Serious Monkey Business with MiniMonos

MiniMonos is a virtual world for kids who love to play and love the planet. Originally from New Zealand, MiniMonos (which means little monkeys in Spanish) joined the Springboard accelerator programme and “flipped” to the UK when it became obvious most of their players were from the US and UK. Silicon Valley was always an option of course, especially since one of the founders is American, but the team liked the Springboard offer and picked Blighty. 9 months on and a roller-coaster ride later, do they still think they made the right decision?

My first meeting with the team was last May and only a 20 minute session – 1 of 10 quick fire mentoring sessions I did that day with each of the early stage businesses in the first Springboard in Cambridge – but I liked them immediately. As did many of the other mentors.

Melissa Clark-Reynolds, CEO and “AlphaMonkey”, is a well-known environmentalist and entrepreneur in native New Zealand. MiniMonos has enabled her to combine her experience of scaling startups with her passion for sustainability. CTO Greg Montgomery, aka “Monty”, has spent over 20 years in the software and games industry and “MissDawg”, CMO Kaila Colbin, is a prolific writer, internet veteran and climate change advocate. They were all seasoned entrepreneurs, about my age (that helps!) and convinced me entirely that they knew what they were doing.

Their business was further ahead than the other Springboard teams, so there was less opportunity to help them shape and build their proposition – something many mentors really enjoy - but with a beta launched and over 200,000 registered users, they had “traction”, ie some proof of concept demonstrated by a significant number of regular players and revenue, albeit small. Their need was help growing the user-base and revenue here through strategic partnerships, advertising and promotion as well as practical support getting their business up and running in the UK. All on a miniscule start-up budget.

So how have they done? A speaking slot at The Children’s Media Conference last July led to a major breakthrough: licensing deals with not just one, but two national kids magazines, Toxic and National Geographic Kids. They’ve also run a national advertising campaign on CITV and have MiniMonos gift cards (basically pre-paid membership) on sale in every branch of Sainsbury’s. From almost nowhere, they’re now the 4th most popular kids virtual world after illustrious and long-running competitors Club Penguin, Moshi Monsters and Bin Weevils. As of February 2012, they had 800,000 registered users with approximately 60,000 new sign-ups per month and monthly revenues of $20,000. Far from profitable but more than enough to cover marketing costs as well as funding projects which provide clean drinking water to kids in India and others that protect endangered animals. And with lots more licensing deals (including a trading card game, books, magazines, modeling kits and ethical merchandising) in the pipeline, user numbers and revenue will continue to grow.

Just as important in start-up land, what have they learnt? For one, most of their new users are Brits and they’ve found that the UK “monetizes” better than other markets. 2.5% of users are now spending money in the game compared to 0.57% this time last year. Melissa believes that their competitors have “trained UK players to pay”. But while Club Penguin and Moshi Monsters only charge for membership, effectively capping their average revenue per user (ARPU) at $6/month, MiniMonos has achieved an ARPU of $11/month through a combination of membership and micro-transactions.

They’ve also learnt how to do things cheap. They were able to create a TV advert using internal resources and use it to reach their exact target audience across the whole UK for only a few thousand pounds. Now they have some scale, they can use their muscle to negotiate even better rates.

Last but not least, they’ve found their niche. While Moshi Monsters tilts towards girls, MiniMonos are targeting boys aged 8 and older. They say girls will play boys games, but not vice-versa. There are also many licensees that missed out on a deal with Moshi Monsters and are hungry to work with alternatives.

So now they know how to grow, they need additional finance (or banana-chips!) to help them do it faster. Rupert Cook, corporate finance specialist, joined the company as Chairman and has been helping with fund raising activity. Stay tuned for news on that.

I’ll leave it to Melissa to answer my original question, “The UK has absolutely been the right place for us to get our business to the next level. We now know the product is a good fit for the UK market which tells us it will work well in other territories. Thanks to the great connections we’ve made here, we’re confident we’ll be able to keep progressing really fast and feel ready to take on the world!”

Some thoughts on the Livingstone Hope Review

By the time I arrived at today's launch of the Livingstone Hope Review of the skills for the UK video games and visual effects industries, it was standing room only at The Vue Leicester Square. The interesting 90-minute presentation kicked off with a video compilation of key interviews and best practice examples captured during the review. It was followed by presentations from the report's authors: polymath Ian Livingstone (Games Workshop founder, fantasy author, Life President of Eidos) and Alex Hope (co-founder and MD of Double Negative). Finally, for a panel Q&A session, the pair were joined by Ed Vaizey, Hasan Nakhshi from Nesta and John Hayes, Minister of State for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning.

The report's overall findings didn't come as a great surprise - what with three teenage stepchildren at various stages of secondary and tertiary education in the household - but some individual statistics did shock me:

• 44% of school teachers thought that ICT was the most important subject for a career in the video games industry, while only 5% thought computer science was the most important.
• Computer science isn't part of the national curriculum, although ICT is.
• Of the 28,767 teachers qualified and registered with the GTC in 2010, only three had a primary qualification in computer science or computing.
• The vast majority of young people in particular, but also their parents and teachers, assumed that Grand Theft Auto, Lego Star Wars and Singstar were all developed in the US rather than in the UK (where they actually were developed of course). Ditto for Prince of Persia, Harry Potter and Inception.
• 58% of video games employers report difficulty in filling positions... yet only 12% of graduates from specialist video games courses find a job in the sector within six months of graduating.
• 48% of graduates working in the video games industry have science, technology, engineering or maths (STEM) degrees.

Of the 20 or so recommendations, the following struck me as especially strong:

• Computer science should be an essential part of the National Curriculum.
• Sign up the best computer science teachers through bursaries and "golden hellos".
• Encourage art-tech crossover
• Develop kitemarking schemes to differentiate the best HE courses from less industry-relevant ones
• Target funding at strategically important and vulnerable subjects.

The skills needs outlined above aren't specific to the games industry; Microsoft, Google, Facebook and the like also need them. Another much in demand skill set has emerged in the social media world: data analytics. Surely it's time for a fundamental rethink about our educational priorities and how degree courses are marketed to potential students? Maybe with the increase in tuition fees, prospective students will be more curious about graduate employment rates.