Volley 押注智能音箱成为家庭游戏平台

做的是什么生意

Volley builds voice-controlled games and entertainment — trivia, choose-your-own-adventure stories and party games — for Amazon Alexa and Google Home, earning from Amazon's developer rewards plus in-app purchases.

启动资金：>$1M seed led by Advancit Capital before YC's W18 class

起因

Max Child and James Wilsterman, Harvard roommates and longtime friends, were running an iOS consultancy when voice apps took off. On the side they had hacked games — a trivia game played by swiping push notifications and a Facebook Messenger chatbot pet — and found the lightweight play intriguing. Around a year and a half before March 2018 they shifted the company's focus to voice: 'Voice was sort of the obvious next step,' Child said.

经过

Volley's first voice title, Spelling Bee, flopped because Alexa struggled to recognize single letters, confusing B, C, D and E. Later titles took off: Song Quiz, a name-that-tune game, became the No. 1 game on Alexa by reviews with a five-star rating across 8,842 reviews, and Yes Sire, a choose-your-own-adventure storytelling game, also topped Alexa's charts. By March 2018 Volley had more than a dozen live titles, was earning in the five-figure range monthly from Amazon's developer rewards program, and was preparing subscriptions and in-app purchases. The startup raised more than $1M in seed funding led by Advancit Capital ahead of joining Y Combinator's Winter 2018 class, and pitched at Demo Day as a six-person team in San Francisco.

可借鉴之处

进入新平台是一系列小赌注的组合：Spelling Bee 展示了 Alexa 的局限，Song Quiz 展示了它的优势——持续推出游戏，而不是把公司押在第一个游戏上。