Blitz

Adil Virani, Co-Founder

Los Angeles, CA

2023

How Blitz.gg took the gaming industry by storm

Adil Virani, the co-founder of Blitz.gg, turned a childhood passion into a booming business. He created a web app to help gamers level up, and now, his company is expanding across the globe.

From humble beginnings to global success

Adil Virani, co-founder of Blitz.gg, a web app dedicated to helping users improve gaming performance, has always been passionate about video games. He first started playing Mario with his grandfather when he was just a child, and he quickly developed a love for the challenge and excitement of gaming. As he grew older and entered the workforce at a young age, he made time to play and create plug-ins for his favorite web-hosted games such as Minecraft, and League of Legends.

After graduating from college, Adil worked as a contractor while interning at TSM, the most popular League of Legends Esports organization in the US. As his expertise in the industry grew, TSM president Dan Dinh offered him the co-lead role in a new business venture called Solomid.net. This new web app, later rebranded to Blitz.gg, aimed to redefine competitive gaming with a revolutionary desktop app.

“Google Ad Manager provides us with a robust tool set to manage our direct-sold and programmatic ad demand. The ease of use and the level of insights from Ad Manager's reporting was the deciding factor of why we chose and continue to use and partner with the Google ad tech division.”

The challenges of scaling and the viral waitlist

"In the early days of Blitz, we faced some of the biggest challenges that any startup could face," recalls Adil. "We were working around the clock to create a product that would help players improve at League of Legends. And let me tell you, it was tough." After facing API limits, server failures, obfuscated data, and other obstacles Blitz finally went down completely for nearly three months. Their team worked nonstop, taking calls from investors, engineers, and developers, to get the site back live: "We refused to give up," Adil says. "We knew that we had something special, something that could change the way players think about the game."

In a surprising turn of events, the team was able to turn the site outage into an opportunity. Since the site crashed when too many people were online, they decided to implement a "waitlist" for access, allowing a limited number of people to sign up at a time. This gave their team time to catch up with demand levels while also creating intrigue and mystery around the site, causing popularity to skyrocket. Once the site went back online, they were able to onboard 350,000 players, tripling their user base almost overnight.

The secret to Blitz's success: Monetization

Fast forward three years, Adil and his team are well on their way to hitting 10M monthly visitors. Ensuring they have a viable revenue model to support their product and users is a huge priority. Their subscription tiers, Blitz Pro and Blitz Enterprise, offer power users and enterprise teams premium features, however as Adil explains, "Blitz's revenue has significantly grown with the introduction of digital ads on our site. This is a key reason why our retention and user growth are trending positively."

For non-subscribers, ads are an essential part of the cycle that drives Blitz's growth. "Revenue, accessibility, and scale are all intertwined, and ads are the fuel that keeps that cycle turning," says Adil. "Ads increase our revenue, which funds our free tier and increases accessibility of Blitz to people who can't afford a subscription. And, as we grow our global footprint across 181 countries, an ad-supported business model easily scales globally. We're able to reach new audiences and advertisers can easily work with us through ad networks."

The Blitz team also has a close working relationship with Google and their monetization teams: "The biggest thing about Google isn't the services that they provide – though those are top notch — it's the people there that help you through the problems that you have," he says. "Google wants to help us become a global company, and are along for the journey with us."

What's next for Blitz?

Today, Blitz continues to help players all over the world improve gameplay thanks to new partnerships with gaming leagues, such as Riot, Respawn, and Valve. From creating new apps, to providing more features, to improving their data processing systems, Blitz.gg is changing the face of Esports and Adil has been able to turn a lifelong passion into a viable career. "I like doing things with a purpose that adds value to the lives of others," he says. "Running Blitz allows me to do what I love effortlessly: I get to work in the gaming industry as an avid gamer myself while growing a platform through a purely data-driven approach."

About the Publisher

Adil Virani began his career at TSM, where he was the sole contributor to TSM's network of sites. While still an intern, he led a massive increase of traffic and created novel strategies to reduce costs. He was promoted to the Director of Technology role in 2018, and played a pivotal role in helping TSM's parent company Swift Media acquire and run the Blitz App, an AI-powered gaming coach platform. Adil helped grow the business from a smaller niche to 3 million daily active users in 3 years. He runs execution, strategy, works closely with Tencent as Blitz expands into China, and collaborates with Respawn, Epic, Riot & Bluehole as Blitz launches support for new games.