Sometimes, when you’re trying to solve someone else’s problems, you solve your own in the process.
Gerald Youngblood was a senior director at AMD, focused on marketing to the gaming industry. His work life fed into his personal life: his son was a gamer as well, and the two bonded over their shared passion.
There was just one problem: while watching gaming content together, Youngblood saw family-friendly content that was mixed in with content not suitable for his son.
“It was HBO, HGTV and Nickelodeon all in the same channel,” Youngblood said.
The content of the games they played, and videos they watched on YouTube and Twitch sometimes included inappropriate language, lewd commentary and abusive posts with in-game chats, sending shivers down Youngblood’s back as he watched with his son.
Together with co-founder Dan Chiu, a former strategy and operations leader at ESPN, Youngblood set out to create a platform, Tankee, to help children ages 6 to 12 find consumer gaming content in an environment appropriate for them.
The first important piece of information they found? What they were tapping into is a huge industry -- 666 million people watched gaming content online in 2017, and the number is growing. And while traditional TV network viewership has declined, kids are moving to online platforms to watch content.
Armed with this information, Youngblood and Chiu knew if they were going to reimagine how kids get their content, they would need to build a platform that was mobile first. Not only that, but they knew influencers needed to play a major part in Tankee, as Youngblood’s son and his friends poured over influencer content.
“The influencers are really diverse -- many are in their 20’s and 30’s,” Youngblood said.
The founders targeted influencers within the popular games Minecraft and Roblox. And people like AmyLee33, who creates episodic content built into Minecraft (Youngblood calls it “Saturday morning cartoons for Minecraft”), and Speedy, who creates how-to’s for games, while also showing the Ukulele Rocket League, help emphasize how important and engaging powerful influencer content can be. In fact, the founders have worked with the influencers to actually create their own custom content.
As the company grows, so has their reach. Machinima, a multi-platform online entertainment network owned by Warner Bros. supplies a great amount of content for the Tankee platform. The startup has raised a friends and family round of initial funding, and it's raising a pre-seed round.
One big feature of Tankee has to do with the inclusiveness and diversity of the platform as it relates to other partners. Youngblood said they built Tankee with strong security and privacy, while also ensuring that parents were aligned in the content.
Tankee also partners with a company called SuperAwesome, based in London, to leverage tech to ensure they are respectful to COPPA (Child Online Privacy Protection Act) by showing kids age-appropriate ads, that never collect their personal data. The company is also looking to connect with branded media partnerships, as well as game publishers themselves.
This will be a big year for the company.
While Tankee will continue to scale from a user perspective, the platform will expand to Android after launching a beta version on iPad last July. The company was also accepted into the Capital Factory accelerator program and is an official nominee for the KidScreen Awards for 'Best Streaming Video Platform' alongside YouTube Kids. They are also one of five Austin startups pitching at SXSW Pitch in March.
While Tankee has a lot of interesting business aspects going for it -- kids have a huge influence in the goings-on of the company.
“The kids actually picked the logo,” Youngblood said. “The kids we talk to give honest feedback about what is great and what isn’t so great surrounding what we do as a company.”
