Game-changing idea wins funding for student startup
- Alec Dent
- School of Entrepreneurship
- Contributors: James Greco, Photos
7 – minute read
What started as a horse-racing game a group of Florida Gulf Coast University students played on a whiteboard has turned into a business with serious startup funding — thanks to FGCU’s Daveler & Kauanui School of Entrepreneurship and a savvy marketing plan.
GG Entertainment is a student-launched company already selling its first board game, God Gauntlet, as well as a series of comics that expand the game’s world. A related novel is in the works, too.
Carl Cearc, chief marketing officer of GG Entertainment and a marketing major in his senior year at FGCU, credits a number of factors for the company’s successful business journey. First and foremost: FGCU’s entrepreneurship incubator, the Runway Program, and the enthusiastic support of Scott Kelly, director of the Rist Family Foundation Institute for Entrepreneurship.
“We’ve garnered over $50,000 in non-dilutive funding,” Cearc said, referring to money received without giving up any ownership or equity. “And it was just because Scott Kelly gave us that chance in Runway and said, ‘Hey, we’ll put you in. We like your idea.’ That changed my entire life.”
Investing in innovative students and alumni
The Runway Program supports fledgling entrepreneurs, providing mentorship and advice to FGCU students in any degree program and to alumni who want to start a business. Runway awards between $50,000 and $75,000 each semester to 10-15 qualifying student and alumni startups selected through a pitch process judged by real investors, business owners and community leaders. The program has awarded over $1 million to Eagle startups since launching in 2016, enabling many students to launch ventures and start earning money before they even graduate.
Cearc and fellow God Gauntlet creators Rodrigo Echeverria, Bella Logsdon and Kem Louissaint turned to the Runway Program when they decided to expand their game idea into a business. When they got in touch with Kelly, the program had already started for the year. Nevertheless, Kelly was so impressed with the work that the group had already done that he allowed them to join the cohort.
“We pushed them to get a prototype into the hands of real users, and they delivered,” said Kelly. “What makes Carl and the GG Entertainment team’s story special is that it reflects exactly what the Daveler and Kauanui School of Entrepreneurship and the Rist Institute were designed to do together.”
With Runway’s financial and mentorship support, GG Entertainment was able to develop their game and their business even further. The game that took shape — in which players take on the role of one of 15 gods from across mythologies and race to a finish line, while sabotaging each other along the way — became increasingly popular as the team traveled to conventions all the way up to Jacksonville, actively building a community of thousands of fans.
Pitching at the national level
The team pitched their business for seed money through Runway, winning $9,000. Their momentum built as they traveled to more entrepreneurial competitions.
“In a way, it’s a little more intense than ‘Shark Tank,’” Cearc said of the contests. “’Shark Tank’ has the ‘you’re going on TV’ aspect, which is its own ballpark. But with the pitch competitions, they’re run almost exactly like those ones in ‘Shark Tank,’ except you’re a completely new business, maybe even someone who’s never pitched before, and they don’t give you the easy judges.”
The biggest challenge by far was e-Fest, a national undergraduate entrepreneurship competition hosted at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, and sponsored by the Richard M. Schulze Family Foundation, which awards $250,000 in funding. With about 170 applicants competing for 25 spots, GG Entertainment was wait-listed in 26th place — until a group dropped out, opening the door of opportunity.
Cearc and Logsdon, an FGCU senior supply chain management major, handled the pitches and faced the e-Fest judges — high-level C-suite executives and venture capitalists.
“You present your business, you show your findings, you show where you’re at as a company and they are ruthless about it,” said Cearc. “If you aren’t a company that’s going to succeed, they’re not going to put any money into your company at all.”
Cheering on the underdogs
GG Entertainment seemed like a long shot.
“We were the underdogs in every single sense,” said Cearc. “We immediately realized on that first day, ‘Okay, every single company here is geared towards tech. We are the only company that made it in e-Fest that isn’t a tech-based company.’”
Cearc and Logsdon didn’t think they would make the final round of competition. To their surprise, the judges saw the analog nature of their product as a strength rather than a weakness. The judges said they hadn’t seen a game that perfectly bridges the gap between complex and simple games — making it extremely fast for anyone to pick up and play, Cearc recalled. They also liked the marketing strategy of developing an entire ecosystem of lore, animations and comics around a series of board games — a very Disney-like approach, he said.
Against the odds, GG Entertainment won third place and $20,000.
“The judges and event organizers specifically noted that the way the other tech-heavy teams supported us as underdogs, cheering for us when we made it to the finals, was unlike anything they had ever seen at e-Fest before,” Cearc said. “They loved the energy a simple board game company brought out of a tech-focused room.”
Taking it to the next level
The e-Fest judges weren’t the only ones impressed by GG Entertainment. Another gaming company, Zap ‘Em Games, liked Cearc’s viral marketing strategies so much that it offered him a job as chief marketing officer. He accepted the position but is also still working for GG Entertainment to develop the company’s future.
While five sequel games are already fully designed, they are focusing on building out all the lore, comics, animations, plushies and other merchandise for God Gauntlet before pushing out the next game.
“I will always be indebted to FGCU,” said Cearc of the company’s success. “I think that a lot of students should know that Runway exists, and that they can just make something of their own there.”