The US tech entrepreneur behind popular gaming trivia app FleetWit is targeting 100,000 paying users in the UK over the next year.
FleetWit was founded in New York City by trivia lover David Metz and Julien Loutre, one of the first Facebook employees in Europe.
The app recently announced its official launch in the UK, with Countdown star Rachel Riley as its celebrity ambassador.
“The appetite for trivia is huge in the UK so it made sense,” Metz told BusinessCloud. “We’ve already grown five times faster in the UK than we did when we first launched in the US in August last year.
“In terms of our expectations, the UK has already exceeded them. We’re hoping to have 100,000 paying users there in a year from now.”
The skills-based trivia app allows users to compete against each other – or against Riley – in head-to-head trivia races for cash prizes.
Unlike HQ Trivia, a live gameshow quiz app which has already amassed a significant following in the UK, FleetWit is on-demand and allows users to play at any time of the day.
Despite HQ’s growing popularity in the US and UK, Metz insists he doesn’t see the app as a rival to be feared.
“Honestly, HQ is not a competitor,” he said. “They’re basically a TV show that’s on your phone and we’re more of a gaming app. They’re scheduled viewing and we’re on-demand, 24 hours a day.
“HQ is actually one of the best things that has happened to FleetWit and I would say in trivia in general.”
HQ Trivia was released in August 2017 on iOS and later for Android on 31 December, with the app officially launching in the UK in early 2018.
In March the start-up raised $15 million in funding at a $100 million valuation.
“That’s been really helpful for us, because it shows that trivia is a pretty big industry and you can make a lot of money off of it,” Metz said.
The entrepreneur says plenty of start-ups have tried to monetise their trivia apps and failed – but that FleetWit came up with a “concrete” monetisation plan from the beginning.
“Most people pick the approach of launching an app, try to get millions and millions of people and then sell advertising off of it,” he said. “Unless you’re Google or Facebook and you’ve got billions of eyeballs, it’s a tough thing to pull off.
“What we did was reverse-engineer it. People can play for $1 or a $1 million prize and we take 20 per cent of all the games that go on.”
Metz revealed that FleetWit’s users spend an average of $106 per month.
“It’s clearly a good revenue source for us and now we want to scale as quickly as possible.
“The biggest free trivia app in the world has 300 million downloads. If we can get five per cent of that, that’s 15 million paying users – and we would be wildly successful.”