Meet the Startup: Singa Games

In this series of startup profiles, we speak to the people behind the startups that provide real-life design challenges to our students. Today, we speak to Naia Hamasaki, Co-Founder of Singa Games.

Naia, can you tell us a little about your company and your current team?

Singa Games has, in its essence, the objective of building happier families by creating meaningful connections among children and adults. We believe that sharing smiles and fun moments is the best way for people to bond, and we foster this by creating, publishing and selling card and board games targeted to families with young children. Our games are designed to entertain kids and adults, allowing them to play and have fun together. We design our games to be easy to learn and fast to play so that anybody can play them anywhere and anytime. We are a small startup with one full-time founder working on the project with the support of two part-time founders and many other experts supporting each part of the project.

What design challenges have you supplied to Experience Haus? 

Our major challenge at the moment is finding an innovative purchasing journey to scale the sales. We are still planning to use the traditional existing channels (game and toy stores, amazon and online pages), but we believe that to differentiate ourselves in the market and accelerate the scaling process, we could design a journey where our potential customers should be exposed to the product (art, material quality, playing experience and benefits) in different ways. We believe that there are many opportunities to build an online and offline journey to leverage on the major benefits of the product (innovative packaging, quality of the material, easy to learn, fast to play and engaging for the family).

What did the individual student/teams of students manage to produce for you?

Project 1

• Market research to evaluate the purchasing behaviour of our potential customers
• Persona building for our potential customers
• Revision proposed for our webpage and e-commerce

Project 2

• Market research to evaluate the online purchasing behaviour of our target customers
• Research to understand the main information needed to make a purchasing decision
• Competitor analysis to understand the different online experiences in the industry
• A prototype on how our online purchase experience should be, with short game demo and different ways to explain the game

Project 3

• Full workshop to evaluate the customer journey for an offline purchase
• Research to build a persona and understand the purchasing behaviour and decision process
• Three alternatives to the different point of sales experiences
• Prototype and results of P.O.S material, using the possibility to experience the games in different moments

Project 4

• Research to evaluate the best way to learn how to play a card/board game
• A navigation map of an APP to facilitate and build an interactive experience for game learning

How have you been able to implement the outputs?

We are running a £10,000 project to revamp our online experience with the inputs from all projects. We expect to take the P.O.S prototype to the UK game expo to test and get better feedback of the effectiveness of the proposed material.

Where do you see the company in 5 years?

Be a consolidated card and board game publisher with an international presence and well known for the innovative way of approaching the business challenges of this industry. We will use a collaborative ecosystem, leveraging our connections in schools to get a symbiotic relationship, where we can offer opportunities for those looking for chances and get benefits from those willing to share their knowledge.

Find out more about Singa Games:

Website: https://singagames.co.uk/

Submit a Design Challenge for an Experience Haus student: https://experiencehaus.com/submit-a-project-brief/