# Executive Summary
# Headlines
• We launched Hitmarker from Newcastle upon Tyne, England in May 2017 to solve the hiring problem in the esports industry. The company has now been profitable for the last three months and is the global leader in esports jobs.
• Esports is a fast-growing segment of the wider $152.1B video game industry, with a worldwide audience of over 450 million people and revenues that are on track to reach $1.1B this year.
• Hitmarker is a business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) jobs board, where company representatives sign up to post job opportunities with their organisations and candidates sign up to apply for them.
• Our website has been growing month-on-month since its creation and is now the largest single source of esports jobs online. We have over 2,200 hiring companies from 54 countries registered, including the likes of Amazon, HP and Logitech, along with a global candidate database numbering over 30,000. Our website has been used more than 1,200,000 times by in excess of 425,000 unique individuals.
• The platform was monetised in January 2019, achieving an immediate monthly revenue of more than £7,500 from Partnerships alone. Promoted Listings were offered to hiring companies in May and Display Advertising was added to the website in July. There are two further revenue streams on the way: Candidate Services and Recruitment Services.
• We are equity crowdfunding to realise our vision for the business, which is to grow rapidly over the next five years, beginning with an immediate move into the wider video game market. This will increase our output and audience size by a factor of five. Our intention is to increase the valuation of the company exponentially during this period, with a view of exiting at a significant multiple thereafter.
# What is Hitmarker’s mission statement?
We launched Hitmarker from Newcastle upon Tyne, England in May 2017 to solve the hiring problem in esports. At that time the industry was still huge, but so new that a professional, industry-specific jobs website had not yet been created.
Before Hitmarker was built there was no single source of esports jobs available online, with listings spread across social media, poor-quality endemic jobs websites (most of which no longer operate), and the more traditional non-endemic jobs websites like Indeed and LinkedIn. Whether people were looking for jobs or trying to find staff, they were required to create accounts on multiple websites to manage their search or hiring process.
Our platform exists to provide esports job hunters and the many, many companies involved in esports hiring with a home, and offers them a feature set that is custom-built to serve their specific needs. There's nothing else like it on the market.
# What products and services do we offer?
Our primary product is a traditional business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) jobs board, which allows representatives from companies to sign up and post job opportunities, and candidates to sign up and apply for them.
The growth of the platform now allows us to offer Strategic Partnerships and Promoted Listings as paid B2B services, and also to monetise our audience through Display Advertising.
In addition to this, we provide candidate services such as cover letter reviews, resume audits and "spotlight" posts on social media for free. We also undertake some consultancy work for hiring companies, which ranges from recruitment assistance (filtering, shortlisting, forwarding) to job description assistance. Both of these services will be monetised in the near future.
While our products are nothing new in the context of the wider recruitment space, they are unique and comfortably best-in-class in the esports industry.
# What market opportunity exists for us?
With an existing audience of over 450 million people (15% more than in 2018) and revenues on track to reach $1.1B this year (an annual growth of 26.7%), esports is one of the fastest-growing and most exciting industries on the planet.
Investment is coming into the space rapidly, which means that more and more high quality job openings are being advertised by companies based all around the globe.
There is a clear opportunity for an endemic jobs website/recruitment services company like ours to dominate this market and become synonymous with hiring in esports, which is what we have been working towards for the past two-and-a-half years.
This being said, esports is only a small segment of the wider video game industry. There are 2.5B gamers in the world (6.8% more than in 2018) and the video game industry is on track to generate $152.1B of revenue this year (an annual growth of 9.6%).
We have researched the hiring segment of the video game industry closely and have found it to be similar to the mid-2017 esports market in terms of the quality and quantity of competitors operating in the space. Our research suggests that adding video game industry jobs to Hitmarker will increase the total available on our platform by a factor of five, which will lead to an even greater swell in terms of audience and revenue potential.
We firmly believe that we can dominate the video game hiring market in the same way we have dominated the esports hiring market.
# What successes can we point to?
Hitmarker is now the largest single source of esports jobs online, having posted almost 5,000 listings in the first half of this year and a total of 7,853 so far in 2019. This represents a growth of 94% over the same period of 2018.
Over 2,200 hiring companies and more than 30,000 job hunters are registered users of our website, with over 100,000 applications being sent through the platform to date.
We are still growing month-on-month, and in September 2019 attracted in excess of 40,000 unique visitors to the site. These visitors undertook almost 90,000 sessions and viewed just under 300,000 pages in total.
Our social media presence has continually increased alongside this, with our Twitter account having over 12,750 followers and our Tweets garnering in excess of 4,400,000 impressions last month.
We are now the only award-winning company in our class too, being named "Service Provider of the Year" at the 2019 UK Esports Awards in August and shortlisted as finalists in the "Supporting Agency of the Year" category of the upcoming global Esports Awards 2019.
We initially monetised Hitmarker in January 2019 and generated more than £7,500 of revenue from a single partnership in that month alone. We have now generated a small profit in each of the last three months, with income from our three open revenue streams covering all of the critical costs of the business.
# What are the next steps for us?
Our overall growth has remained consistent for two-and-a-half years now, and if we simply continued on the same path we have no doubt that this would remain the case moving forwards. However, we believe adding video game industry jobs to Hitmarker will lead to a very significant short-term boost in audience, plus an enormous and lasting long-term boost to revenue potential.
Once we become an esports and video game jobs platform rather than "just" an esports jobs platform our primary mission for 2020 and beyond will be to maximise revenue.
Having run Hitmarker as a free service since its creation, we began to monetise our service in January 2019 when we entered into our first strategic partnership with the University of California, Irvine to promote its new Esports Management Program. This partnership earned us over £7,500 in less than two weeks and almost £20,000 across the initial three-month term. The same partnership was renewed between July and September and earned us over £21,500. It is expected to persist throughout 2020.
We began to offer paid promoted job listings to hiring companies in May, a second strategic partnership was agreed with Esports Insider, an events and news company, in June, display advertising was added to the website in July, and a third strategic partnership was agreed with Gamer Advantage, a manufacturer of gaming glasses, in September.
In the near future we intend to begin charging for our candidate services, such as cover letter reviews, CV/resume audits and "spotlight" posts on social media. We also expect to agree a partnership with a recruitment agency that specialises in esports, which will see us earning a monthly retainer for exclusivity and making a commission on candidate and company referrals that lead to successful placements. Further to this, talks are underway for a significant strategic partnership with an international corporate services provider that should come into play from early 2020.
# What is our vision?
With the size of the esports and video game industries today and with how quickly each continues to grow, we believe that Hitmarker’s potential is enormous.
We are now generating profit and still growing month-on-month, we are already established as the go-to brand for hiring in esports and once we successfully transition into the video game industry and monetisation is fully realised we believe we will have a highly profitable business model within two years, even when accounting for future hires and significantly increased marketing costs.
We have also spoken to a number of senior executives in the local recruitment and venture capital space, most whom have been involved in the sales of niche, industry-specific jobs boards in the last decade, and they have only reinforced our belief in our potential to exit the business after five years having achieved a very significant multiple on our current pre-money valuation of £1,920,000.
We'd be genuinely surprised if we weren't able to double the current valuation over the next 12 months.