A few years ago, when Syracuse University junior Michael Paris was still in high school, he and a friend, Angelo Damiano, Class of 2018, decided to start their own business: PowerSpike. Today, the pair is strategizing their next steps after the company received $500,000 in investments this summer.

PowerSpike, an esport influencer marketing platform, connects advertisers to major players in the world of online gaming. The company aims to help gamers make a living through sponsorships and advertising deals on Twitch, an esports tournament platform, as well as other live-streaming platforms. Damiano, then a double major marketing management and entrepreneurship and emerging enterprises student, said the idea came from his passion for gaming and exposure to the difficulties of monetizing the competitive esports world.

As a World of Warcraft enthusiast and a top-100 player in the U.S., Damiano recruited Paris to start the project. Paris’ artistic background and experience with design software gave him the skills to design the product, while Damiano, the chief executive officer, covered all things business.

“We sent out like 100 emails to different brands and got two responses — both of them were rejections,” Paris said. “We realized it was going to be difficult.”

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PowerSpike’s first year saw significant growth — its third partner, then a Binghamton University sophomore Eric Rice, was brought on to tackle back-end development. They began receiving enough money from grants and competitions to fully fund themselves, Damiano said. Some of the competitions that kept the company moving forward included the Panasci Business Plan Competition, the RvD iPrize and Compete CNY, among others.

But the CEO said that between the end of his freshman year and the first semester of his sophomore year, the product was “totally different.” Rice, the chief technology officer, said when he joined in fall 2016, the company was clearly in its beginning stages. Other than a few web pages and digital storage, he said he pretty much had to start from scratch.

Damiano describes Rice’s addition as a gamechanger — projects that might have taken him a few weeks, Rice could finish in a couple of hours.

“For the first two to three months that we were building this, we had no idea how to code in general,” Damiano said. “We were scrapping things together. (Rice) was really able to come in and give us the execution that we needed to make it happen.”

But after almost a year of funding, things slowed down when the startup ran out of money just before the new school year, Paris said. Between classes, inconsistent returns on their work and low funding, the drive to continue PowerSpike was low. It wasn’t until the spring that things began to change.

Paris said during his second semester of sophomore year, the startup earned “a lot of traction on the streaming side of things,” and gamers were signing up for the service. The big push, however, came with their acceptance to the Techstars Atlanta Accelerator, a program that helps enterprise startups receive the financial and professional support they need to succeed.

“The first real moment where it was like ‘this could really be a thing’ was when we got into Techstars,” Paris said.  

Paris, Damiano, Rice and a few other members of their team have been working with Techstars all summer to simplify their product and make it more accessible, Damiano said. PowerSpike was one of 1o startups to receive a $100,000 investment from the program as well as connection to professional mentors. A few months later, a team from the Philadelphia 76ers reached out to Damiano about a potential partnership that later secured a $200,000 investment.

“Probably biggest challenge that we had was that this idea was meaningful and we were the right people to do it,” Damiano said. “You’re constantly validating your concept and that you’re the right person to be doing this.”

Published on August 28, 2018 at 12:34 am

Contact Lydia: lnilesst@syr.edu