What it is
Ink Games is the gaming arm of an Austin technology company then called InfluenceInk. In May 2019 it had no revenue and no launched product. Its first title, World of Influence, was planned for the fourth quarter of 2019: a map game the deck called "Pokemon Go meets Monopoly", in which players own postal codes, earn from the activity in 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. The company later shipped Prize Kingdoms, which sells itself on the line Play. Win. Earn.
What Common Ground did
- Fowler took the seat of Seed Advisor, Go-to-Market, and ran the go-to-market plan and the story the seed round would be sold on. Common Ground's capital partner came in on the capital side, and the raise ran through Prince Capital as the licensed placement advisor.
- Moved the pitch off the current build and onto the team. Investors were being walked through features that would be gone by the next build. At seed, with no revenue, the check is a bet on the team's judgment, so the build became a demonstration of that judgment instead of something to defend.
- Worked shared contacts jointly instead of splitting the list, against standard practice. A contact who trusts two advisors separately, and hears the same answer from each for the same reason, is hearing two independent reads. That only counts if each read costs its owner something, so both advisors held an equity position in the company and the contact could see it. Fowler had watched the same thing work as a general contractor: a GC's recommendation of a subcontractor carries weight because the GC is on the hook for that sub's work.
- Paid for that weight in reach, and built a filter to protect two calendars at once: take a pitch meeting only when a named person inside the fund will carry the deal without the advisors in the room, and when the fund's decision process fits a seed timeline. Two yeses, or no meeting.
- Read the launch plan around its channel rather than an ad budget. A game that pays players to recruit replaces paid acquisition with a payout line, so the questions ran in order: does the game hold a player who is never paid, what is a referred paying subscriber worth against the payout that brought them, who holds the first territories, and one title or several.
- Closed the advisory in September 2020, once the seed had closed and the launch was behind the company. Fowler kept his position after the paid work ended.
Results
- The seed round closed in 2020, for a company with no revenue, on the strength of its people, worked off shared contacts through Prince Capital.
- The company went on to raise a Series A in September 2021 and a Series B in August 2022. Those rounds are the company's own work.
- It shipped Prize Kingdoms, which leads with play before earning, the first question the launch plan was read against.
- The two-question meeting filter outlived the raise and is still how Fowler decides whether to take a raise meeting.
External links
- Public data room: Ink Games data room
Public record
At a glance
| Project type | Seed-stage go-to-market |
|---|---|
| Industry | Mobile gaming |
| Seat | Seed Advisor, Go-to-Market |
| Ran through | Common Ground; the raise ran through Prince Capital |
| Dates | May 2019 to September 2020 |
| Duration | Seventeen months |
| Location | Austin, Texas |
| Public data room | Ink Games data room |
| Related pages | Common Ground, Prince Capital |
| Credit | Created by Common Ground |