Sharing Doofy’s YC Application that got us an interview. Good luck to all future applicants :)
Company name:
Doofy
Company url, if any:
Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.
India’s 1st Cloud Game Streaming Platform
What is your company going to make? Please describe your product and what it does or will do.
A web client and native apps for macOS, Windows & mobile devices to stream and play any game from our gaming server without any lags or latency issues.
Where do you live now, and where would the company be based after YC?
Bangalore, India / Bangalore, India
Please tell us about an interesting project, preferably outside of class or work, that two or more of you created together. Include urls if possible.
Over the years, we have worked/experimented/collaborated on several MVP’s. These include a diagnostic device startup, flower delivery startup & a merchandise platform for youtube channels/podcasts.
How long have the founders known one another and how did you meet? Have any of the founders not met in person?
Hari and Myself studied at the same high school and have been great friends since 2009.
How many founders are on the team?
2
CATEGORY
Which category best applies to your company?
Gaming
PROGRESS
How far along are you?
We created an MVP under two weeks and launched on Product Hunt a week ago. We were on the front page of Product hunt for our launch was discovered & featured by CNN-Times18. Our paid users have grown from 0 to over 50 in under a week just through product unt.
How long have each of you been working on this? How much of that has been full-time? Please explain.
Around a month. I (Anirudh Balagopal) have been full time while Hari is sharing his time between Doofy and his Phd.
Are people using your product?
Yes
How many active users or customers do you have? If you have some particularly valuable customers, who are they? If you’re building hardware, how many units have you shipped?
Around 50 paid users and 500 signups
Do you have revenue?
Yes
Anything else you would like us to know regarding your revenue or growth rate?
We launched last week and have around 50 paid subscriptions. We have been growing 10% daily.
IDEA
Why did you pick this idea to work on? Do you have domain expertise in this area? How do you know people need what you’re making?
This is a problem our co-founder Hari had. We have validated the market by launching on Product Hunt without a free trial and getting paid users.
What’s new about what you’re making? What substitutes do people resort to because it doesn’t exist yet (or they don’t know about it)?
We are India’s first cloud gaming platform. People have been buying expesnive gaming consoles or using VPN to access services like GeforceNOW or Stadia.
Who are your competitors, and who might become competitors? Who do you fear most?
Stadia, Geforce Now, xCloud & PS Now are our competitors globally but none of them are available in India. We are quite different from Stadia, xCloud & PS Now since we offer unlimited game selection and ability to use pre-owned games in your Steam or Epic Games account, while you have to either use free games or buy new games in Stadia Stadia, xCloud & PS Now suffer from a serious limitation of game selection.
Geforce Now does offer Steam integration globally but since we offer integration with any store the customer requests gaming stores in India, we already have a better selection. That said, Geforce Now would be our biggest direct competitor if they launch in India.
What do you understand about your business that other companies in it just don’t get?
The other companies do not take the indian gaming market seriously, which explains their absence in the country. The network infrastructure and percent of population with internet accessibility is growing exponentially in India, which we plan to take advantage of. There are other advantages to the indian market including a high percentage of youth compared to western countries, and sheer concentration of gamers in a few metropolitan cities which makes them accessible to low latency gaming from nearby servers. The economics resulting from the majority of gaming PCs, graphics cards and other devices being imported resulting in lack of accessibility for the middle income group also makes the subscription based cloud gaming quite enticing.
We also understand the two major pain-points that our users have — Ability to stream flawlessly in the indian network, and Unlimited Selection of Games.
How do or will you make money? How much could you make?
(We realize you can’t know precisely, but give your best estimate.)
We offer no free trial- our users have to buy game passes to use our service.
India has around 300 million online gamers. Capturing 10% of this market at estimated $10 monthly subscription would amount to a $3.6 Billion ARR.
How will you get users? If your idea is the type that faces a chicken-and-egg problem in the sense that it won’t be attractive to users till it has a lot of users (e.g. a marketplace, a dating site, an ad network), how will you overcome that?
Our users are already growing organically after our product hunt launch. We are already seeing quite a bit word of mouth and have been featured on CNN-Times18 etc. We plan to get more users by offering referral programs, hosting gaming competitons etc
