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It is a long weekend in the United States and we have Monday off. I hope I am napping on the couch with three dogs drooling around me, all four of us sleeping.
But! First! There's a lot to do, so let's dive into one startup's pivot from earlier in the week and talk about money.
There are a lot of people in the world of the esports world. It is possible to figure out what is going on in your favorite game even if it is built atop different games, forums, tournament series, platforms, chat apps, and websites. Back in 2020, Juked.gg set out to build a news hub for all things esports.
The company raised a seven-figure round back in early 2021. Ben Goldhaber said that the service had a period of rapid growth, which he described as "up and to the right" in a graph form.
What happened? According to Goldhaber, who also goes by the gamertag FishStix, Juked wasn't reaching a larger audience than the top 1% of fans. The company asked its users what they thought of its service. Goldhaber said that users brought up issues endemic to the game like community toxicity and hot takes.
The social network was pivoted to build a less toxic place for fans of the game.
After testing it with around 750 users, the product was made more generally available on Thursday.
According to data from AppAnnie, the service did chart among users in the United States this week, but only in the social networking category. We will check back with the company in a few months to see how downloads go.
I had to agree to a strong set of terms to sign up, and there are still big questions about how the service intends to combat toxicity at scale. Users will have to sign up with a phone number if they want to use human moderation with artificial intelligence. Good ideas, but not great for a company at mass scale.
I like what Juked has been working on. I am not in the market for a new social network. Let's see if the startup's in-market juke can help it score more points. We wouldn't fall over in shock if the company worked to raise more cash since it has been a year since its equity crowdfunding round.
This week brought more earnings calls from tech companies. We've had our eyes on the market for hints about what's to come.
We dive into how important forward guidance is for tech companies. Trailing results seem to be less important to investors than what they think will happen in the future. We took notes when Amplitude was taken down. We don't think that we're pointing a finger at the recent public Amplitude because there were other companies that took similar knocks. It was direct-listed last year.
Appian's earnings were another side to the coin. The low-code automation company has been a quiet story in the public market. That's not a bad thing; its CEO Matt Calkins told me this week about the company's results.
How so? Calkins defines innovation as more than just building something. He told us that it isn't enough to make something cool. If the company doesn't market a new feature, sell it, and use it, then it hasn't actually innovated. He said that innovation is not a product. He said that the final result of innovation is a customer testimonials of a new feature. People need to know that something exists so that they can try it.
I like his point of view. It helps explain why the creation of a collection of hypotheses is more innovative than the creation of useful tools in the market today.
I need a little more before I let you go. The staffing crunch in the United States is helping companies like Appian because it is driving up the cost of hiring. The company is seeing demand from customers to automate more of their work because employees don't want to do it. Employees bounce.
Appian's growth has been increasing for a while now. It had an earnings report that led to a gain. The bar that companies have to clear today to get a few hundred basis points of market cap extension is our entry point. It is a much harder market than it was a few quarters ago. The IPO window is kaput because of this.
I hope your weekend is relaxing.
Alex.
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