Building an eSports Venture from Ohio to $10M+ in Revenue: eFuse CEO Matthew Benson (Part 2)

Matthew Benson: We built the MVP for eFuse. Almost an entire year later, we launched the product on January 2, 2020. On the initial launch, we didn’t have much success. We were just getting rolling and stumbling during the first three to four months. COVID hits right about that time. All eyeballs go to gaming.

One of the pieces we picked up on is a lot of people were turning to run online eSports tournaments. We pivoted the business to focus on building eSports infrastructure to facilitate different types of competition. We built this platform that we call the Arena. The first day we launched it, we had 10,000 visitors. From that point forward, we scaled the business to 500,000 in that first year.

Sramana Mitra: What’s Arena?

Matthew Benson: The Arena is white-label league management and tournament service that can run any sort of game title. Our system is essentially the referee and the scorekeeper for that.

Sramana Mitra: These are all online games that you are creating arenas for?

Matthew Benson: Exactly. Think along the lines of traditional sports with basketball, for example. We are the NCAA. We are also the referee.

Sramana Mitra: What is the business model?

Matthew Benson: It’s a B2B SaaS model. We license the technology to the game developers themselves. Think of the epics of the world like Fortnite. We’re licensing this technology for them to run eSports competitions at the high school and collegiate levels. That’s one outlet.

The other outlet is, we give this technology to brands to run eSports competitions in the gaming space. Crocs, for example, can spin up a gaming tournament, and recruit talent from our ecosystem to play in it. It’s an authentic way to get in front of the gaming audience and provide an opportunity for the next generation of gamers.

Sramana Mitra: You said you had 10,000 users. What was in the Arena that the 10,000 users came to?

Matthew Benson: The initial 10,000 folks came for a tournament. Through the journey, we met an individual influencer in the space who wanted to run a gaming tournament. He’s the one who came to us and said, “Will you build this for us?” Within a week, we built this scrappy MVP. When we finally launched that, we had 10,000 visitors on the first night.

We just white-labeled that and repeated it. Over 2020, we ended up getting 500,000 people to register. We did around $500,000 in revenue. We used that momentum to raise another round of funding. We raised $6 million. We took the business to over $10 million in revenue and up to 75 employees.

Sramana Mitra: What is the pricing model?

Matthew Benson: On the brand side, it’s super dependent on the game title but also the size and scope of the tournament. If we’re running a 100-person tournament, that’s easier to handle than 10,000 folks. We run tournaments anywhere from $25,000 on the low end to upwards of a million dollars on the high end.

Sramana Mitra: So it’s event-based pricing?

Matthew Benson: For the brands. On the game developer side, we are running their competitive ecosystem. We’re building the college league and building an infrastructure for them to run competitive play over the course of the entire year. Those are usually longer-form contracts. Those are in the seven-figure range.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Building an eSports Venture from Ohio to $10M+ in Revenue: eFuse CEO Matthew Benson
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