SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
EP 595: nDreams is #1 VR Application Creator, 250,000 Sold, $6M in Funding with CEO Patrick O'Luanaigh
11 Mar 2017
Chapter 1: What inspired Patrick O'Luanaigh to focus on virtual reality?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have.
Chapter 2: What challenges does nDreams face in the VR market?
I'm now at $20,000 per top. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination.
Chapter 3: Which game has generated the most revenue for nDreams?
We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark. And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Okay, Top Tribe, this week's winner of the $100 is Zach Ferron. He's a 22-year-old Apple employee, and he's listening to the show and loving it.
Chapter 4: How does nDreams measure success in their games?
For your chance to win $100 every Monday, simply subscribe to the podcast on iTunes now, and then text the word NATHAN to 33444 to prove that you did it to enter. Coming up tomorrow morning, you're gonna learn from a founder who has helped over a thousand passengers get to where they want to go. They've got three co-founders, four employees.
Chapter 5: What was the process of creating Perfect Beach?
They're in Mountain View right now going through 500 startups. They launched in 2016. They took 150 grand from 500 startups for 6%. And again, they're helping people travel more efficiently and on a success-based 25% fee.
Chapter 6: How much funding has nDreams raised for VR development?
Nathan Ladd here. Good morning, everybody. Our guest today is Patrick Olunek, and he started as a programmer and designer at Codemasters 20 years ago, working on Micro Machines V3.
Prior to founding End Dreams in 2006, he was creative director at Eidos, where he was responsible for the design and gameplay of all the titles there, including games you know very well, like Tomb Raider Legend and Hitman Blood Money.
Chapter 7: What are the future plans for nDreams and its game releases?
End Dreams is now 50 people strong and pivoted to focus solely on virtual reality three years ago. They've launched six VR titles already. We're gonna dive in today. Patrick, are you ready to take us to the top? I certainly am, Nathan, yes. So it seems like gaming is really what's gonna cause the distribution and widespread adoption of VR. You're at the forefront of that.
Chapter 8: What life advice did Patrick O'Luanaigh wish he had known at 20?
What do you think is the biggest thing standing in your way to widespread adoption?
The biggest challenge is just getting enough hardware units out there. At the moment, the hardware, the high-end hardware is still fairly expensive. And there aren't any killer apps yet. We're still figuring out how to make the very best games and experiences for VR and learning quickly.
So I think it will be a combination of the price point of hardware coming down, the mobile VR headsets working with everybody's phone, not just the very expensive high-end phones, and also great, great content coming out there, which the market needs.
Which of your games so far has been the biggest hit in terms of revenue generated for yourself?
Strangely enough, actually, it's been a mobile game called Perfect Beach, which has been out for 18 months now and is a very simple experience. If you had a stressful day or boss has been moaning, you're stuck in the traffic, you can put it on and just relax and pretend you're back on your summer holiday. And bizarrely, a very simple product that was very quick to make.
It's done very, very well for us.
Defined very well. I mean, do you measure downloads or views per day? What's the key usage metric you look at?
We tend to look at units sold at the moment. At the moment, VR is a little bit too early to do service games and to do certainly free-to-play titles. So for us, our key metric is sort of how many units were sold so far. And across all the titles we've launched so far, we've done just under a quarter of a million titles sold so far.
That's VR games and experiences, which is a great start in a pretty early market, to be honest with you.
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