Interview with Sam Koch: Co-developer of Andi

What is ‘ANDi’?

It used to be the worlds first gaming assistant and now it is a cross platform gaming discovery app.

So sort of like the ‘Tinder’ for gaming?

Sort of! I actually just finished our Tinder for gaming feature in app on Friday so you can actually swipe through games! Although that’s just the very basic element of what we’re doing right now. Eventually we want to have it entirely automated and just send the games that are the most relevant to the gamer using notifications because people shouldn’t have to waste time searching for things. If we know what they like, why not just tell them? Our current tagline is the next level in gaming selection

Care to give us a sneak peek into the business plan?

We intend to strike a balance between quality and advertising for users. The way machine learning works is that we plan to recommend only the best games to people that are the most relevant to them.

Machine algorithms will spit out the probability of a person liking a certain game based on their previous likes but we will also allow developers to come along and boost their percentages. Only games with a 75% or higher probability of enjoyment will be recommended to people, developers with high quality games can boost their percentages from 80% for example to 85% for a fee. People still get recommended games they want to play but the developers can actually promote theirs slightly further

What was the eureka moment?

The company consists myself and another entrepreneur, Ben Woolf. We volunteered at online website TechCrunch’s Disrupt convention last December and we both thought that we were surrounded by really successful start ups but how can we distinguish ourselves? We then discovered a company called Atmos Play who do high quality game demos. We toyed around with the idea of creating a game and partnering with them. We wanted to create something  with high commercial value and good PR potential. We turned to the Google Play store to see what was working and found that there were over 1 million games and no efficient way of sorting through them. We had found a problem and ANDi was our idea of how to solve it. We started researching and found it takes 15 minutes for the average person to find a game they might like to play and even then it won’t necessarily stay on their phone for too long due to in game purchases.

What would you say is the most important part of ‘ANDi’ for you?

The final destination is to be on every gaming platform we can. The future of technology is in virtual and augmented reality.  If we can get into the game market for that, especially with games like Pokemon Go,  a game that combines virtual and augmented reality with huge success that if you were to add in VR goggles that’s where we want to be heading. We want you to be able to find ANDi on Xbox, Play Station, the Apple Store, Google Store and PC. If we do that we could become the central game discovery tool.

Do you have a target demographic?

It depends on the country! The age demographic of gamers is between 6 and 63 years old. Kids are playing different games and adults are playing anything. Comparing america to Japan, the Japanese aged 45 to 55 play 3 times as many games as Americans the same age as the commute in Japan tends to be 3 times longer because of traffic and you can only read so many articles and spend so much time on social media.

Our audience is actually everyone as an end goal but currently we’re focusing on millennials, they’re most likely to try something new. People aged between 6 and 20 we’ve found have more free time than anyone else and they often have the most games installed allowing us to help them the most.

Off the cuff what is the number one game you would recommend right now?

Ben and I would recommend you different games. I would recommend ‘Clash of Clans’ because it’s got clean graphics, easy to pick up and easy. But Ben would probably say something more intense and war based. It’s the causal gamer in me that loves ‘Clash of Clans’ so much.