My name is Slava Heretz and I am the founder and CEO of Camlann — an indie PC and console game publisher.

I began my career in the early 2000s in finance and accounting: specifically strategic finance. 

I started out doing a lot of modeling work, but as my role grew, I ended up getting familiar with MarTech, AdTech, and PRTech. 

Eventually that led to doing fractional CFO work for pre-seed to Series A startups between Boston and Silicon Valley. 

I turned that into a tech-enabled services business, which I exited in 2020.

I decided to combine everything I learned about go-to-market with my passion for gaming and started Camlann in 2022.

We use AI to generate a majority of the marketing and sales work that launching a new game requires. 

We offer an industry-leading revenue share and simple, streamlined workflows that have historically been overly complex or disjointed in the industry.

We most recently raised a $700K angel/pre-seed round in the last 12 months.

We decided to start fundraising from November to December of 2022 after we had onboarded our first set of customers. 

We wanted to have enough money to scale and enough runway to get to our next raise.

Given the tough fundraising environment of 2023, we decided we needed to get some fundraising momentum — even though we had to give up some ground on valuation.

We wanted to be able to fill our pipeline with games that we can release. 

We also needed to service the games we already had in our portfolio. 

Our investors wanted to see us repeat the process of filling our potential client pipeline all the way through to launching the game — dozens of times.

We started by focusing on the tier 1 gaming-focused VCs, but at the time it was far too early for them. 

I decided to pivot to a more generalist approach by pitching to investors I knew focused on the MarTech and AdTech space — but who were not necessarily gaming-focused. 

That’s where we got our first investor. As we develop further and get more traction we will circle back to those bigger gaming focused VCs.

I started with a broad list of all potential investors and eliminated those who were clearly not a fit — either because they focused on the wrong stage or the wrong industry.

Early-stage gaming VCs were our obvious target, but we also considered industry-agnostic VCs who might be open to us.

We began by securing as many meetings as possible with gaming-specific VCs before expanding our outreach to generalist investors — where we eventually found success.

We had close to 100 intros, about 40 pitch meetings and ended up with 1 main investor who brought in a couple of partner funds. 

It was technically 3 checks, but Comeback Capital was the lead.

Our strategy was to position ourselves as the most data-driven and leanest offering of our kind in the market.

In the video game industry, there are various approaches to operations. We aimed to demonstrate with the numbers that we can scale to $100M in revenue.

We wanted to highlight that every decision we make is data-driven and ROI-focused, benefiting both us as the publisher and our partner studios. We are fully aligned with the success of our games.

A key point is that we can run a lean operation by using AI to eliminate many manual tasks, allowing us to maintain significantly lower costs than our competitors.

We also have a proprietary process for selecting high ROI games.

Our timing is ideal as shown by our strong 'Why Now?' slide, given that the big studios are currently laying off employees.

The recent FTC decision to eliminate non-competes has increased our potential customer base as developers from larger studios are more likely to start their own smaller operations.

I sent out monthly updates to every VC we have spoken to. Even if they said no before, as our model is further proven out, they are likely to come back around. 

Having a16z come in at the beginning of this year through their creator fund was a great signal — it excited my monthly update list of 200+ people.

The macro environment made it difficult because there was a feeling that the gaming industry was in a downturn — this made investors much more selective. 

One sticking point several of them brought up was founder-market fit. They did not see the connection between my background in finance and starting a video game tech business.

One big positive is that I'm now a 2x founder — that's definitely helped alleviate some of the investor concerns.

Fundraising at an early stage can involve a lot of up and down moments. It can be difficult to continue to push forward when you are getting a lot of “no”s. 

Our goal when pitching to these investors has been to explain that our model won't resemble a traditional SaaS business, where a contract is sold and quickly generates revenue.

There is a long lag between winning a client and the release of the game. Instead of traditional revenue KPIs, we rely on measurable hype KPIs.

There's a lot of data in this space showing that measurable hype converts to game sales, but convincing investors of this has been particularly challenging.

Now that we've had our first batch of successful releases, investors are increasingly starting to believe in our vision.

You have to bring a strategic mindset to the whole fundraising process. There is a sense in which it is like a competitive game.

You also have to know what the people you are talking to care about. If you focus on just the data — but they want to see a big vision: it will not go well.

Do your research on who you're meeting with.

Our existing investors have been great. Comeback Capital, Right Side Capital Management, Darwin Ventures, Integral and a16z have all participated in our pre-seed round — I'd recommend them to founders.

If you sign up for Medium and tick off the boxes about VC, fundraising, and tech — you get some great content from insiders.