This past week in Tel Aviv Startup Grind, Sagi Schliesser sat down with Ram Yonish to share his experience as an entrepreneur leading Tabtale, a global app surpassing 1 billion downloads.
A big part of Sagi's journey is finding the right time. After working on information systems in the Israeli Air Force and studying computer science and psychology, Sagi joined a small B2B startup in 1999, right before the dotcom bubble burst.
Over the next decade, he became a CTO at IDIT and later, he was convinced by the charismatic CEO and COO to join Sapiens’ C-suite. Here, he learned that "companies are all about people." As CTO of Sapiens, he hired former employees from his previous company, developing Sapiens’ flagship product and positioning them as a market leader.
These roles were lucrative, but Sagi dreamed for more. "You do some things for your occupation, and some for your soul," he explained. So on his 35th birthday, he decided that he would write a children's book called "Hi-Tech Dad." It sold 1000 copies which raised money for charity organization Latet - Hebrew for ‘to give’.
This book sparked an idea and Sagi founded Tabtale. Its first product was an interactive children's book for the recently released iPad, taking 5% of total downloads in the early days. The first 500,000 downloads were achieved without external funding, allowing them to raise initial funding from MAGMA with no clear business model. Sagi joked: "If there is one thing that all startups excel at, it's burning other people's money."
After an initial funding round, Tabtale soon set its sights on gaming - a market that would eventually grow to $100B globally with mobile gaming surpassing console gaming for the first time in 2016. The secret to Tabtale's success is that it’s a company that develops quality content.
Tabtale has built a gaming platform that can effectively A/B test everything from cross promotion banners to parts of game play. They can efficiently market to specific users, building an audience of millions users who are incentivized to download several games. A typical user downloads up to five or 10 games out of the several hundred that Tabtale offers.
Some fast stats on Tabtale:
#9 in the App Store for Android and iOS worldwide
Its games account for 1% of all global app downloads
Employs 250 people across 5 countries: Israel, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Serbia, China
Has produced over 300 games
When you’ve experienced this kind of success, one may wonder ‘what’s next?’ Today, Sagi is surveying the startup landscape from an investor’s perspective, looking for great founders and interesting technologies.
The future for TabTale, he says, lies in communication within games, but not as a competitor to social media heavyweights like Snap. He also believes that, geographically speaking, Africa is the next continent poised for major growth. Stay tuned for updates from Sagi and the next Startup Grind event is in Tel Aviv.
Editor / Writer: Shay Mamo, Kristi DePaul, Vered Zabar (Tel Aviv Team)