Please meet Eduardas Klenauskis, co-founder and CEO at Applava. He represented the startup and explained more about their market challenges.

1. So what is Applava? How it works?
   Applava is a games development studio. The majority of our products are for mobile device users, but recently we started focusing on making computer games as well. Our model may seem very simple – we brainstorm game ideas and develop the ones which we like the most, however, the whole development process is way more complex than it may look – there are more smaller stages like prototyping, testing, data analysis, marketing, game support and etc. When all of the development process stages are completed the game is published on online store depending on the platform it was made for (Google Play Store, Apple App Store, Steam) and anyone can download it and play on their device.

2. What are your competitors and competitive advantages?
   The competition is very high. Even if you do not have any skills or experience in this sector, there are a lot of videos, tutorials, lessons online and you can learn games development step by step. That is why these days there are a lot of great companies and individuals who make games. So we can say that our competitors are the games itself not the teams who develop them. And to give you the scope – there are more than 1 million games in the App Stores combined and each day this number is growing. To be competitive we try to find the niche categories, try to make the games that tell a story in some way, have a specific art style, idea behind it and etc. We look for quality over quantity.

3. What were the reasons behind coming up with this idea and launching this product?
   It’s our hobby and is a great way to express ourselves, our ideas. And seeing people playing our games is the biggest motivation to continue doing what we do.

4. When exactly did you launch, what were the main challenges before launching?
   Applava was founded in 2014. The biggest challenges were to make all the processes smooth knowing the limited amount of time resources we had being a two people team and different areas we had to have experience in.

5. What are your target customers? Both in terms of user profile and geography?
   Our target customers audience is very broad and we do not target users of any specific profile. We have some learning games that are great for schoolchildren, sport lovers, casual players will find their type of games too. The main aim is to make the games that people enjoy playing no matter what their profile is. Mainly our target audience countries are USA, Canada, UK, France, Germany, but our products are available worldwide.

6. What are main challenges while working on this product and how are you overcoming them?
   Developing a game takes time and it is not just programming and making of art assets. There is so much more behind all of that and even after you make it you do not know what the reaction of players will be. Also, the technologies change very fast and sometimes you cannot predict things that do not depend on you. So I would say that time management and adjusting to the things that were not expected are the main challenges which we try to overcome by splitting all the process into smaller tasks and steps and reviewing all the project once again after each step.

7. How are you funded? Do you seek extra funding?
   Currently, we are self-funded but we are always open for discussions with investors.

8. Please introduce your founders, your core team and your broader team?
   Applava was co-founded by Eduardas Klenauskis (currently CEO) and Tomas Putanas (currently CTO) who are the only two people working in Applava.

9. How has business been so far? Could you share some numbers to illustrate this (users, sales, etc)?
   Since 2014 we developed more than 10 games. In total our games have more than 15 million downloads worldwide and counting.

10. Future plans, ambitions? Simply speaking – what’s next?
    Making our games available for a broader audience, developing and publishing new ones for Xbox, PlayStation consoles.

Thank you for the answers!