A game that would pay its players, and a pitch that defended the build
In May 2019 I took the seat of Seed Advisor, Go-to-Market, at Ink Games, the gaming arm of an Austin technology company then called InfluenceInk. Our capital partner, a registered broker, came in on the capital side with me, and the raise ran through Prince Capital as the licensed placement advisor. My side was the go-to-market plan and the story the round would be sold on. We worked the raise itself together.
Where the company was is easy to state. It had no revenue and no launched product. Its first title, World of Influence, was planned for the fourth quarter of 2019. The idea was a map game in which players own postal codes on a global map, earn from the activity inside their territory, and get paid for bringing in other players. The founder and CEO, Robert Towles, had a team that had built games at EA, Zynga and Buffalo Studios, and a deck and executive summary written in the summer of 2019 that put that history on the second page.
The problem I found was in the room, not in the deck. Investors were being walked through the current build, feature by feature, and they were diligencing features that would be gone by the next build. A mobile studio's current build is always a step behind whatever ships next. Defending it invites the wrong argument, because an investor who wins a point about a feature has learned nothing about whether the team will get the next build right.
What the company actually needed was two things. It needed a story an investor could believe before there was any revenue to point at, and it needed a short list of people who could close a seed check, worked by people whose word was worth something. A wide list worked fast by anyone willing to send an introduction was the default, and it was the wrong tool for a company with nothing yet to diligence except its people.
Sell the judgment, work the list together, and pay for it in meetings
The first decision was what a seed check in this company was a bet on. At seed, with no revenue history, the product is evidence of the team's judgment, not the asset. So the pitch moved off the build and onto the people: what they had shipped before, how they decided what to cut, how fast they iterated, and why this market and this mechanic. The build became a demonstration of that judgment instead of a thing to defend.
The second decision was harder, and it went against standard practice on purpose. When two people raise together, the usual move is to divide the contact list so nobody gets worked twice. Our capital partner and I had a large overlap in who we knew. We chose to go to the same people together.
The reasoning is narrower than "two vouches beat one". A contact who separately trusts both of us, and hears the same specific answer from each of us, is hearing two independent reads land on one conclusion. That is harder to dismiss than either opinion alone, but only if the contact can see the two reads are real and not two friends agreeing for free. So both of us held an equity position in the company, and the contact could see it. As a general contractor I had watched the same thing work with owners. A GC's recommendation of a subcontractor carries weight a broker's list does not, because the GC is on the hook for that sub's work and the owner knows it. A vouch is worth what the person vouching has at stake.
This is the structure, drawn as a table.
| What reaches the contact | What sits behind it | How it reads |
|---|---|---|
| One advisor, a divided list | ||
| One recommendation | A name on an introduction | One opinion, easy to discount |
| Two advisors, a divided list | ||
| Each contact still hears one recommendation | One name per contact; the second advisor is never seen | Twice the reach, the same weight per call |
| Two advisors, one shared contact, together | ||
| Our capital partner's read, from their own relationship with the contact | Their equity position in the company | One independent prior |
| My read, from my own relationship with the contact | My equity position in the company | A second independent prior |
| Both reads on the same answer, in the same conversation | Two stakes the contact can see | Two priors landing on one conclusion: this team is worth a seed check |
The price of that structure is written into the last rows. Every qualified conversation needed both of us in it at the same time, which means two calendars per call instead of one calendar across twice the names. Working jointly covers a list at roughly half the speed of dividing it. So the third decision followed from the second: if we were going to have fewer conversations, every one of them had to be with someone who could actually close.
How I came at this one
The question I asked first was what a seed check in a pre-revenue studio is actually a bet on. The answer was the team's judgment, and two people who each know the investor and each hold a stake are the strongest evidence of judgment a company with no revenue can offer. That question fit because the company's history was in its people, and ours was in the relationships.