Stakester
- Product design
- Product management
- Web design & development
- Brand
- Leadership
- Role
- Co-Founder & Head of Product
- Years
- 2019–22
- Team
- 30+
In 2019 Tom Fairey, Quantexa’s former CMO, asked me to co-found Stakester and lead its product: esports competitions for everyone.
Casual gamers play each other one on one, on games like FIFA, with cash for the winner.
Brand and pitch
First I made what we needed to raise our pre-seed round: the brand, product visuals, a website built in Webflow, the pitch deck and a roadmap.
The MVP
The MVP had hard problems to solve: connecting two strangers, on our platform and on PlayStation or Xbox; proving who won; and getting enough players that a newcomer finds a game fast.
Leading product
More than 1,000 competitions in a test weekend proved the idea, and won us VC funding. As we grew to a team of more than 30, I moved from design to leadership: strategy, roadmap and KPIs from the app’s data, and an agile pipeline across our own developers and an external team.
New directions
I led us into mobile games, and into web3, with a collection of NFTs I conceived and designed to add to the app.
Outcome
We raised at a peak valuation of £80m, but some things we couldn’t overcome, like Sony launching its own competitions on PlayStation Plus.
I’m proud of what we built from nothing. What worked, and what didn’t, made me even keener on start-ups.
- Sign-ups
- 100k
- Peak monthly active users
- 8,000
- Peak valuation
- £80m
“I loved working alongside Andy on Stakester. He’s not only a great designer, but an organised and dedicated team leader, project manager and product visionary.”
