Welcome to HackerNoon’s Writing Prompts! Would you like to take a stab at answering some of these questions? The link for the template is HERE.
1. What is your company in 2–5 words?
Live events become playable.
2. Why is now the time for your company to exist?
Audiences no longer want to sit quietly and consume whatever a broadcaster puts in front of them. They play, stream, comment, create and expect to participate.
At the same time, live events now produce enormous amounts of real-time data, while technologies such as Unreal Engine, cloud computing and spatial computing have finally become powerful enough to turn that data into high-quality interactive experiences.
Badass Studios sits at the intersection of those shifts. We transform live events into real-time digital worlds that audiences can watch, explore and play while the event is actually happening—not six months later in a conventional game.
3. What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?
We have a brilliantly unusual mixture of people from gaming, film, broadcast, live events, virtual production and emerging technology. That matters because the problem we are solving does not belong neatly to any one industry.
A gaming company may understand gameplay but not live broadcast. A broadcaster may understand storytelling but not interactive worlds. A technology company may build something impressive that no normal human wants to use.
Our team understands how all those pieces fit together. We can handle the deeply unglamorous engineering underneath the experience without forgetting that the result still has to make someone say, “That is fucking cool.”
Most importantly, I am incredibly grateful for our kickass team. They are smart, brave, relentlessly creative and willing to build things that have never been built before—often under the pressure of live international sport, where there is no second take. I could not be more excited to be building this company with them.
4. If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?
I would be producing one of my movies. I also write screenplays, so storytelling has always been part of how I see the world.
In many ways, Badass is another form of storytelling—except the audience is no longer sitting outside the story. We give them a way to participate.
5. At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your metrics?
At this stage, success is a combination of commercial validation, repeat business and proof that our technology works under real-world pressure.
The ultimate metric is simple: did we deliver a Badass implementation, or did we create something people genuinely want to use and customers want to buy again?
6. In a few sentences, what do you offer to whom?
Badass Studios builds live, real-time digital twins for sports properties, broadcasters, rights holders and <a href="https://comicvibe.com/tcl-unveils-c7l-and-new-entertainment-lineup-at-the-mastermind-of-experiences/” title=”TCL unveils C7L and new entertainment lineup at ‘The Mastermind of Experiences’”>entertainment companies.
Our first USP is that everything happens live. Fans can interact with the event while it is happening: race against the real pilots, compete against athletes or take the same penalty—all driven by live data from the physical competition.
Our second USP is one platform, many experiences. The same real-time environment can power broadcast graphics, AR, simulators, games, virtual production and fan experiences. Instead of funding disconnected activations, our customers invest in one platform that keeps creating new ways to watch, play and participate.
7. What’s most exciting about your traction to date?
We have already done the thing people usually put under “future vision.”
With E1, we built a live digital twin of an international race and connected it to what was happening on the water in real time. The platform has powered broadcast visuals, AR, simulation and LiveGP—where players can race inside the live event against the actual pilots.
Epic Games featured the work in an Unreal Engine spotlight, but the strongest validation is that the technology survived where clever demonstrations often die: in live international sport, on broadcast, with real data and no pause button.
We are no longer pitching the idea that live events can become playable. We have proved it.
8. Where do you think your growth will be next year?
Our next phase of growth will come from turning successful event projects into longer-term platform relationships.
We expect to expand across motorsport and other live sports while developing LiveGP: our model for letting audiences compete inside a sporting event while it is happening.
The next growth engine is clear: live, playable sport—delivered through broadcast, sponsor-funded experiences, creator competitions and new esports formats built around the physical event.
9. Tell us about your first paying customer and revenue expectations over the next year.
Our first paying customer was the UIM E1 World Championship, the world’s first all-electric raceboat championship.
We began by building a real-time digital twin of the race environment, connecting live race data with Unreal Engine to create broadcast and augmented-reality experiences that physical cameras could not deliver.
That first project grew into a platform for broadcast graphics, AR, virtual production, simulators and LiveGP. It proved both of our founding ideas: live data can turn spectators into participants, and one platform can create many experiences.
Over the next year, we expect to triple our revenue as we move from individual implementations towards multi-event agreements, recurring platform revenue and partnerships that scale across entire seasons.
10. What’s your biggest threat?
Our biggest threat is not competition. It is the gravitational pull of doing things the way they have always been done.
Live entertainment involves broadcasters, rights holders, production teams, data providers, sponsors and technology partners. That complexity can make even ambitious organisations retreat towards something safe, familiar and deeply beige.
There are technical risks too. Live systems must be reliable, low-latency and capable of working in unforgiving environments. We take those challenges seriously.
But the larger risk is waiting too long. A generation raised on games, creators and interactive media will not suddenly become satisfied with passive viewing because somebody gave them a second-screen statistics page.
The audience has already changed. The question is which companies will change with it.
This startup founder interview template is based on HackerNoon Founder & CEO David Smooke’s ten questions for startup founders.
Would you like to take a stab at answering some of these questions? The link for the template is HERE.
