00:03:46 · Steven Zhao
But luckily, at a young age, my parents got a computer, and then I really started to kinda figure out how to use that machine. And one day, my friend showed me a game creation software, which I put into the computer and I started making games, and it started becoming a hobby of mine. So since 12 years old, I've been building games. So I studied in UCSD, University of California San Diego in electro engineering. After college, I moved to Hong Kong to build a gaming studio called Blue Tea Games where we made PC and mobile games. You know, we grew from two people to 40 people. It was pretty successful for a time. And during that period, PC was pretty hot. People download the game on the computers. But the shift to mobile created like a brand new way of playing experience. And for me personally, I didn't adapt fast enough. I was late to the mobile space. And because of that, when we transitioned to mobile, we didn't catch up and weren't able to create games that was able to be successful. So that was a pretty big learning for us is always look at what is trending in terms of technology and how do you build for that future. So when you build a game, it's important to not build what is popular today because by the time you finish, you know, you'll be nine months too late. What is gonna be popular one or two years down the line? From my first startup at Blue Tea, we failed to do that, and we weren't able to scale. And it was around 2015 we saw that VR was becoming very hot. So we decided, it's like, hey. Why don't we take our learning as a game developer and bring it to a whole new medium, double down on VR? And then we decided to do that with a brand new company. So that was essentially how Sandbox was formed. So when we started the company, we were, like, doing two things. Number one, we were building games on the VR consumer market. A part of us also took our learning back at Blue Tea, which was you always wanna build for the future. What do people want two, five, ten years in the future? And we felt like the consumer VR headset itself wasn't enough. We wanna be fully immersed. We want
00:05:42 · S0, S1, S2, S3, S4
Ad[00:05:42] S0: This episode is brought to Ad[00:05:43] S1: you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini in Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses, setup required, compatibility, and availability varies 18 plus. Ad[00:06:07] S2: This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. Ad[00:06:37] S3: Your sausage McMuffin with egg didn't change. Your receipt did. The sausage McMuffin with egg extra value meal includes a hash brown and a small coffee for just $5. Only at McDonald's for a limited time. Ad[00:06:49] S4: Price and participation may vary. Promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing.
00:06:49 · S4, S5, S6
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00:07:22 · Steven Zhao
[00:07:22] S7: I'd be able to interact closely with friends. And to us, like, you know, I grew up watching The Matrix. It's like, hey. Do we have the technology to actually create The Matrix? And then we look backwards like, hey. We do. So we did a regular consumer game, and we basically iterated on what The Matrix looked like. Come the end of twenty sixteen, we launched a consumer game. It was like a top 10% best selling game, but the market just wasn't there. Like, we weren't able to make enough revenue to keep the company going. So at the end of twenty sixteen, like, all our bet was putting into building this other project, which is basically... It's now Sandbox VR, location based VR experience for a group of friends to play together. But for us, that was our pivot. At that time, it was what we call the winter of VR. The Christmas sale didn't live up. People thought the hype of VR, us trying to race in 2017 was essentially impossible. So we had just two months of runway left, and then I really wanted to build, you know, this physical space in VR. None of the investor came in. One of them, investor, would ask us, well, you're just a team of six people. We didn't have a big team. So that was one big challenge we had. The second challenge we had was you are not located in The US. There's a geography challenge. You know, our team is based in Hong Kong, and it comes to a certain type of perception, but really, like, you know, you're not in the dominant market. How do we know that this is something that can work in a different country? So for us, we have to build our technology, build our content, and build our retail location. So there's not a lot of money to come around. We have to be very resource creative. And, you know, for us is how do we use technology to solve something that can be replaced by using a lot of hardware. So for instance, in order to do full body tracking, you need a lot of cameras. But each camera were very expensive, so we spent a lot of time figuring out how to use software to minimize the amount of cameras. And this turns out to be a blessing because it was very important later down the road as we scale that every location will be as low cost as possible. Another challenge we had was in terms of being resource constrained. We try to figure out how to either get people to come to our location.
00:09:21 · Steven Zhao
You know, one of the hardest thing is marketing our business. As a small company, you don't have a big marketing budget. So we had to be very creative. Like, how do we get people to come? So we decided that, hey. Why don't we productize it? Why don't we make it so that we create a software video that after you come and play, we'll give it to you? And this video is gonna be capture the most embarrassing and funny moment of you playing with your friends, and then you can easily share on social media. And when we created that, every customer that comes in start putting it on social media, and it generated an insane word-of-mouth. So that taught us, like, two important thing. Number one is every problem is, looking really deeply into it, like, doctor really analyzing it. There's probably a creative way to solve it with less resource, but also to get a much better outcome. And the other thing that we've learned is it's not only important to just build a product, but it's also really important to build a distribution strategy for that product. So at that time, I took all the money I had and I put it into Sandbox. And then in six months' time, we built the technology infrastructure, and we opened a really small shop in Hong Kong. And I remember vividly, there's a story where we try to hire a game producer, and he asked how can Sandbox beat Sony or Nintendo or any big VR players in The United States? And, of course, coming from a Hong Kong company where we never seen success in Hong Kong at that scale, that was a very valid question. And what I told him was, I always believed that in order to make a big change, you have to have a direction that's uniquely different. And for us, we believe that what we are building is something that no one else in the world is doing right now. The moment we felt like we had product market fit was during a test run before we even launched a product. My friends came and played and within experience, they were like screaming and yelling and so loud to the point that the neighbors came knocking on doors saying, hey, is everything alright? Like, we didn't know the type of visceral reaction that customer would get. And we felt like that visceral reaction is something that has never been done before. And we're like, okay. There's probably something there. So after we got then a product market fit in our one
00:11:23 · S0, S1, S2, S3, S4
Ad[00:11:23] S0: This episode is brought to Ad[00:11:24] S1: you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. They can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks, Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses, setup required, compatibility, and availability varies 18 plus. Ad[00:11:48] S2: This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. Ad[00:12:18] S3: Your sausage McMuffin with egg didn't change. Your receipt did. The sausage McMuffin with egg extra value meal includes a hash brown and a small coffee for just $5. Only at McDonald's for a limited time. Ad[00:12:30] S4: Price and participation may vary. Promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing.