The superstar teams can just ping the best investors and raise with a $10m valuation with a pitch deck and a prototype. If you’re not in that category of founders, you want to approach the fundraising process by reaching out to dozens of investors. Possibly fifty or a hundred. Angel investors and VCs.

Today I’m talking with Vladimir Funtikov, the Co-Founder and CEO of Creative Mobile, from Tallinn, Estonia. Vlad and his team were one of the earliest mobile teams to strike it big on Android back in the day. The team started scaling things up quickly and through their rollercoaster ride, Vlad has learned a lot about company building. We’ll now hear more from Vlad himself.

It’s Joakim here. Greetings from Helsinki! In the past week, I’ve completed two books: The Practice: Shipping Creative Work (2020), by Seth Godin, and Turning the Flywheel (2019) by Jim Collins. The books have similarities but they’re also quite different.

In October of 2020, I did a podcast interview with the Finnish financial publication Talouselämä, on the topic of burnout, recovery, and entrepreneurship. Since the recording was shared in Finnish, I went and transcribed it in English.

Photo by Damir Mijailovic on Pexels.com I've been thinking about the ideal gaming company management. What kind of roles do you want at the top of the gaming company, next to the CEO? I love flat organizations, but I think there are many pros in the hierarchical...

In October of 2020, I did a webinar on playtesting mobile games with Elie Mouraud from PlaytestCloud. We talked about how you can learn more about your game by focusing on the player’s experience, from early on in the development, all the way to soft launching and going live.

Hi there, It's Joakim here. Greetings from Helsinki! I’ve finally settled a date on the angel investing online community launch: Gaming Angel Fellowship will launch on December 7th. Sign up starts next week. Here is what you get when you sign up for the...

Photo by fotografierende on Pexels.com The first part of this article series on stock options for gaming startups addressed how startups should look at giving out stock options to their staff, by creating an ESOP, which stands for employee stock option plan. There...

This week I read the new book from Morgan Housel called Psychology of Money which contains some 18 chapters on the way people think and behave when it comes to their finances.

Today I'm talking with Sean...

I recently recorded a podcast with Steve Young from App Masters. We talked about my experiences from small and big gaming studios, and how to grow as entrepreneurs.

I wanted to write about Reference checks. With startups, there’s a variety of roles to hire for. And investors will do their own checks on the founders.

On September of 2020, I did the...

If back in the day when I was starting Next Games, I would have said to the co-founders, “Hey, Compass Point: West will take too much time to develop. We need to kill this game…

Photo by Bich Tran on Pexels.com When a startup is raising funding for the first time, the question is, what is the format that the money will come into your company? There are two prevailing instruments. You have a convertible note and an equity-based funding round...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVsEIUVlbcw In this webinar, Joakim Achren from Elite Game Developers and Elie Mouraud from PlaytestCloud will go through some big example cases of how playtesting for mobile games can be a success. Presentations Here are the...

Today I'm talking with Jason...

Photo by Shashank Verma on Pexels.com It's Joakim here. Greetings from Helsinki! This week, I've been continuing my work on the course material work on the Gaming Angel Fellowship's angel investor course. I've scheduled a few angel interviews now, and those...

On October 8th,...

Photo by Everton Nobrega on Pexels.com "EGD News" now goes out to 1,820 people, so I want to begin with a thank you for sharing this newsletter every week. If you have a friend who should subscribe, please send them this link. I'm halfway done with creating the...