Tinfoil Fez: Building a Bellevue Business by Bootstraps

Three gaming industry veterans with a vision pooled their talent and resources to launch a startup company in Bellevue that they hope will lead them to success in the mobile game development arena.

The founders of Tinfoil Fez decided early on to take a bootstrap approach to funding the company. They’ve invested their own money into the venture, but they now are doing enough contract work, both as a team and individually through the company, to pay the expenses of development and office space.

They expected lean times, but have been pleasantly surprised, says Andrew Brinkworth, Tinfoil Fez’s art director. Still, they take nothing for granted.

"We were so happy when we could buy a whiteboard," Brinkworth says.

Creative director Rafael Calonzo said he expected most of their work to come by way of contracts from their former employers, but they’ve been steadily building a reputation and working for a variety of companies, doing graphics, development and localization projects.

“Things are going better than we hoped in terms of getting work,” Brinkworth says, adding that it’s a double-edged sword. “It’s taking longer to get to our business plan.”

The company, which is comprised of Brinkworth, Calonzo and technical director Stephen Nguyen, leased an office in Bellevue in April last year, and each made the leap from jobs elsewhere to full-time work on the new business.

The group moonlighted to develop its first iPhone game app, a compendium of drinking games called Barcadea, under the company name Fishbulb.

They realized that though there are a great deal of mobile app developers, there are relatively few mobile game app developers, Calonzo says.

“You have to consider people have maybe five minutes to play” a mobile game app, Calonzo says, while they’re waiting for the bus or in between other activities, so the games have to be focused and tend to be arcade-like. By looking to a model that will bring in game console users, too, they hope to have a much broader potential demographic to tap.

The idea for the startup has been brewing for more than 10 years, Brinkworth says, when he and Calonzo, who attended Seattle University together more than 15 years ago, toyed with the idea of starting their own game development concern.

They are working on beefing up their business plan and at the same time forming the basis for gaming software they plan to develop that will help link console games to their sister mobile devices. The partners’ hope is to secure venture capital and be fully funded within a year-and-a-half. In five years, they hope to have grown to a 30-person operation and have two products in development simultaneously at any given time, Brinkworth says.

To shore up their business acumen to match their technical skills, Brinkworth and Calonzo took a series of business classes for gaming startups through the Washington Interactive Network, and recently the company assembled an advisory board.

Now, they are honing their skills and process by developing games for other companies that have an idea but need help to execute it. Most of those contracts are confidential, so they can’t name apps under development, Brinkworth says.