A Rhode Island entrepreneur is trying to create a community-focused alternative to video-game streaming titans like Twitch and YouTube, and is looking for investment from the community along the way.
RitualMotion, founded by Rhode Islander Dana Paul in 2018, just launched its new GUILD (Gamers United In Live Discussion) platform, which Paul said is focused on “peer to peer” video experiences.
“If I’m watching you on Twitch, I’m just in the audience,” he said in an interview. “We can’t have a conversation on your gameplay or your techniques, or tips and tricks.”
The company is making the argument that it would change that by emphasizing open discussions and back and forth. “It allows creators to have more of an intimate setting with their community,” Paul said.
Ritual Motion also doing things a little differently in other areas, like allowing people to tip content creators in Bitcoin.
Paul and his business partner Bill Cesare saw the explosion of the gaming industry and felt like they had found a niche, so they started the company with support from the innovation campus RIHub. At first, their focus was content curation and creation, and they built the site up to the point where they were getting 100,000 unique visitors a month.
At that point, said Paul, they wanted to start giving users and creators a platform to share their stuff too. “Our goal, knowing creators … is to give them a tool that they can get discovered and have that hyperconnection with their community where they can create, collaborate and share,” Paul said.
As the project grows, Ritual Motion wanted to bring in some capital, but it chose an unconventional route to do so.
Paul said he and Cesare had gone through the typical seed and Series A, B, C funding rounds before, as serial entrepreneurs, and wanted to try something different: Crowdfunding.
The company launched a campaign with the equity crowdfunding platform StartEngine. StartEngine’s founder, Howard Marks, was also the co-founder of gaming giant Activision. The campaign has raised more than $200,000 from nearly 100 investors so far.
“We thought, there’s got to be a better way to get your community around this and for them to have ownership,” Paul said. “And we have been humbled by and blown away.”
