Discord, a group-chat platform driven by people connecting in communities known as servers, has 100 million monthly active users, according to news and analytics site Business of Apps. There are almost 7 million active servers on the platform, the majority of which are gaming-related.
If you’re a gamer, you likely already know how popular Discord is. You also probably know how difficult it can be to organize or join well-run online tournaments. Hosts might require players to register on multiple third-party platforms; scores may be difficult to track; and awarding prizes can be challenging, among many other hurdles.
No one understands this better than Brett Philips.
A few years ago, he played a lot of FIFA in law school with friends and wanted a way to host online tournaments during finals because doing so in-person wasn’t an option. After noticing that there weren’t many online-friendly tournament platforms available, and recognizing the growing popularity and efficiency of Discord, he and his co-founders launched Tournament Kings in 2019 to fill that gap in the market.
The Arvada-based company is on a mission to streamline how gaming tournaments are run with its automated bot that lets players and organizations host competitions directly on their Discord servers. Tournament Kings’ platform is decentralized, so bots live on individual servers and simplify how hosts communicate, manage brackets and record results.
Since launching, Tournament Kings has facilitated thousands of tournaments and is powered by about two dozen employees positioned globally. Phillips, the CEO, shares details about where the company is today, challenges he’s overcome with his team and what he hopes 2021 looks like.
How did Tournament Kings come about?
I had the idea and chewed on it for a while until I met my business partner and we raised a little money. When we first started, the original plan was to just make another website like Smash, Challonge or similar platforms. We learned that these websites were really good at hosting in-person events primarily, but they were only doing half of what was required to run an online event. Just because you set up a bracket, that doesn’t mean the tournament’s over; those are only one or two steps in the entire process. You still have to get the team registered, report scores, choose maps, etc. At the time, everyone was using Discord to do all that logistical stuff in getting the tournament running successfully.
That was a lightbulb moment for us because we thought, “Why don’t we just bring tournaments into Discord?” So we built the same functionality those websites had, but we packaged it into an app on Discord and brought it to the users.
You recently launched a B2B subscription model through the platform. Can you share some details about that?
Decentralizing the platform allows communities to fully capture the user traffic that tournaments generate. Every esports community or game-affiliated brand runs tournaments as a marketing mechanism. Orgs would spend a lot of time, energy and money organizing and advertising the tournaments just to send their community to a third-party website to run the tournament. And a lot of that user traffic was failing to convert. Decentralizing tournaments allows orgs to keep users contained in their ecosystem.
We realized that there was a real marketing value there, which we didn’t fully anticipate, and that led us into our B2B subscription model. We recently launched enterprise and premium versions that feature a white-labeled tournament platform with a high level of customization. We also have a distribution function that gives out participation trophies to users, like discount codes for brands that sponsor tournaments, for example.
Discord has very strict anti-ad and anti-marketing rules. You can’t buy a banner ad because it’s against their terms of service. But they do allow bots or apps to be branded. So through our B2B offering, brands of all sizes can advertise and market to the Discord audience legally for the first time. They can advertise in a native, organic way because the ads are not static images that just live in channels; the ads are the platform itself.
Decentralizing tournaments allows orgs to keep users contained in their ecosystem.”
What were some of the major challenges you faced in getting the company started?
My business partner and I are non-technical founders and that was a huge challenge. There’s a reason most tech startups are founded by technical founders. When forming a company around a technical product, being able to actually build the product is very helpful. We realized it was taking us longer than anticipated to build our website because we were starting from scratch. So we had to pick the right talent, and that was our single biggest hurdle for probably a year until we made key hires in our COO and CTO, who are both technical people. Getting them into the C-suite was pivotal for the success of this company. Now we’re now starting to see the fruits of that transition because this is where a lot of my strengths and experiences in selling and leading teams start to benefit the company.
Another more continuous challenge is that because we live on Discord, that’s a third-party variable outside of our control. That presents unique, fun challenges in terms of stability and scalability. It’s a complex cat-and-mouse game that our COO and CTO help us navigate. Beyond that, the other biggest challenge was explaining to our friends and families, who were our initial investors, what gaming and Discord are.
What kinds of tech tools do your developers use to power the platform?
According to our CTO, our stack starts in Terraform and we provision everything from there into AWS through a couple of distinct accounts for production, staging and other functions. Within the AWS product catalog, we’re using RDS, ElastiCache, API Gateway, Lambda, EC2, and other tools for our foundation processes. We’re also on AWS for logging and monitoring.
In terms of day-to-day programming, we are very much a Linux-centric shop. Pretty much everyone here runs and loves Linux. We write a lot of our code in Golang. We’re also very heavy into AWS Lambda and serverless, event-driven architecture. We also have a lot of Python that we write for some of our bots. We fire events back and forth between those services and it’s fairly straightforward.
The games we play
What does your dev team structure look like?
We run a Kanban process the company plans month over month, and then the local project manager divvies up the work by refilling people’s queues every day. Engineers have two or three things in their queue and they work on what they find the most interesting or what they believe is the highest priority. No one has to go to a planning meeting if they don’t want to. Devs do their tasks, which go through quality assurance and code review processes. No scrum, no planning meetings, no story points and no nonsense. Simplicity, productivity and happiness are our core values for the engineering team.
As far as team structure goes, there are a lot of people here who would self-describe as full-stack developers, but they definitely specialize in certain areas. So we have our web dev team, which is relatively small right now. They work primarily in React, Redux and Materialize. We have our API team, which are entirely Go, AWS and Terraform-centric. And we have our bot team, which is very Python-centric.
We have continuous integration but we don’t do continuous deployment because our product is a real-time communications project suite. We can’t just deploy it in the middle of someone’s tournament; that may make them upset. But we do have a fully-fledged staging environment.
Simplicity, productivity and happiness are our core values for the engineering team.”
What are your plans for 2021?
The hardest thing for us right now is focusing because there are so many opportunities based on the current obsession with gaming and esports. So we’re focusing on continuing our growth, increasing our market share and working on our B2B monetization strategy. We’re in the beginning stages of setting the playbook for that strategy, so in 2021 we’ll look at how to scale it and make it more efficient based on case studies and data.
Beyond that, we’re focusing on improving brand awareness. We’re well-known in our niche but we want to expand that notoriety to the gaming industry at large, then the overall startup industry. We’re finalizing a partnership with Challonge and we will probably start a Series A funding raise in 2021, as well.
