Livecamp stories: Bunch
LAN parties, on your smartphone.
Throughout Livecamp the theme of community has come up time and time again. In our post on Ghost Commander, we talked about how communities were forming around live streamers on Twitch, making live stream entertainment an inherently participative and 2-way experience. With Bunch, an app that lets you play games with your friends in real-time on your phone, this community aspect is closer to home. Bunch reinforces ties between friends, giving them the most frictionless way to hang out, play games and just have a good laugh–without the need to physically be in the same place as each other. It’s like the LAN parties of the past, but without having to co-ordinate whose house to go to.
This interview is with Selcuk Atli, co-founder and CEO of Bunch. Just last week, Bunch announced their monumental $3.8M seed funding round–proving that the future in live streaming is one where you can trash talk your friends while playing Minecraft.
S- Who are you and what did you do before starting Journey?
I’m Selcuk Atli, CEO of Bunch. I grew up in Istanbul, came to the US as a Fulbright Scholar for grad school. While I was in SF I started and exited x2 advertising and technology startups — Boostable (YCW14) and Manifest Commerce. Outside of tech, I am the lead singer of an indie rock band called The HMMS.
S- What are you working on?
Group video chat for live mobile games. A lot of us grew up playing LAN parties, where you get together with your friends and play video games like Counter Strike and Starcraft. Most of the fun in those parties came from just being with your friends and laughing together while playing games.
Teenagers still do the same thing today; but they don’t need a LAN, computers or consoles. They hang out with their friends playing games like Minecraft and Fortnite on their smartphones. They’ve traded the big screen PC and console experience to playing these games on their phones with friends, anytime — anywhere.
What we do is allow these teenagers to have a LAN party with their friends anytime, anywhere and enjoy the talk and laughter that makes the LAN parties fun in the first place. Essentially we are a social network that builds a social layer around all these mobile games hence the easiest and most fun way to play these games with friends.
S- Explain your product in 3 words?
FaceTime [while] playing games
S- What has been your biggest challenge so far during the Betaworks Camp program?
I think our biggest challenge has been focusing on the most important pieces of our roadmap first. There is such a large opportunity in this space and so many cool things we can build, but we need to focus on building the most important things for our users first. It’s been a challenge but I think we’re now on the right tracks.
“There is such a large opportunity in this space and so many cool things we can build, but we need to focus on building the most important things for our users first.”
S- Why did you apply for Betaworks Camp?
The experience of the Betaworks team in consumer applications and gaming was compelling. Plus, it was an opportunity for us to gather our team in NYC for an intense period of 3 months and get a lot more done, faster.
S- Why did you build this product?
1. We wanted to have this product for ourselves
2. We saw the gaming landscape changing significantly with the behaviour of teenage users moving from PC games to mobile games, and with this, we felt there needed to be a better chat experience that tied all this together.
S- If you could get introduced to one person to help the development of your product, who would it be?
Tim Cook, because if he likes Memojis, he’d love Bunch.
Last Thursday we held Livecamp Summit, an event that brought together top investors and Media in our Studios space for demos from all 5 of our Livecamp companies. You can see Bunch’s demo here. You can also read further coverage of Bunch’s fundraising round on Crunchbase, Engadget and Medium and you can watch Selcuk’s interview on Cheddar here.
This is the fourth post in a five-part series that dives into the Livecamp founders’ journeys into the tech industry, their biggest challenges and hanging out at Betaworks. Read the third post on Contentflow, here.
Betaworks Camp is a thematic 3-month accelerator program at Betaworks, NYC. Stay up-to-date on Camp company announcements and future programs on Twitter: @thebetacamp
