Monetizing Esports | Evolving EVOS #4

Since the other the countries for EVOS were starting to stabilize, I wanted to continue to expand the footprint of the organisation & Thailand seemed to be the perfect location for the next stop.

Scouting & Acquiring

The first step was looking for an entry point & this wasn’t easy. We didn’t know much about the market & it was different from Vietnam since we didn’t have prior knowledge of the country’s esports scene. The only thing we had was a solid strategy. It worked for Indonesia & if it’s not broken, we aren’t going to fix it. It was simple 4 plan strategy.

Acquire Fame > Build & Market the Brand > Monetize > Focus on Winning.

The first step was to scout on the most popular teams in the country, we needed to grab the attention of the local fans. While the brand EVOS Esports might have some credibility in Indonesia & Vietnam, we were nobodies in Thailand.

This is an important thing to understand when entering a new country is to reframe the mentality of the company. A new country means new market & new people. The first step was building infrastructure, a strong foundation to build the brand & understands esports. Our first hire in Thailand was Jarupong, he was in charge of League of Legends in Thailand while working for Garena, esports was his bread & butter and he knew the community in the back of his hand, Since we had a reliable figure to enter Thailand, we went for it.

Some say, he's the most legendary Caster in the Thailand Esports Scene ??

Authenticity is King

The one principle I believe in till this day is to be genuine and authentic while doing business, if you truly love what you do, you will be able to find a way to make it work, even if it means taking a long way around. Well, this principle helped EVOS pick up our first team in Thailand. To fully understand what I mean, let me share you a story.

We scouted around the country and decided that team Debut.ROV was the best bet for EVOS to enter Thailand, the team had extremely popular personalities, namely Guy & Krit who were at 200k & 1Million subscribers on YouTube respectively. They were the perfect candidates & fit our strategy of acquiring fame as our first step.

The problem was that since they were big stars, a lot of other brands were also looking at them. In particular, a huge brand was in talks with the team and was very close to signing them up. We knew missing out on the team would deal a huge blow to growth in Thailand so failure wasn’t an option.

In the end, we succeeded cause of our authenticity.

What happened was we took a meeting with the team and told them we weren’t leaving today without them signing a contract with EVOS. Wesley and I took our seats on the table and wouldn’t budge. We wanted to show that we genuinely wanted to grow with the players, we had a plan to grow their personal brands, making them superstars, we weren’t just using them as a tool for our benefit, we were a team. The players saw it the same way and understood the best way moving forward was signing with us & the deal was done.

EVOS.Debut was born.

Bumpy Road, Take Me Home

Since we were able to pick up a team, we could slowly replicate our strategy from Indonesia and implement it in Thailand. As we managed to hire a capable Country Manager to handle the country, the operations would basically “autorun”. Therefore, I focused on another aspect for the company, fundraising.

You see, it was around the same time, we started to garner some attention from the public, more notably, our brand was starting to make waves in the investor network. My partners and I thought this was an ideal time to raise funds for the organisation in order to prepare for the expansion of the organisation.

We were in deep talks with an investor group and things were looking positive but in the end, the deal was too lopsided, and it would have changed our business strategy completely as they wanted too much control in the aspect of our direction for the company, so the fundraising talks broke down.

Of course naturally, this caused plenty of friction between the other partners and I, our opinions on the company direction were becoming extremely different. Thankfully, in the end, we were able to realign with one another and our focus was back on growing the business. We all agree that we had to expand to another vertical in order to maximize the monetization in esports, the next big moneymaker was Talent Management, but we needed money to build the vertical.

The issues started to come back and it seemed like there weren’t any solutions.

I decided to take a flight back home to Singapore to reset & well, that worked wonders.

Growing Verticals

Since I was already back in Singapore, I thought might as well try to make some calls & see if anything could happen. I decided to meet up Insignia Ventures to check if they were interested to potentially invest in the organisation, no real harm to ask, fortunately, they were.

I immediately called up my other partners to check on their thoughts on this and while there were concerns on the deal, in the end, everyone agreed it was the right move to make since we needed money to grow our new vertical.

And well, we signed the term sheet at the condition that the money comes in within a month’s time in order for us to invest and build the Talent Management vertical. The rest was history & with the deal signed, EVOS entered phase 2, establishing influence. We had to redraft plans to grow the company & making sure the investment was effective.

Moving Forward

The investment also gave my partners and I a lot of confidence in EVOS Esports, and everyone decided to work full time on EVOS to see how big it can really grow. In the coming months, we were able to seal sponsorship deals with Popmie, KripKrip, AXE & SingaCoffee in Indonesia, further strengthening our influence in esports, enforcing the idea that EVOS Esports has the potential to grow even more, we just had to find more innovative ways to utilize our influence.

That’s the thing, esports is still a new industry and people don’t really know much about it. To be honest with you, when my partners and I started EVOS, we never thought it would have gone so far. What started as a hobby ended up becoming a career. Looking back on my journey, it was majorly positive but there were a lot of rash decisions & wrong moves as well.

There is no textbook on “how to build a successful esports brand”, no one has it figured out yet. It was all trial by error and even today, we are still trying new things, hoping it will stick. Then again, that’s the fun of esports, you’ll never know what’s going to work, it’s about innovating & that’s why I love this industry so much.

With that being said, this is the end of my 4-part series documenting my journey in EVOS Esports. I hope my writings will be able to reach out to at least 1 reader and inspire them to chase their own passion. Venturing into the unknown might be a scary thought but if you never try, it will stay as a pipe dream.

For EVOS Esports, this is far from the end. There are still plenty of plans to grow & trust me when I say this is just the start.

#EVOSROAR