Juked pivoted from esports news hub to a less-toxic esports social network

A startup that began as a centralized news hub for esports and rebuilt itself as a social network for esports fans.

Esports fans wanted a less toxic place to be fans together — with toxicity, spam and hot takes endemic to esports — more than another news hub.

Juked.gg launched in 2020 to centralise a fragmented esports world of games, forums, tournament series and chat apps, raising a seven-figure round covered by TechCrunch in early 2021.

Co-founder Ben Goldhaber says growth went 'up and to the right' before user counts plateaued. User interviews surfaced complaints endemic to esports — community toxicity, spam and hot takes — so Juked pivoted to building the social network users were asking for.

The social product launched publicly on a Thursday in February 2022 after a closed alpha with around 750 users, and immediately charted among iOS users in the US in the social networking category, per App Annie.

The news-hub ceiling was the audience itself: hardcore fans had nowhere left to grow.

User interviews turned a vague plateau into a concrete product thesis about toxicity.

The alpha's 750 users de-risked the pivot before public launch.

Phone-number signups and moderation were baked in to attack esports' core problem directly.

A plateau means your audience is the wrong shape, not necessarily your product: ask the users you have what the product should be, then dare to rebuild around it.

As of 19 February 2022 the social network was freshly launched and charting on iOS, with toxicity-at-scale moderation still untested and the company expected to raise again.