Founders are used to working under adverse conditions, but Payton Keathley’s situation is a bit out of the ordinary.
Keathley is running his startup, Xiled Inc., out of a hospital room in Lexington, Kentucky, while he recovers from having a portion of his right leg amputated from above the knee on July 10.
The procedure happened after the hospital in his hometown of Pikeville, Kentucky, could not get Keathley to a larger hospital, affiliated with University of Kentucky, to administer the level of care needed until 16 hours after he had broken his leg while falling at his house around 9 a.m. on July 9. When he arrived in Lexington, amputation was the only option after he was having severe circulation problems due to the bone break.
In spite of all of this, Keathley continues with his daily operations, as he expands the initial platform (ClanHub) and looks to launch two more in the not-so-distant future.
“[I] just keep pushing,” Keathley told me recently. “That’s all I can do. … I’m just doing what the doctors tell me. I’m super motivated, super passionate about what I’m doing.”
‘Cater to all of the clans’
Nearly 13 years to the day before his fall, Keathley had started the Xiled Gaming Network, a clan (a term for any organized group of gamers) of approximately 3,000 members located all over the world. Since its start in 2010, Keathley was able to leverage VIP memberships and sponsorships to be able to send members of his clan to competitions all over the globe.
“I looked around. I was like, ‘Well, I’m doing super good. I’m super successful as one individual clan. I want to cater to all of the clans.”
In the spring of 2022, Keathley launched Xiled’s first big venture, ClanHub, which now has approximately 75,000 users. Through the platform, users can join clans, communicate with other community members through posts, compete against other clans and create tournaments, among other abilities.
“So essentially I developed the toolkit I never had when building a clan,” Keathley said.
Although ClanHub offers free membership, in the spring it started to offer a premium service for $9.99 a month with extras such as a clan management system and access to premium web traffic stats and a premium clan page.
In addition, for $4.99 a month, users can make longer posts, use special emojis and have a verification similar to Twitter Blue (now called “X Premium”).
As of a recent date, Keathley said that he had more than 800 premium users, which was basically double the amount of clans that had registered on ClanHub, which had its app launch last October.
Clans on ClanHub play a variety of games on several types of gaming systems (Switch, PlayStation, Xbox and mobile devices). The most popular games to play are Call of Duty, NBA 2K, and, perhaps fittingly, Clash of Clans.
In addition to raising money through the premium options and ads on the site, Keathley said he and his team are looking to start on-platform streaming that would run on subscriptions for specific “clan channels,” while having the ability to run ads as well (similar to Twitch). The company is also looking into creating an application programming interface (API), which could be embedded into users’ personal sites.
Next up
In addition to ClanHub, Keathley and his team are busy working on a website and app for the Xiled Gaming Network (“to not also forget where we came from, in a sense," Keathley said). They also have been working on a site, Appalachian.gg, which Keathley hopes will turn into the destination for e-sports and players and gamers to unite, similar to how Facebook interactions work.
“[It’s] a focus on that niche. … I think that’s going to become the social network for e-sports [players] and gamers in the Appalachian region,” Keathley said.
Keathley said the company brings in around $8,000 to $12,000 a month, but that is a significant jump considering its revenue was closer to $3,000 at the beginning of the year.
To date, Xiled Inc. has raised approximately $200,000, largely coming from Keyhore Capital. The company — composed of three full-time employees, one of whom is based out of Ashland, Kentucky — is looking for an angel investor in particular for $25,000 to update its servers for the needed bandwidth needed for platform streaming.
Xiled Inc. earned $3,500 by placing second in the Startup Appalachia Pitch Competition in June at Morehead State University.
