CAMILLUS — As high-school students in Camillus, Philip Impaglia, 23, and Michael Serrata, 25, played a lot of video games. Now, they still play video games, but as the co-founders and co-owners of Geeksmith Productions, they have transformed their hobby into a fledgling business. Starting as a “nerd culture” podcast in the fall of 2012 […]
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CAMILLUS — As high-school students in Camillus, Philip Impaglia, 23, and Michael Serrata, 25, played a lot of video games. Now, they still play video games, but as the co-founders and co-owners of Geeksmith Productions, they have transformed their hobby into a fledgling business.
Starting as a “nerd culture” podcast in the fall of 2012 discussing video games, comics, and movies, they’ve built the Geeksmith brand into an online community. With a dedicated staff of seven, they now record two podcasts, the Geeksmith Podcast and Comic Box, from their homes in Camillus. This year, Impaglia and Serrata launched a website (www.geek-smith.com) that hosts articles, interviews, videos, and game reviews. This October, shortly after pop culture consulting company ICv2 reported that comic-book sales have increased 35 percent since 2010, they self-published an original comic book, The Founding Fathers, written by Impaglia. The first issue of the series is available for purchase on their website.
The gamer community itself is changing and expanding as comic books and video games become more mainstream, say Impaglia and Serrata. A 2013 report by the Entertainment Software Association says 58 percent of Americans play video games, and the average age of a gamer is 30.
These self-labeled, self-taught businessmen haven’t quit their day jobs yet — Serrata is the manager at Hallinan’s Wine & Liquors in the Fairmount area of Camillus and Impaglia is about to begin a sales position selling Verizon FiOS services. But they’re working on turning their passion project into a business they can sustain.
The Business Journal New Network (BJNN) chatted with Impaglia and Serrata about the importance of networking, building connections, and the lessons they have learned so far.
BJNN: When did you two meet and decide to start working together?
Impaglia: It actually started with me and my friend in 2012. We were looking for an audio engineer. We weren’t thinking about making a company, just a podcast, and Mike mentioned he had a background in audio editing. So, he brought over some of his equipment, and from that day on he was on the podcast regularly.
Serrata: And we’ve both been playing video games and in nerd culture for as long as I can remember. Me, since I was 10.
BJNN: With so many podcasts available now, how do you produce one that stands out?
Serrata: That was something that we struggled with. Anybody can make a podcast. In the beginning, if you listen to our first couple of episodes, it’s not really that good. We knew that, so we experimented. We had interviews, we started making outlines, and we refined the process into what it is now. People want to listen to podcasts because they feel like they’re part of the group. It has boundaries, but it’s also free-form enough that people will be interested.
BJNN: When did Geeksmith become more than a hobby, and something you wanted to pursue seriously?
Impaglia: In 2013, we were in Boston covering a gaming festival called Penny Arcade eXpo and were sick of being ignored. So, we pretended to have a press pass. I flipped my regular badge backwards and made sure it wouldn’t flip over. Then, I literally walked past lines, walked into booths, and said, “I’m here with Geeksmith.” Now, we’re on the Adult Swim press list, and we’re talking to Nintendo a little bit.
Serrata: We started picking up all these contacts and being taken seriously, so we realized we might as well take ourselves seriously.
BJNN: Considering the historically negative social connotations of the word “geek,” why did you decide to brand yourself as “Geeksmith?
Serrata: I think gamers have long been pigeonholed as nerds. But those kinds of stereotypes only hold for so long. Now that gaming has such a mass appeal, that stereotype no longer fits. I think nerd culture in general is in a really good, weird transition period. It’s actually not just nerd culture anymore. I’ve been thinking about that a lot in terms of trying to describe the website in a single sentence. For the longest time it’s been a “nerd culture destination,” but more and more it’s becoming just a culture destination.
BJNN: How will you generate revenue from an almost exclusively online business?
Serrata: So far this year, we’ve had 15,000 unique regular visitors to our website. Ads on the site were only added recently because we’ve been focusing on building an infrastructure and an audience first. With our growing audience, we’re hoping the ad revenue will help us turn a profit next year.
Impaglia: We’re also in the middle of creating our own products. The comic book we recently released was a big one. We have some merchandise that sold pretty well at New York Comic Con, and I think we’re going to start putting it on the website storefront. We have personalized t-shirts, bags — pretty much anything with our Geeksmith logo on it.
BJNN: How do you get more content?
Serrata: We’re in the process right now of hiring writers — freelance writers, which is hard to do on a shoestring budget. Right now, we have a very small list, but our team is growing, so we’ll have more written content. We’re also working on video content.
BJNN: How are you expanding your audience?
Serrata: We are relentless on social media, whether it’s through our personal accounts or the Geeksmith accounts. We do shamelessly promote ourselves wherever we go.
BJNN: How did you manage to put together and publish The Founding Fathers independently?
Impaglia: Literally networking. It works. As long as you’re personable, you can make any connection you want. We had artists, and after a month and a half, a finished comic book. A regular comic- book team can have anywhere from six to 10 people working on it. But we had an artist in Boston, an artist in Pennsylvania, and an artist in Connecticut, and had to do everything over the Internet. Now we’re selling it in storefronts and on our website.
BJNN: How have you funded your venture?
Serrata: We funded it mostly through a personal loan from a friend of Phil’s, who is now an investor, and the rest was funded through personal finances. Between paying artists, printing, and distributing, the first issue of The Founding Fathers cost about $8,000 to complete.
BJNN: What have you learned from running your own business?
Serrata: That in our community, whether it was the independent-games community or the comic-book community, people are so willing to help each other out. So many people have helped us out, and we want to be able to do that for other people when we get bigger. For example, Mugen Studios, an independent media production company, let us share their booth with them at this year’s New York Comic Con. We promoted some of their content and they liked working with us.
Impaglia: It’s that pay-it-forward type of thing. It’s important to build those connections in this community because it’s hard to build them with mainstream companies. The independent community can feel your pain. You guys in as much debt as we are? Sweet, I like you. But we’re doing well. We’re not even at the end of the year and our podcast hit 75,000 downloads. That’s huge.
Serrata: Not bad for some kids from Syracuse.
Contact the Business Journal News Network at news@cnybj.com