Me Girl avatar game company discloses a fresh $1M to make more titles

Frenzoo, the Hong Kong-based gaming company behind the Me Girl mobile game series, announced today it closed a US$1 million funding round from existing investors, including Fresco Capital, K5 Ventures, Anshe Chung, and others. The round, which brings the company’s total funding to US$3 million, was completed last year but has not been disclosed until now.

Frenzoo CEO Simon Newstead says that the funding will be used to ramp up hiring and marketing. The team currently consists of 25 employees.

Frenzoo has been active since 2007. It began as a startup building Frenzoo.com, a virtual world reminiscent of Second Life – the once-hyped program that’s now all but forgotten, with the exception of a few diehard users. After fine-tuning a web-based online universe for five years, the team ultimately decided that virtual worlds were too niche to bring in sustainable revenue. Recognizing that its users enjoyed the mix-and-match fashion element of gameplay, in May 2012 it pivoted and launched a set of mobile games under a brand called Me Girl.

Me Girl titles let users customize the fashion and appearance of personal avatars by playing games and purchasing virtual-goods, which is how Frenzoo earns its revenue. It tries to appeal to women who mix in a healthy dose of daydreaming with their online habits. Newstead compares the titles to Pinterest – which has a small but extremely loyal community – and describes their appeal as “evergreen.” This helps them avoid the boom-and-bust cycle of casual games.

“We don’t want to be another me-too company that makes a clone of Candy Crush. Our take is that there’s this lifestyle segment that’s really popular in other media forms like blogs, magazines, and TV, but it doesn’t really exist in games. So we think that is our opportunity.”

Newstead envisions Me Girl’s future as a company that relies not just on virtual goods for revenues, but on deals with brands and ecommerce companies. One of the company’s titles was developed with Teen Vogue, in an effort to dually promote both brands. In the future, bigger brands might connect with Frenzoo to reach its user base, either to build awareness or directly drive purchases of specific items.

“We kind of sit at the intersection of games as well as lifestyle media and ecommerce,” Newstead tells Tech in Asia. “Yes we’re a game, there are goals and scores, but because we have the avatars and the fashion, there’s an opportunity there for tying up with ecommerce and also working with real brands.”

Frenzoo is also launching four new titles – Me Girl Love Paradise, Me Girl Love Story, Glamour Me Girl, and Me Girl Celebs – which brings its total game count to seven. In the past, the company has relied on cross-promotion and word of mouth to drive user acquisition, but this round of funding will pave the way for its first serious marketing campaign.

“For every kind of dollar or for every user we bring on through a paid acquisition, we think that we can get a lot more downloads organically,” says Newstead. “In a beta test for one of our new games, we got a half a million users without doing any marketing or advertising. So we think there’s a natural demand for the types of games we’ve been making.”