How GameOn! ATX Built a $1.9M Game Show Business and Left Without a Deal

We are here in Austin, Texas at Game On ATX. If you've ever wanna been on a game show, this is where you need to be.

You bring a group of friends, anywhere from six to 44 people. We have built a game show set where we will have one of our hosts come out and lead you through the game show experience.

Founded right before COVID with four entrepreneurs, they came out of the gates swinging with crazy revenue growth.

We had a full year with both rooms open. We made 1.9.

Yeah. That's amazing. The has moved in and things have gotten a little more tricky.

Our sales have basically been cut in half year over year.

Why is that? We're not sure. The question now is, do I like their growth plan? And if so, I'll offer to invest on the spot.

We also have a a travel show that we can take to people's locations. We have a wheel. We have a buzzer. We have a large screen. We can

take that anywhere and really entertain a lot of people.

So what is one new mobile set cost? It's between 25 and 30,000.

Hey. How are you? Doing alright. Welcome in.

I'm Nathan.

I'm Jake. Nice to meet you.

Tell us where we are. Give us some context.

So this is Game On ATX. It's a game show experience here in Austin, Texas. You bring a group of friends anywhere from six to 44 people. We have built a game show set where we will have one of our hosts come out and lead you through the game show experience.

When did you guys launch this business?

So we started around September 2019, which was great for about six months. And then we closed, we reopened in April '21. We've been going pretty strong since then. And then we opened our Houston location last January.

Keep saying we. How many co founders?

So three others other than me. I got brought into it as the sort of junior owner, after a few months of being open.

How do you guys sort of split roles? Anytime there's multiple co founders, I always like to understand who's doing what.

There's a large tech component of this. Our software is completely proprietary. We've built it all. That's really Chris's strong suit is he comes from a software background. Travis has a background in sort of film set design. He builds all of the set pieces and everything. Mhmm. Jeb has taken on more of the role of the sort of customer facing side. I am the actual day to day manager here in the Austin location.

So I'd love to take a look at some of the rooms or how this works. You want to take me back?

Yeah, absolutely. I can show you, in fact the rest of them are back there.

Okay, great.

I'm Nathan.

Hi,

Travis. Travis, nice to meet you. Nathan. Chris, good to meet you. Nathan. Jeb. Jeb. Okay. Nice to meet you, So wait, who is the tech person? Who is the film person? And who is the customer service facing person?

So I'm the tech person. Travis is one.

I'm the construction film guy. Okay.

Yeah. Have the word customer facing.

What was it like opening this sort of in twenty twenty six months before COVID? I mean,

it was really nerve wracking. We self funded it. We all had day jobs, so we're kind of working part time. We just were open on the weekends. And our first month, I think we had enough money left over from the funding to cover one month's rent. So it a little scary, but it worked out. And, for the next six months, were growing month over month pretty, pretty well. And then COVID hit. So what did it cost

to open a place like this? This does doesn't look cheap.

It was about a $100,000 to build this.

Oh, that's lower than what I thought it would have been.

Well, we just started with the one room, the smaller room. So this room came later. This was another 50 to 70,000 to build this room. Okay. We built it ourselves completely though. Are you guys

just reinvesting profits or are you raising externally?

We were just reinvesting. Okay.

So you still, you forced to own 100 percent of the business.

That's right.

That's great.

Any debt? We have another location in Houston and we took an SBA loan out to do that location. We've got about 87,000 left on that loan, so not too bad.

So explain to me what happens. I show up here with my crew of, I don't know what, 15 friends. Is that a good average size? Yeah. Yep. It's a great size. How do we start?

What would happen? We'll split them into two teams. Typically, there's a red side and a blue side. And from there, our host will come out and just lead them through the games.

All the games are programmed. We we own the software. We wrote it ourselves. What So do you want to show off?

What should we do?

Let's show you the room. Let's show you what the games look like and what the customers experience.

Okay, let's do it. I'll follow your Okay.

Great. Alright, typically when you do come in the door, we will have you make up a name. We prefer you don't use your own name.

Team Dave doesn't lose. That's all I have to say.

In the red corner, of course, we have team Dave. Let's some noise. Boo. And in the

blue corner,

we are looking at team Jeb. We'll start off with survey squabble. We asked 100 people to name a fruit with lots oranges. Okay. Don't even need to finish the question. Show me oranges. Oh, baby. Should've let me finish. Now, Banzai, I'm gonna finish the question for you. A fruit with lots of seeds.

Strawberries. Let me see. Strawberry. Number four answer on the board. Team Jeb is in control. Whirly words.

Your first category is food and drink. Let's get a big spin here.

Oh, that's what we like to see. Tea.

Do we have tea? One tea. That's what we're talking about. Yes,

Let's go with r.

Rats. R stands for rat. You wanna guess? Alphabet soup. Wow. And that's what you get, ladies and gentlemen. That's the skill that comes

from working here for so long. Whenever you're ready, one

right after another day. One, two, and three. He's got 500. He's got a zero. And he's got a 100. Today's winner is

TJ. Dan, you're not supposed to win. They're not gonna give us any money if we win the game. What are you doing?

You make you.

And I'll even let you hold

the trophy because we don't normally use cool. This This is cool.

Normally, losers don't get to touch the trophy, but we will clean it after the game.

No worries. Great. We don't wanna lose our trophy.

That's right.

So that was super fun. How long how long would that process actually take if it was a real game?

So about an hour and a half in this room. Typically, it's groups of like say 20 to 30.

And then we have two more games that we're working on that are currently in development.

The product I just experienced, that is your that is your biggest selling item. That is the main revenue stream, right? That's correct. And so pre COVID, before you had to shut down, what were you able to grow revenues to?

That was just with the one room. So I wanna say we got up to 30,000 a month. We had to turn down a lot of requests for larger groups. And we were like, okay, there's clearly demand for something that can accommodate up to 40 people where they're all participating at the same time, where they're all doing the same thing.

So you go up to 30 ks, you guys are cheers in, you're saying we're beating projections, you know, maybe think about quitting full time jobs or not, then COVID hits. Does it basically go 100% to zero?

Oh, Yeah. Yeah. We completely shut down. You know, we followed all the the lockdown requests and protocols. How did

you make it through? Because the landlord said, if you're not paying the full rent, guys, paid. You just ate the cost.

We ate it. I ended up selling my house and luckily this particular lease is inexpensive. Now it's up to 5,100 or so. Okay. So what happened after COVID? You get reopened? We reopened and then a few months later we build this room and revenue just immediately doubles. Like month over month it doubled, and then we started saving money to build a second location, which is what we did last year in Houston. We had a full year

with both rooms open. That was... We made 1.9.

Yeah. That's incredible. Yeah. Yeah. Last year 1.9. So now you're scaling. You've got these two rooms. You got a second location open at that point.

But here's where our story gets a little sad is that, you know, I don't know if it's the economy or more competition, but our sales have basically been cut in half year over year.

Why is that? We're not sure. Competition is hitting us. Is it a direct competitor or is it like an escape room is eating, is cannibalizing this

There's kind of other game show businesses out there, right?

This room and this location was the sort of the second big money bet you met, but it obviously launched in a much smaller room. Why don't we go learn more about the growth story and plans to grow in that room? Does that work?

Yeah, absolutely. This is the black box is where it all started.

On a full capacity month, how much can you generate revenue just from this room?

We can do eight games a day in here.

And then six days a week. Like our best months, we were making 170, 180,000 a month.

Okay, I mean that's obviously a great business. Do you ever have repeat customers or they come once and then they sort of experience it, there's no surprises, they don't come back?

No, lots of repeats. Repeats like every week. There's someone who has been here for one reason or another.

Really? It's been like 10 times.

Yeah. Won't say his name I guess but What the hell does

that guy do?

People fly in to see him and then you know he's showing them Austin and this is just a destination He's bringing new groups.

Part of the tour. Yeah.

But the business expands pretty nicely for the clientele where someone will come in with a work group that will love it and then say, I'm going to come back here for my birthday. Then three of those people will say, I should do this with my work. And those work groups generate people who wanna come back for...

The word-of-mouth has been easily the best marketing campaign that we've had. Know, it's... We... I think early on, we spent less than $2,000 a month on marketing.

I'm surprised here in 2026 sales are going down because there's a couple trends that should be helping you. Right? People are going to drink less. So looking for forms of entertainment that they can do with their friends late at night that does not involve drinking. This is that. People are craving human connection because we're all feeling lost in this online world, this is that. It's three things. It's competition, it's broader economic trends,

and then the third is that in January we redid our website and hired a marketing firm because we were having a really hard time growing Houston. We hired a firm to come do it. They redid our website completely, and since then it's just been something's broken apparently.

How much did you guys plow onto the Houston location to open it? About 700,000. Wow, that's a lot.

What makes that so expensive? The lease itself was already double what we were paying here. So that started it. And then it was a complete remodel. It was an office space, it had all these rooms. There was a huge demo. We went big.

That one, we wanted to be the showcase room to say, If we did take on investors, this is what they would look like going forward. This was our stamp. It sort of ate all of our profits from our best year.

It just hasn't performed. What's your best month of sales in the Houston location?

$50,000 maybe 60,000 What were you projecting? Growth similar to this. You know, I think 8% month over month.

Last month, what did this location do in Austin? 60. And Houston?

30, I believe.

Is that sustainable for you guys? Are you at least break even?

I think at 90, we would be making little bit of profit.

Okay, good. Good. Good. And how many folks are full time across both locations?

Just two. Yeah.

Yeah. People are what? You have contractors coming if you need help.

It's a lot of part time work.

Yeah. Part time work. When I meet a founding group, which obviously was a founding group that are passionate what they're doing, it's really difficult to outsource the marketing and just be like totally hands off because you are the brand, right? Like you guys sort of know what makes it tick. You're here. You're feeling like you're feeling it a little bit, right? Why is that funny?

Personally, I was happy to kind of offload it because it's just a black box to me. Don't understand. We do have a great product. I'm very confident in our product. I'm not at all confident in our ability to spread the word.

What is the growth plan? I do this show because I want to find founders with a great vision where I put my capital behind their ideas and grow, but I can't come up with the ideas.

We also have a travel show that we can take to people's locations. That's for larger events. We have a wheel, we have a buzzer, we have a large screen.

We can take that anywhere and really entertain a lot of people.

So what does one new mobile set cost? It's between 25,000

and $30,000 Okay, and

of your $90,000 a month of total sales today, how much of that is mobile sales?

It would be around 10 to 12, and now it's probably closer to three to five, maybe five to seven.

Yeah, five to seven. Five to seven.

I mean, writing a check for 25 ks to get another mobile unit and then having it amortize out where you're doing between 5 and 10 ks per month on that, that's a very fast payback period.

Right. You know, we've been asked about franchising the sort of brick and mortar, but if we franchise the mobile, that's sort of that's more attractive for us to say, here's a sort of business in a box, you know, that you've got a set you can operate as a sole proprietor. You pay us for the use of the software and purchase the set from us. Then you can go and do this on your own, you know, kind of like a one or two person show.

But if I were you to check for $50,000 to do two more mobile units, you wouldn't be able to fill the units. Correct. That's the issue right now.

Yep. Mhmm.

Yep. Right. Because the current mobile unit isn't fully rented out.

But we do actively wonder, how much SEO is affecting us, That people were finding us and now they're not. What someone

search? Give me some search

Fun things to do in Austin. Team building. Building.

Even game show Austin for anyone who's maybe heard, oh, there's a game show experience here in town.

Do you guys rank number one for these terms if I open incognito mode on my Google Chrome? I don't think so. Is there a big corporate competitor that has moved in that is dominating SEO? Yeah. And they're a global chain already?

I think they have 15 or 16 locations. They're pretty big.

Have they offered to acquire you?

They have not. They have not reshelled.

Why not? It sounds like, I mean, you're a big business. You're doing 1,000,000 a year. I don't know. Would you sell to them? I mean, are you... Do you want to keep building this? Are you frustrated? Would you sell to them?

Last year, I think we would have said, no. Let's see how big we can make this on our own. You know, now it's I'll speak for myself. It's probably I would entertain an offer, of course.

How much are they offering? Private equity guys or gals, they don't want to do work. They prefer to be golfing. Wanna be doing... It's the same amount of work to do a million dollar deal as a $100,000,000 deal. Right. And your revenue right now is just too small to attract that kind of attention.

So that's... That was kinda what we wanted to do is do whatever it took to get our revenue up to that point. And then and then we could think about, you know, do we wanna sell or do we wanna keep it going?

You guys ultimately think about this like a Hollywood studio. You're about experience and content. I imagine if I'm coming in here with 15 to 20 friends, if you were able, if there were GoPros in here recording the whole thing and by the time we walked out you had a three minute video ready for me to take, I would be willing to pay a lot of money for that. I mean 100, $200 potentially. Are you doing anything to upsell

We that sort have not. Yeah, that's been a somewhat frequent request of like, know, can we get a video of this?

People want to feel like they're taking a clip of them from being on TV and sharing it on Instagram.

Yeah, we've definitely talked about it, but what we found is there's so much movement that it's kind

of hard to follow the game. The other idea that we had was, you know actually advertising other businesses inside of this place. Know we see 2,400 people a month. Captive audience. Advertisements are part of game shows.

So have you

So, have you done done that? That? We have not. That's a great idea.

Why haven't you done it? Just time. Other things come up that are a little more important.

So, you guys aren't full time on the business?

No. Yeah, I have a day job. Travis has a day job. Okay. If I looked at the

contract you signed with the marketing agency you brought on, what would I see

in the deliverable section? It's essentially running the socials.

Do you feel like they're doing a good job or no?

If I'm basing it on Revenue. The only Yeah, thing that exactly. Then no, you know, the answer to that is...

So, who's firing them? None of you seem like a mean guy.

I will happily fire them. Our previous marketing effort was effectively word-of-mouth and it worked.

If that's true, word-of-mouth is your biggest thing, then your best marketing agency is this guy that's been here 10 times. It's your biggest customer. It's getting a couple hours of his time or her time every week to do your marketing. They understand the product the best. Have you tested anything there?

No, no. I'm sort of

hunting here because I haven't heard like a clear ask. So, is there a clear ask?

You know, we thought about this. We were like, okay, what will we do with a $100? And you know, my immediate answer is marketing. I would hire a better firm. Yeah, but what the, this is

where I get lost, right? It's like, I don't like the fact that none of you guys are the market. Like if you had some indication that you spent $5 on ads and you saw three new customers come in, I'd say great, at least there's something there to test more. But really what I'm hearing is we aren't really in the weeds on it. We're sort of putting that responsibility on somebody else which is just really hard to do that.

Yeah, we're going to get into the weeds. I mean that's what has to happen.

Are any of you an engineer? You mentioned any that. Are you an engineer? Yeah, yeah.

I write software. Yeah.

So I mean you could get the guys set up so that when they have a new idea of what to test on the website they could just type in with their voice on Whisper Flow, create a PR, you push it and they can be testing it in two seconds being non engineers. Right. We are a game show company in Austin, Texas, identify all of our competitors and how they rank on SEO and give us an angle on what we need to change on our website and the Google web search schema to outrank them for these four keywords and let's and see what it comes out. I don't know what it'll come out with, but let's see what it comes out with. And then we just go like

what you just described as the thing we don't know. That's the alchemy.

Okay, well, here's where I'm at. I don't see a way for me to put money in this business right now to grow it, but I just love the concept. And I'm just naturally curious about this kind of things. I don't see a way to cut a check today. So not going to make an offer today. I just don't see a way for me to help you guys grow the business. And I don't want you guys servicing

debt to me and then not having growth. Then we all are gonna hate each other. But I am very curious. So I'd love to spend some time after this, dive a little bit deeper into SEO and we might discover something fairly quickly that we can plow money into to drive growth. And at that point, can sort of reconvene and see if we can get some sort of deal done. Yeah. How's that sound? That sounds great. Alright. Well, was great. It was great to meet all of you guys and congratulations. It's still tough to build a $90,000 per month business. So I mean, something to be proud of. Look forward to reconvene. Good to meet you. I'm still mad at

you for kicking my ass. Jeff, this was your fault.

Yeah. This is all your fault. You know? If you guys liked that deal, remember, new episodes drop every Wednesday. Click here to subscribe so you don't miss out. Also, wanna see more deals like this one? Click here to see the next deal immediately.