The impact of the received grant into the company’s progression has been great. The economic grant enabled us to perform both actions, e.g. implementation of the marketing and analysis of KPI, without stressing about the money neither about the time spent to perform the required work. Very often, gaming companies like ours, spend all budget in developing the software while nothing or very few in the marketing and branding actions. Marketing and branding actions are equally important than developing a good product, and certainly, not any company will succeed if it is not able to achieve good sells of a very good product. Therefore, we really appreciate the support received by the Horizon 2020 SME Instrument.
Furthermore, the grant included the support of a coordinator, in this case Olli Mankonen, Senior Advisor in Turku Business Region, was very helpful and from the very beginning they helped us to understand the bureaucracy needed to accomplish. He also helped us to select the perfect coach, in this case Armin Zadakbar from The Armin Bar Ltd. Armin came to visit us, and shared his time and experience with us for a total of three days. He took his time to analyze our company’s product and target market, and gave incredible tips and insights to improve the succeed rate of our actions. In our opinion, it is very clever that the funding instrument includes not only monetary support but also such coaching and expertize.
As part of the actions to improve our brand among our target clients during the project, i.e. blind and visually impaired people, we performed two actions which had a considerable impact among them.
The first action, Music Competition, see Section 2.6.1 aimed to proof that there were talented blind musicians and that it was possible that the music and the sounds in any game could be composed and created by blind people. Thirty-three blind musicians participated in the competition, and the music of nine of them will finally appear in the game. In addition, half of the sounds used in the game have been created by a sound designer who is also blind. We hope, and we believe, that this kind of actions are necessary, and that people in the blind and visually impaired community have appreciated this kind of action.
The second action, myTrueFriends, see Section 2.6.2 intended to bring also voice to those who are usually forgotten by the main stream currents. The impact of this actions is yet difficult to quantify, but we believe too that it was worth and that sooner or later they will be appreciated.
The current situation of the company looks good, because the required work (Goals 1 and 2 of the project) has been done. We expect that the launch of our first game AudioWizards would be a success, and that we can continue developing our own proprietary software IMAGE.
