Co-Founder and CEO Taylor McLemore spoke with us for our visit to Prediculous.
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Prediculous builds social fantasy sports games for fans, social second-screen music award apps for music aficionados, and social competitions for reality TV fanatics.
How did the company get started, and where are you at now?
We were founded in 2010. That year we raised Angel Round. We had developed a set of intellectual property that allows us to build games really quickly. Around that time we also started a strategic partnership with Sporting News. We built our first title – Aikman Fantasy QB. We went on to do a variety of projects with them. In 2012 we had the largest March Madness game on Facebook, it wa called "Bracket Insanity" and sponsored by SubWay.
At this point in time we've just come off developing two March Madness games, both of which were really successful. One of them, CourtMania, had over 100k users.
How did you get started in this space?
It all started with prediction games. In the course of our business development were introduced to president of Sporting News. As I said, we built that relationship and saw the opportunity. There's a really big unadressed market, and we're filling the need - billions of people have expressed likes, tweets, and check-ins that represent favorite bands, home teams, and must-watch shows. We bring the games to the people.
How big is your company?
Currently 3 people. We'll be hiring up this year and doing some fundraising. We're feeling good about things though - we've produced 9 games in the past 18 months and it's going strong.
What are your goals for the coming months?
We're transitioning to build proprietary games and sell sponsorships to those. We did that with CourtMania, and it went well. This gives us the ability to own and build the audience and our relationship with them. The plan is to build out an entire suite of Prediculous games.
What's the Prediculous culture?
We’re people who like games, having fun, competing. Obviously we like sports. We really pride ourselves on independence and everyone having the ability to contribute their piece, while still working very closely as a team all of the time.
Being based in Denver, what do you see as the greatest needs to grow the startup community?
Continuing to draw in more talent is #1. The community will be bound by the talent resources. How do we accomplish that? Denver’s already a great place to live and work, but we need to expand on opportunities for cstartups to communicate, collaborate, interact. There are a lot of grat events and things like Galvanize happening; we just need to keep that going.
Learn more about Prediculous in their company profile, or visit their website.
This week we also visited TrackVia and AppIt Ventures. Learn more about the Built in Denver Startup Tour and read past weeks' posts here.
