That audience is the starting point for a lot of interaction and activity. They play games, talk to each other and spend real money on virtual currency. They have created a mobile virtual world and we use that as the starting point for building out a rich platform of communication and commerce tools. We also have built a set of tools for outside gamers to use to make their games available to our users on our platform.

All of that happens today in the mobile web. All of the game play and communication happens in the browser. We have decided to use HTML5 in this way and as a result we are becoming an alternate distribution platform for mobile game content beyond app stores. We have been signing up game publishers over the past four months at a substantial pace. Publishers view us as a way of acquiring user and customers without having to deal with the economics of acquiring customers in app stores. There are 250,000 games in the app store today. To break through that kind of clutter and meaningfully attract users requires money. It costs them 1.50 dollars to acquire users whereas if they leverage us and the user base we already have they can get customer acquisitions at a fraction of the cost.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Transitioning from a Developer to a Distributor of Mobile Games: Lon Otremba, CEO of Tylted
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