Virat Khutal of Twist Mobile on developments post the Matrix Investment

It has been a year since we spoke to Virat Khutal of Twist Mobile. The gaming company, with offices in India and Singapore, had closed a series A funding with Matrix Partners then, and Virat had spoken to us about his expansion plans.

One year on, we caught up with Virat to map the growth of the company since the funding.

YS: How has Matrix helped you over the year? What areas are you working on right now?

VK: Our main focus since the funding has been talent acquisition. We have been busy building the tools and technology and learning better programming skills. We want to build a strong team in India, which will enable us to scale up in southeast asia region.

Our experience with Matrix has been fabulous. They know how to build a great company. A good investor can help you identify the right problem and then help to solve it. They have made us realize that a gaming company should first invest in infrastructure and technology, which is of utmost importance to build a good product. Only then can you move on to monetizing it. So we are in no hurry to churn out average products which will not sustain in the market for very long.

YS: What has your focus been in terms of target markets?

VK: Focus is still the same. We are planning to hire designers/programmers in Singapore in the next 3-5 months, train them in India with our team and then let them develop products for those markets. In terms of operating system, we are developing more products for iOS and android now.

YS: What new products have you introduced? How have they fared?

VK: We have introduced about 15 new products in the last year. 3-4 of them have already crossed 1 million downloads. We remain focused on casual and arcade games. We want to target first time gamers, so we are trying to keep it simple. We have also worked to increase the obstacle levels in our games. Earlier we had around 30 levels, now we’ve gone up to 120. This makes the game more engaging, for a longer period of time.

YS: How is your monetization model shaping up?

VK: The games are all free for download so far, but we are working on it. We are thinking of introducing some paid levels. We will also look at developing our own virtual currency for our games in the future. Virtual currency is the big thing in the gaming space.

We wish Virat all the best. Watch this space to know more about the growth of Twist Mobile.