ProGuides

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ProGuides

ProGuides (founded 2014) is a professional ESports mentoring service that offers gaming courses, coaching, and access to training tips and resources. ^[1]^[2]^[6]^[7]^[8]

Overview

ProGuides was established in 2014 by Sam Wang, Wesely Situ and Kristoph Oedman as a way to help gamers take their gaming skills to the next level. They initially launched as a way for casual gamers to train with professional and semi-professional gamers. However, as time went by the founders discovered that people not only wanted to learn from professionals, but they wanted to test their mettle against them too. Co-founder Sam Wang said: ^[4]

“After we launched the beta, we found some interesting user behavior.
We found that gamers were experienced already and wanted experienced players who are better than [the matches] the game can provide… At the end of the day you do get to play with someone pretty awesome and is something that I think can make games better.”

On the site, professional gamers offer their services for a fee and ProGuides takes a 25% cut.

However, the platform lowers the costs for gamers who get involved in coaching at a high level. ^[4]

By August of 2019, ProGuides had provided more than 9,000 paid training sessions and gathered a network of 250 professional coaches.

They've also reached over 1 million registered users and 55 available courses.

Subscriptions cost $7.99 a month billed as $96 annually.

^[4]^[5]

Funding

In June of 2018, ProGuides raised $1.9 million in pre-seed funding from Amplify, Quest Venture Partners, the Greycroft Tracker fund and the GFR Fund. ^[3]

By early 2020, ProGuides had gained $5 million in seed funding led by early stage consumer tech investment firm M13. ^[9]