[Bootstrapped] Ep.138 - The First 100 with Bartosz Skwarczek, the Founder of G2A | Digital Marketplaces | Influencer Marketing

Bartosz Skwarczek is the Founder of G2A, the world’s largest digital marketplace for digital entertainment such as games, gift cards, subscriptions, and software. Bartosz is also a serial entrepreneur, Forbes Technology Council member, public speaker, and a huge proponent of Web3’s integration with digital marketplaces. G2A has scaled rapidly since its launch in 2012 -- it's available in 180 countries and supports 200+ payment methods.

Where to find Bartosz Skwarczek:

• Website: https://www.g2a.co/
• LinkedIn (4) Bartosz Skwarczek | LinkedIn

Where to find Hadi Radwan:

• Newsletter: Principles Friday | Hadi Radwan | Substack
• LinkedIn: Hadi Radwan | LinkedIn

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Transcript

Let's do it. Broadcasting from around the world. You're listening to the first 100. A podcast on how founders acquired their first 100 paying customers. Here's your host, Hadi Rodwan. Good to have you on the show Bartosz. How are you doing today? Thank you very much, Hadi. I'm doing really well. Thank you. Amazing. Thank you for stopping by the podcast. Bartosz Skłarchek is the founder of G2A. Thank you. I'm trying my best. Is it one of the hardest family names to spell? Well done. Well done, Hadi. Yeah. Founder of G2A, the world's largest digital marketplace for digital entertainment, such as GIFTS. cards, games, subscriptions and software. And Bartosz, you are a serial entrepreneur, it's not your first business. You've scaled G2A from scratch, bootstrapped, fully bootstrapped to more than 180 countries. Bartosz, did young Bartosz exhibit any signs of early entrepreneurship in your life? I think so, because of my father. He was an entrepreneur. And he was very entrepreneurial in general, in so many fields. So this kind of thinking, this kind of mindset, I would say it was at our house, at our home from the very beginning. So also my dream from very early was to found a company, to have it on the, maybe not on the global scale at the very beginning, but definitely to be a founder of a business and just to scale it. What did you learn early on from your father when it comes to business? I can say that my two most influential mentors were my parents. My father definitely taught me people approach in the meaning that he trusted people and people could trust him. He was a man of his word and he always very much tried to... walk his talk. And this approach was very clear for me at every stage of my childhood and every stage of my very first part of the life. And my mom, she was always about the culture, about somewhere vivre and she taught me actually one of the most important, if not the most important rule of my life. When you do something do it really well. And I think this mindset is with me for the last decades. Amazing. And it's always a great one. The household fosters this type of skill because it's a skill at the end of the day in 2012. I think you started your company. What made you go after the digital marketplace? And if you can tell our listeners what exactly. does G2A do? At the very beginning, it was 2009, when I met my business partner, 2010, we founded a company and at the very beginning, it was online store and very humble beginnings. Just two of us, four employees, one very small room, 13, one three, 13 square meters and working day in, day out. from early morning till late night, doing everything in very entrepreneurial approach. And later on, 2014, we did a pivot. A pivot in the meaning of changing the business model. So we changed the business model from online store to the marketplace, like eBay for games. And then at this moment, I asked my team, to build the largest gaming marketplace in the world. And we were gamers, so we exactly knew the customer. And we mapped six factors, prices, range of products, security, user experience, support, and payments. And I said, okay, to build the largest marketplace, we have to be on the top of each of these verticals. And the next years, were day in, day out, constant pushing. Pushing the bar higher, pushing the quality of the platform and everything we were doing higher. And five years later, we became the largest marketplace in the world. And you can ask, how is that, how you can count it? So when you look at the marketplaces in the digital area, digital sphere, there is no other marketplace having more. items, offerings for the client than we have, 75,000, or more clients, 30 million. Last year, we crossed 30 million clients number, and this year we want to acquire, we want to have a couple of millions more. So today, G2A is fully global marketplace, 200 countries, every continent, literally every country in the world. I believe it's just the beginning. Amazing. I know on your website, you mentioned you have more than 200 million visits. So there's a lot of activity happening, reaching millions and millions of users. But if you go back to the early days, how did the user know about the marketplace and who was your target audience? Were they people who have, let's say, PlayStation games they want to sell or anything specific in mind when you started? When you start a company, it's extremely important to have product market fit. And what does it mean really? It means that you have to be aware of what kind of client you are targeting, what kind of client you would like to acquire, what kind of clients you would like to serve and what is your USP, unique selling point. In our case, we decided that the price will be the most important factor for us. So we put a lot of attention on the supply. side. So we were traveling around the world looking for the biggest, best wholesalers and we were focused on the PC market only in the very beginning. And to understand the nature of the product, the nature of the game, it's the voucher, the code that you need to have and the game which you have to download from many platforms like Steam or... Battle.net or many others. And to play the game, you need the code and code is in the form of voucher. So then you are looking for the sellers of these vultures around the world. And we were looking for them in literally every country. And then we were buying from them, not giving a very high margin for us, very high take rate and selling to the client. And the client was coming. to our marketplace, to our platform at the very, very beginning, because we had good prices. And then we started improving the real user experience from the customer journey through the payments factor, which is a part of customer journey, eventually ending with the marketing and partnerships. And behind all of these factors, people. are the most important ingredient when it comes to building the company. I have two follow up questions. One is you're building a marketplace, so you're matching the buyer and the seller and it's more of a chicken and then egg play, because if the buyer's coming to your website and there's not enough games to buy, they would go to another source. And the seller, if there's not a lot of buyers there, then he wouldn't promote with you. How did you figure out which one to come first and how did you manage that? timing gap, because there's always that timing gap between the matching. Very good question. And the answer lays down with our history while at the very beginning we were a store. So we were buying games and selling them. So when we were buying, we were taking care of the supply, supply side of the business and demand side of the business. were our clients. So in this case, after three and a half years of running this kind of business model, we decided to change it to marketplace to scale faster. So that was the way we could match those two sides of the marketplace business. And that is the way we could acquire enough clients and enough sellers to provide them a platform that they can use for offerings. What was your early strategy to acquire these? What channel worked for you the most? And were there any channels that were not scalable, but you had to do them early on? G2A was probably the first company in gaming industry who started working with influencers on a massive scale. So of course we started small with one, the first, the second, the third, but that was the time when not too many people were aware of this marketing strategy. Not too many people were aware of the value that creators, because that's the way they prefer to be named, not only influencers, but creators, creators of the podcasts, creators of the YouTube's V-LOG. creators of different kinds of media and of course content. So that was our, one of our best strategies, which have been working actually very well for us from the very beginning till now, we work with over 1000 infant creators, including the largest ones in the world, like PewDiePie. That is one of the examples of what we did. The other one. was gold mine program. So what we wanted to do is to incentivize those of our influencers and those of our clients who would like to recommend the platform further. And we build a very special system that were rewarding influencers and creators for helping us to scale the business. And we shared with them millions of dollars in total for all these years. And that was another great idea, which brought us where we are today. Amazing. A follow up on the influencer strategy. If our listeners today are listening and they want to implement such a strategy, how would you think about the rewards between what to offer to the influencer? and how to attract them because there's always that monetary value. There's an exchange between having access to their customer base or viewer base, and then incentivizing them to sell your product versus something else. How would you think about the pricing strategy here or the reward strategy to attract the right influencers? Today, the creators and influencers market is very developed comparing to 15 years ago. And It's also very individual because you have so many types of different kind of influencers. And there is no one strategy which is the best one, of course, because as soon as you have it, very quickly somebody is copying that. And it's not the best anymore because many other people are using it. Anyway, when I'm saying individual, I mean our best contracts. and our best partnerships, because it is something more than just a contract. The crucial thing when I say, when I describe this model is to remember that influencer is not a number, that influencer or creator is not just a marketing tool. Influencer and creator is a human being. and they are people who have their values and needs. And this is very crucial to understand that each relationship is very individual. It is not like, hey, let's have a strategy and let's have 100 influencer this way, boom! It doesn't work this way. Of course you can do it. But then you treat them like a commodity, which is not a good approach. They are... very creative and very taking care about their audience, providers, most often of high quality content. And you should respect them. They are different. They are sometimes very different. Not only diversified because of the the language, but also very different when it comes to the behavior, when it comes to their personalities. And you have to respect them for who they are, not for what they can bring to your platform. So building relationships with creators and influencers is something more than just an Excel file. and hey, this is the strategy, blah, blah. Our best relationships with influencers were based on personal, individual relationship with them. And then you can take care of what is important for them because it's not always money. Sometimes they need different kind of support from you. It can be technological support, it can be market rich support, it can be content support, it can be some kind of network support. It depends. It's very individual. So working with influencers is about relationship, not about money. Of course, you have to pay them. Of course, you have to reward them. But this is a part of a bigger picture, not the only important thing. So in one word, in conclusion, always remember that there is a human being behind any kind of business, behind any kind of strategy. I believe that the most important factor is always human. Thank you for sharing this advice. You scale to more than 180 countries and with scaling, there comes a lot of challenges. What are maybe three things that... You did not anticipate when you started scaling up and you learned along the way that it's really hard to scale. Anything you can share with our listeners if they plan to scale their companies? Yes, of course. How many hours we have? I'm joking, but it's a story for so many hours. Okay. Just three. Let's start. One, the first of them is when you want to do business globally, you have to be aware that every country... Every jurisdiction has its own law, its own tax system, and you have to follow it. So in our case now, it's easy because we have resources to work with the best advisors in the world to the best legal offices in the world. We work with the whole big four. So Deloitte, PwC, EY, KPMG, amazing companies. Top of the game. But when you are starting your business, you don't have money to work with such an expert. So it is very important to choose advisors and experts that on the one hand, you can afford, but on the other hand, that they can provide you decent advice because you can get into trouble if you are not following the regulations. And if... You don't have the proper governance. And when you are starting a business, many people are not thinking about it, but the world is complicated, especially when you want to do business globally. And either, even though getting online is opening for you the whole world in a nanosecond, still in different countries, you have different regulations. And they are different in Europe, European Union, and they are different in the United States and very different in China. So that is the first thing that you have to be aware and you have to put it on your agenda. When you think about scaling the business globally. The second thing is you have to be brave. You have to have courage. Scaling the business to one online business, to one, two, three, five countries. Quite often. requires from you the same amount of work and time when you want to scale it to much more countries. So be brave to go farther than just one country. Be brave to think larger than just the neighborhood. I'm not saying globally at the first moment. Of course, you can do it, you can try it. But in our case, we started from one market, it was Poland. Then We go farther for the European Union and then we went farther for the global market. And still these days, today, we are operating in almost every country in the world. At the same time, trying to be very local and trying to be very close to the market, to the client, to understand the behaviors, the needs, what can we bring? So that would be the second advice. And the third one. is about culture differences because China is very different than Taiwan. And it's very different than India. And it's very different than Poland and very different than the United States. And you have to do your homework to understand the client, to understand who is on the other side of the screen and who do you want to serve? because this is our job, we are serving the client, we are giving them the best possible user experience and to do it in the best way, you have to do your homework and really well understand the client and the differences between you and your core values, your way of thinking and the way of thinking of your client. Those three for the start. Very helpful. Thank you for sharing these. I know we might need a different episode just for this, but at least these three put, if you want, the building blocks for scaling. What is the principle that you live by that has served you well on your journey? The first and most important are values. And in G2A we call it DNA. And of course they come from us, from G2ANians. And when you are asking about me personally, it's the same as we have in G2A. So it's honesty and trust, it's perseverance, it's responsibility and appetite for growth, appetite for building the life, the product, the platform, everything you do. So values, I would say this is the most important thing in my life. And also, which is interesting, when I do different kind of tests, like Gallup test, then I can clearly see that it is also on the top. And that was actually a very interesting discovery for me, that the things which I believe in not being named when I did the special test for 300 questions and when I get the results, it's like, Oh, wow. It shows clearly that this is it. The second thing is the mindset. And the mindset is anything is possible. I really believe it. It's the matter of the price. Are you willing to pay the price of the effort, the price of the pain, sometimes, of... You know, when you are an entrepreneur, you want to scale your business, build your business. You have to be ready for stress, never ending. You have to be ready for working week. It's not a joke. It truly is like this. If you are starting a business, be ready. Because as soon as you start, from the moment you think about starting the business, always problems will be with you, different kind of. From the first moment you think about the business, your job is problem solver. This is your job for the rest of your life. You are solving problems every day. This is your main job. It doesn't matter if your job is founder, president, CEO, doesn't matter, you are problem solver. If you don't have this attitude that There is always a list. I give you my example. Even though I am improving my self-management skills over last 20 years, with different tools, with different books, with different things, ways, approach constantly, non-stop, I still have a list of things to do, which is waiting for me. It doesn't matter how many things I cross out of the list as done, done. There is always 100 more waiting for me. This is entrepreneurial life. It never ends and you have to be ready for it. If you want to do business, you have to accept that there is a price for it. And the price is that you are never leaving your company. Even though you are at your holiday, even though there is an evening or night. Whatever, something is always waiting for you to be done, to be decided, to be taken care of. And last thing, when you are building the business, there is always something you can do better. So that is another thing which is with you till the end of your life, business life, that every time you are aware You can spend more time on something to make it better. And you have to decide A or B or C or D. So if you don't like make decisions, don't start the company because you have to be decisive, you have to be quick. Your decisions must be taken. Nobody is going to do it for you. And this is the very serious job because people rely on you. Clients rely on you. You are the number one responsible person in the business. When you are a founder, a CEO, a president, you are the leader and you have to like it because otherwise you will be suffering like hell for the next years until you realize maybe that this is not for you. So this is at least how I see it based on my 20 years of... experience and hundreds, probably thousands, entrepreneurs, CEOs I met in my life, I talked to and I know. This is CEO, there is a saying, I love it. CEO job, and I was the CEO of G2A for over 10 years. CEO job is the most lonely job in the world. You are there alone, Of course you have your team, of course you have your business partners, of course you can have your investors, but most often with the biggest problems, you have to face them alone and you have to like it. Otherwise you will be burned. Great advice. Thank you for sharing this part. As a gamer yourself, what are your top three games? And which is the most anticipated game you are looking for in 2024? My favorite game of all time is Mortal Kombat. It's the game which I played from the first, from the very first edition. And I was playing each of them. And this is, this is actually a great game when you, when you would like to play with somebody. And it's great for stress release. So that would be my first choice. The other one is Gran Turismo. I love Moto games and I spent a lot of time, many years ago, I spent a lot of time on Gran Turismo. That would be the second one. And the third one is classic. I think old retro Doom. I played it when I was in my high school. And I still remember the game, of course, there are next editions and next and next. But these memories from my high school when I was playing this and competing with others, that was great game. Yeah. I mean, you know, even now, when you look at these games, they have great graphics, great gameplay, great stories, right? But when you go back, I mean, I'm old now. I'm almost 40 and there are the GTA 2, Grand Theft Auto 2, which has a clunky UI and it was from the top. And then there's Red Alert. I mean, these are like classic games that are so competitive that you always look back and say, wow, now even with the best graphics, the GTAs are amazing with the graphics. It doesn't have the same element of gameplay as before. I mean, that's me. talking at that age. Probably the millennials disagree with me on this. The variety of games you can play is overwhelming and amazing at the same time. So 2024, of course, we have Prince of Persia, we have The Last of Us, GTA, it's so close to G-Com that surely we are looking at it and we'll see when it comes, when it happens. But I'd like to, I'd love to see Tekken. I'd love to see Final Fantasy VII and there is no one game which I'm waiting for. Unless it's the new release of Mortal Kombat, then this is always my first choice. But in general, I am very curious about the whole gaming market. It's growing constantly every year. It's not growing super fast, like, you know, 20 percent, but it's growing on a one-digit decent level. trajectory over several years, which is good. And I think those titles, of course, Mario Bros, one new edition, we could, we could see there and many others, but those titles, I think, a word to see. Amazing Bartosz, thank you for stopping by. It's an amazing episode. Where can people reach you and what's next? People reach me at of course, social media, G2A social media. So either this is X. Twitter or Facebook or TikTok or any other Instagram, et cetera. We are there. Of course you can, you can drop to my LinkedIn or my website, Squarcheck EU, very simple. And what is next? Next for G2A? Ooh, man. It's, we believe it's just the beginning, you know, when, when you cross 10 years. So when the company is 10 years old, we are 13, 14, almost 15. Then when you have the culture in place and when you have the assets, when you have the team, people and spirit, then it's just the beginning. And we have a decent strategy for the next years, for the coming years. Working very hard. Last year was very good for us. January was very good for us. And we are looking at this year from many angles, starting from... brand and awareness and being very present on local markets. The biggest one like the United States, the biggest ones European, like Spain. We also look deeply in our roadmap. The roadmap are features that we are preparing for our clients. So our platform, there is around 150 new features that we want to deliver to our platform. So. Stay tuned because it's going to really rock. And this is never-ending game. So we have 150 on our pipeline. At the same time, new are coming and we are trying to implement, starting from AI to any other tool which is there. And lastly, the culture part of the business, the values part of the business, the human people, the most important part of the business. We are deeply involved in diversity, campaign trend and everything around it. One, because of who we are, very diverse company. There were almost over 50 different nations on board G2A historically. And we are very proud of it. Through our approach to the governance, to the society, to either ESG or diversity inclusion, it is important for us. Amazing. We'll put all of these in the show notes. Thank you for stopping by and we wish you the best of luck on achieving your vision. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Hadi. It was great to be here with you. Thank you so much for listening to The First 100. We hope it inspired you in your journey. If you're enjoying the podcast, please subscribe to our podcast on Apple iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or Spotify. and share it with a friend starting their entrepreneurship journey. Leave us a five star review. Your support will help spread our podcast to more viewers.