So has the boom returned? “I’m not sure if there can be an internet boom all over again, but the good thing is there is certainly not an internet bubble! I think now when we say dot-com, we are talking about companies that are about making money, and dot-com’s are no different to a bricks and mortar business. They make a healthy profit and they do well, you could liken us to a high street department store, only difference being that our products are digital. We are forging a new industry and we have a stable business and dot-com’s essentially have less risk involved in them, compared to traditional businesses. Our website is a gateway to the true internet generation that will never go. So the internet boom idea doesn’t really apply to us.” From the first point of contact Rob has this noticeable glow when he talks about his company; he seems genuinely excited about every prospect of his business. “I clearly remember my first ever game console, a ZX Spectrum 128K, which was given to me by my parents; it was my first real introduction to computer games. There were many that came and developed on that idea, but for me of course the style and imagination behind this machine overwhelmed me, it was very, very complex at the time! I had just finished a management degree and my now co-founder John Trisby, was a trader at the time, who was investing in dot-com’s and he knew about the online market.

This was just before the ‘bubble’ and he saw that there was a strong opportunity in online entertainment so we racked our brains for ideas. “MTV, Disney and Warner Bros were all very interested in the web as a broadcasting platform, but their methodology at the time was to repackage their existing platforms, like music videos, films and try to then deliver them by the browser. The audience was mostly then on dial up connection, which was not great to use, compared to now, with broadband. So we felt there was a big opportunity to build custom made content via the faster channel of broadband, for the young generation. Our main focus was then to make it easy to access, small in file size and to entertain people. We knew time was really a premium, whether at school or at work, we wanted our audience to have something that they could fit around them. Our first success was a dancing President Bush which brought us in our first two million users; we actually set it up my co-founder’s flat using a camera recorder, and a flash ability and animations manual!” Venture capital for niche markets are sometimes hard to obtain so I ask him how he came about starting Miniclip and if he had any difficulty sourcing funding as an entertainment gaming company. “We have no external investor which is quite unique; I and my co-founder used all our savings for it. If you have investors, they can limit your ideas and vision for the company and your creativity as they are testing that loop. In a market like ours, we need to be able to make very quick decisions and the business needs to stay very nimble and that’s something that we have been able to achieve having no investors hanging on our coattails.

You can see with websites like Amazon how well that has worked and that’s what gets you to the top position. We have been profitable for six of our seven years of business and we have a pretty staggering growth. Our industry is too new, so in a way we haven’t really had any business angels or mentors as they know as much as us and visa versa, gaming is still quite new. In terms of growing your business you can certainly get help, but overall I think we have the vision for our business better than anyone else.”Small is exceptionally savvy and it is what his audience wants to see or do, his offices are littered with all sorts of amusements in the name of ‘market research’ and this has played a significant role in their success over other games providers. “We needed a site that was quick to get on to and easy to play so we set up a website and started making topical animations. I had no background in coding or programming at all and put George Bush’s head on a character and we had thousands of users! It was perfect timing, when everyone was talking about ‘bushisms’ and you had all these people poking fun at his quotes, people just loved it because you didn’t need to be a professional gamer, it was just a comical and easy to use game and it went like a bullet round the world. News networks around the US loved it as we were English, so it was very topical. Our website built a reputation so we realised that there was a huge amount of power in viral marketing and that this would be a great medium to grow a business; being relatively cheap to produce, with marketing being mainly through word of mouth.

”Although gaming websites are a relatively new industry, countries like the US and Japan have broken the market with homegrown products of their own already, so I set out to ask what makes them unique.“There are so many services and products that are vying for your attention now, so building more innovative, fun and easy games are our priority. There was no real longevity plan for the games. I wanted to create short, sharp bursts of fun that would keep people interested, like puzzles and shoot ‘em up games that could be played over and over again. You can’t play dancing Bush for half an hour a day! We also built more classical games too, the 3D type, multi-player games and role playing games and we have now built up a huge catalogue of 500 plus games. We spent a lot of time creating a very simple product and its very time consuming. It looks simple at the front of it, but it’s like a duck swimming! There is a lot of work behind the scenes, not showing off on the website with design or graphics, that’s our secret. You can’t make an ecommerce site where people can’t find the checkout, but it happens! We create a product that is BANG, quick. No hoops to jump and that’s what makes the users come to us. We pride ourselves on customer our games are free but there is no reason for us to fail in service. A lot of leading online companies won’t respond individually to emails in any reasonable time, but we can turn those queries round quickly and we make sure people are on hand to help.