This story is part of Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business 2022. Explore the full list of innovators who broke through this year—and had an impact on the world around us.
When former pro-gamer Josh Fabian set out to create Metafy, a service that connects average video game players with professionals for live coaching, he asked himself an essential question: Who should his customers be, the students or the coaches?
Fabian knew that other game-coaching services had chosen to prioritize students; they make money from fees that coaches pay per session, which can reach up to 20%. “But when you make that decision . . . when a coach is a product on the shelf, they don’t make a living,” he says. Having struggled financially himself as a gamer—he became a top-20 player of Clash Royale in 2016 but still didn’t make anything close to his former salary as a lead designer at Groupon—Fabian saw an opportunity for Metafy to offer pros another key revenue stream.
The two-year-old service doesn’t charge fees to coaches and instead passes a 5% transaction cost onto students. Fabian says that more than 1,000 coaches have joined the service in response to this policy. Most have earned an average of $4,000, though Metafy projects that as many as six coaches will each take in $100,000 this year.
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