C5 Network
CEO & Co-Founder · 2013–2015
A global gaming data platform that hit 50 million total visits and consulted for a North American eSports champion. Built right before the industry had infrastructure to support it.
What I Learned
- Audience is not the same as business model. 50 million visits with no clear monetisation path is a media company with an identity crisis.
- Consulting for professional eSports teams was genuinely interesting work. It also showed me that the teams needed data infrastructure that didn't exist yet.
- Being early to a category is not always an advantage. Sometimes the market isn't there, and being first just means you build the road for someone else.
C5 Network -- Cloth5.com -- was a global gaming analytics and content platform that my co-founder and I built starting in 2013. The timing felt right: eSports was emerging as a serious industry, professional teams were starting to take performance data seriously, and there was almost no one doing rigorous analytics for the space.
We built a platform that combined content with data tools, grew it to 50 million total visits across the network's lifetime, and ended up consulting for a North American LCS team on data and strategy. That last part was the most interesting work we did -- sitting inside a professional eSports organisation and thinking about how data could improve draft decisions, player evaluation, and competitive preparation. Pretty rare opportunity for 2013.
The business model was the hard part. We had audience. We had credibility in the scene. We had a consulting practice that was working. What we didn't have was a clean, scalable revenue model that connected all three. Content monetisation through advertising was thin. The consulting engagements were interesting but not repeatable at scale. We were running several businesses at once under one brand, and none of them were quite big enough to justify the overhead of all the others.
Mixed outcome is honest. The platform worked. The consulting was genuinely good. We left before we found the model that made all of it cohere. The eSports analytics space is now a real industry -- I look at some of the companies operating in it today and see versions of what we were trying to build.