Meet TutoTOONS, a Kaunas-headquartered free drag and drop game builder that lets artists turn their drawings into professional mobile games without any coding and earn from it. They now have a 300-strong global artists’ community and their games generate more than 8M active monthly players worldwide, and offices in Vilnius and Barcelona. Interestingly, TutoTOONS was born during a Startup Weekend Barcelona hackathon in 2013, and the company says hackathons are a great first step to launch one’s business.

Mantas Kavaliauskas, TutoTOONS CEO and Co-Founder, shares their story.

Hello Mantas, so please tell us about your Barcelona hackathon experience?

Mantas: The first time we pitched TutoTOONS was at Startup Weekend Barcelona in June 2013. Startup Weekend hackathons, also organized in Lithuania, share the same concept of creating something from scratch in just a few days and a very similar program to Hacker Games: pitching ideas and forming teams on Friday, working on your product over the weekend, final presentations and awards on Sunday evening.

The story how we came up with TutoTOONS idea links to our background in the games industry. After 6 years of creating games for primary school kids and working with the best educators in the country, we saw the untapped potential in people who have no or little game development experience but many great ideas for games. The timing was perfect – we always wanted to go global, knew the market well, had some free time and resources to start a new venture.

The initial idea of TutoTOONS was a tool for teachers to create their own educational cartoons and games without any programming, just by dragging and dropping images. Right before Startup Weekend, we created the first prototype that was selected from 37 pitched ideas together with 8 other projects, received a lot of positive feedback and took the first place. The hackathon had the right environment for clearing up business idea, creating a business model canvas and even starting to build the international team. I was living in Barcelona then and met TutoTOONS future co-founder Damien Bruneau at the same event.

What were the main challenges whilst working with your project after the hackathon and how did you overcome them?

Mantas: After Startup Weekend Barcelona 2013, TutoTOONS went through many other startup events in Lithuania, Spain and other countries to get more global experience, connections and know-how. Startup events helped us shape the idea of TutoTOONS. We quickly learned that teachers are busy preparing for the lessons, taking care of children at school and coping with their work at home. They had little time to learn how to use TutoTOONS platform. We also struggled with project monetization, developing business with the schools worldwide and fulfilling the needs of different education systems.

However, we had a strong belief that anyone can create games and everyone should be able to do it in a fast, easy and fun way. We continued to develop the game building platform but at the same time, we tested it with various target groups and kept polishing our business model. Eventually, we discovered that there are many people who simply want to create games and found a new way to shift our business – build a tool for artists that helps them become game creators.

How has your business been so far?

Mantas: TutoTOONS offers a free drag and drop game builder that lets artists turn their drawings into professional mobile games without any coding and earn from it. All an artist needs to do is to think up a game idea, create game graphics and build the game with TutoTOONS platform, available online or as a mobile app. TutoTOONS team does the rest: provides full support to improve your game, publishes it on the app stores, promotes to millions of players and splits game revenue with the author, usually fifty-fifty.

A growing community of 300 artists worldwide uses TutoTOONS builder every day. Creative talents with diverse backgrounds and artistic styles make TutoTOONS games unique and interesting for the players. We’ve put everything we know about game development to create this platform and we want to share our knowledge with people who may have never dreamt they could be making games on their own. We want to make mobile game market open for everyone.

With three offices in Lithuania and Spain and international team of 35, TutoTOONS raised no funding from investors and is building its own success. Since official launch in January 2014, the company published 300 games for kids on Google Play, App Store and Amazon that generated 200 million downloads. In January 2017, TutoTOONS games had 8.7 million active monthly players worldwide. To understand the size of this audience better, you can compare it to the most popular web portal in Lithuania Delfi.lt with 1.2M monthly active users.

The biggest TutoTOONS market is US where the company competes with major kids’ brands like Disney, Mattel and LEGO. Results motivate to keep up the hard work: 20 out of 100 most popular Google Play apps in Educational Games category are TutoTOONS games, and the best of the best fight over the top rankings with the global kids’ market leaders.

So why should one take part at hackathons? The Hacker Games are coming to Kaunas soon.. 🙂

Mantas: If you want to start your own business, hackathon is a first step. It gives you the easiest way to evaluate your business idea in the fastest way possible. As a matter of fact, we pivoted the initial TutoTOONS idea from educational cartoons to games on the first day after the hackathon. Getting out there and making yourself visible at any startup and tech event are a must, as well as meeting possible future partners, team members, mentors, investors and other important people. Believe in your idea, speak about it, develop, implement, evaluate, measure results, learn, change if needed and carry on.