Using a fictional firefighting game called Blaze Alert to demonstrate real-world scenarios, David illustrates what a high-quality player experience looks like: a clear call-to-action (CTA) with distinct value propositions, a fluid transition to the store, and the inclusion of native payment options such as Apple Pay or Google Pay. 

By following these principles, publishers can create a smooth purchase flow that respects the player’s time and maximizes potential profit.

The video outlines several frequent mistakes, such as failing to mention exclusive web store bonuses — like extra levels or medals — within the game’s CTA, or neglecting to use authentication tokens to automatically log players into the store. David also highlights the importance of keeping “hot deals” sections populated and ensuring that thank-you pages include a direct link or automatic return to the game to keep players engaged. 

Beyond the immediate purchase flow, David touches on technical optimizations such as achieving page load times under two seconds and utilizing specific Open Graph data for social media promotion on platforms such as Discord.

For developers looking to audit their own D2C strategy and supercharge their conversion rates, FastSpring offers expert consultations at fastspring.gg.

The post Video: Avoid These Mistakes When Steering to Your Game’s Web Store appeared first on FastSpring.

One key takeaway: steering is no longer a theoretical concept — it’s already driving measurable revenue shifts. Publishers can now guide players from in-game offers to web stores, where they receive better value while studios keep more revenue. Even simple banners pointing to a web shop have been enough to move significant player spend off-platform.

Chip also previewed SteerSafe by FastSpring, a new solution designed to make this process seamless. Players can tap on an in-game item, complete checkout in seconds on the web, and return directly to the game — all while publishers benefit from secure, compliant transactions.

The momentum behind direct-to-consumer is clear. A recent FastSpring survey of over 100 senior gaming executives found that 57% already operate a web store, and of those who don’t, 60% plan to launch one within the next year

To read more key highlights from Chip’s interview or find more episodes, visit 2.5 Gamer’s channel.

Listen to or Watch the Full Episode

Below, check out Chip’s episode of the Player Driven podcast via YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.

About Chip Thurston

Chip Thurston is the Head of Gaming at FastSpring. He leverages over a decade of gaming industry experience to help FastSpring’s game publishers define a best-in-class strategy to monetize and market their games direct to consumer.

About FastSpring

FastSpring is how gaming publishers sell in more places around the world. For over two decades, FastSpring has been a trusted payment provider you can use to sell games or in-game items on your website, web shop, or embedded directly into your game with fully customizable and branded checkouts just for you. FastSpring allows you to offload the complexity of global payments, sales tax and VAT compliance, player payments support, and many other aspects of payments management. Spend less time managing your payments and compliance and more time making great games! To learn more about how FastSpring supports game developers, visit fastspring.gg.

The post Steering, Web Stores, and the Future of Game Payments, on the 2.5 Gamers Podcast appeared first on FastSpring.

FastSpring’s Head of Gaming (and former product leader at Scopely and SciPlay) Chip Thurston recently sat down with Greg Posner and the Player Driven podcast to discuss these changes and why they’re so important in the mobile monetization space. 

Check out the episode below to learn more about:

• What the Epic Games v. Apple ruling means for developers.
• How studios can future proof their businesses.
• Why direct-to-consumer strategies are now a competitive necessity.

To read more key highlights from Chip’s interview or find more episodes, visit Player Driven’s website. 

Not sure how to get started with a web shop? FastSpring has partnered with Nexus to make web shops easier than ever. Learn more about Nexus’s game-optimized web shops with FastSpring payments and tax compliance here.

Listen to or Watch the Full Episode

Below, check out Chip’s episode of the Player Driven podcast via YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. 

About Chip Thurston

Chip Thurston is the Head of Gaming at FastSpring. He leverages over a decade of gaming industry experience to help FastSpring’s game publishers define a best-in-class strategy to monetize and market their games direct to consumer.

About FastSpring

FastSpring is how gaming publishers sell in more places around the world. For nearly two decades, FastSpring has been a trusted payment provider you can use to sell games or in-game items on your website, web shop, or embedded directly into your game with fully customizable and branded checkouts just for you. FastSpring allows you to offload the complexity of global payments, sales tax and VAT compliance, player payments support, and many other aspects of payments management. Spend less time managing your payments and compliance and more time making great games! To learn more about how FastSpring supports game developers, visit fastspring.gg.

The post Why Direct to Consumer Is No Longer Optional for Game Studios, on the Player Driven Podcast appeared first on FastSpring.

As part of our sponsorship of GDC and the Community Clubhouse Developer Summit, FastSpring CMO David Vogelpohl hosted a panel on web store success, with panelists including FastSpring Head of Gaming Chip Thurston, Keywords Studios Head of VIP Services Jason Dauenhauer, and Nexus Head of Developer Success Travis Neiderhiser.

Note: A major U.S. court ruling was released on April 30, 2025, with a judge declaring that Apple’s anti-steering policies for purchases outside of apps are anticompetitive and were to be discontinued immediately. This panel discussion took place before the April 30 ruling. The situation continues to develop; for more, follow our Industry News posts or sign up for our newsletter using the form on the right side of this page. 

Jump to video.

Check out the video below to learn:

• Why web store adoption is increasing among game publishers and developers, but has room to increase as more gaming companies realize that avoiding web shops leaves them at a competitive disadvantage. 
• Why mid-value players should not be neglected as an opportunity for web store revenue growth expansion beyond VIPs or whales. 
• How building a web store that looks like your game can greatly reduce buying journey friction and make it easier for players to go there and make purchases.
• And so much more. 

Not sure how to get started with a web shop? FastSpring has partnered with Nexus to make web shops easier than ever. Learn more about Nexus’s game-optimized web shops with FastSpring payments and tax compliance here.

Panel Discussion: D2C X-Ray Vision: What Top Publishers Do to Scale Web Shop Success

Monetize Your Game With FastSpring

FastSpring is how gaming publishers sell in more places around the world. For two decades, FastSpring has been a trusted payment provider you can use to sell games or in-game items on your website, web shop, or embedded directly into your game with fully customizable and branded checkouts just for you. FastSpring allows you to offload the complexity of global payments, sales tax and VAT compliance, player payments support, and many other aspects of payments management. 

Spend less time managing your payments and compliance and more time making great games! To learn more about how FastSpring supports game developers, visit fastspring.gg/.

The post Video: D2C X-Ray Vision: What Top Publishers Do to Scale Web Shop Success appeared first on FastSpring.

Likewise, in the tech-meets-ecommerce space, there were very few SaaS companies out there, live service gaming didn’t really exist yet, and software companies wanting to sell their software globally had very, very few options.

And the options that were available left a lot to be desired. 

That’s why on June 28, 2005, four tech founders — including Dan Engel, current Founder and Managing Partner of Santa Barbara Venture Partners — got together to found FastSpring. 

Twenty years later, we’re still going strong! Now led by CEO David Nachman and backed by Accel-KKR — and with technology more advanced and stronger than ever — FastSpring is celebrating its 20th anniversary by looking back on how we got here, applauding today’s team for our current successes, and looking forward to a bright future in the payments industry as an experienced partner our customers can trust. 

In this special celebratory post, we share:

• A special twentieth anniversary episode of Growth Stage, interviewing both FastSpring’s co-founder & first CEO Dan Engel and FastSpring’s current CEO David Nachman. Jump to podcast.
• A brief history of FastSpring, with some fantastically nostalgic photos of the team throughout the years. Jump to history. 

Growth Stage Podcast EP34: What It Takes to Build an Enduring Business

Building a lasting business isn’t easy. 

Knowing what really makes a company succeed long term can be even harder.

That’s why it can be helpful to learn from companies that have stood the test of time.

In this episode of Growth Stage, we celebrate FastSpring’s 20th anniversary with insights from its first CEO, Dan Engel, and current CEO, David Nachman. They share:

• What has helped FastSpring thrive for two decades.
• What mistakes to avoid when building your own business.
• What it really takes to build something that lasts.

Whether you’re planning to exit in two years or fifty, take a moment to step back and think about the long term future of your business. Watch or listen now!

Jump to video.  |  Jump to history. |  Jump to transcript.

Podcast Full Interview: Audio

Listen online or find it on more podcast services.

Podcast Full Interview: Video

Transcript available at the end of this post.

A Brief History of FastSpring (With Photos)

FastSpring was founded in 2005 with only $30,000, by a distributed team of four tech founders who only all got connected “through the transitive property,” Dan explains. “I only knew Jason, but then he knew Ken, and Ken knew Ryan.” 

Dan had had an idea for a shopping cart upsell product — which didn’t come to fruition — but after meeting Jason Foodman in 2005, Jason pointed out that the upsell product couldn’t even exist unless they owned the shopping cart in the first place. So Dan asked, “Well, what if we create our own shopping cart?” 

And since Jason was already working with someone who wanted to create a product with the ecommerce infrastructure to compete with Digital River, FastSpring was born. 

Dan recalls that he, Jason, Ken White, and Ryan Dewell all connected remotely from four different U.S. states via email and messengers, not even meeting in person for about the first four years as they worked on FastSpring; “Maybe every six months there’d be a phone call.” Dan and Jason handled front-end sales, while Ken led “phenomenal customer service,” and Ryan “just was an awesome coder.” He recalls Ken describing Ryan as “probably the best guy on the planet to build what we were building.”

Since all four guys had been CEOs already, they were all familiar with working on their own areas without needing much guidance. “We split up the business into silos, Dan explains. “Ken handled support, Ryan development, me on the sales side and also all the CEO role, and Jason on the sales side and some other stuff too. And that worked really well.”

The First Mission of FastSpring: The Golden Rule

Just what were the founders of FastSpring trying to build? 

“I think we wanted to build a business that treated its customers the way we thought we should have been treated as software vendors,” Dan says. They each had felt wronged in some way when working with Digital River or with payment companies that weren’t built to work with software companies, so they set out to build a solution with a driving force to “put some good into an industry that had a lot of bad experiences.”

He also describes Digital River in 2005 — only about nine years old then — as already having become an inflexible “technology dinosaur.” 

“So we wanted to build that next generation system.”

“I think that’s really what our driving force was: to put some good into an industry that had a lot of bad experiences.”

Dan Engel, Co-Founder and first CEO of FastSpring

“And we thought if we were just normal, nice people that cared, we could accomplish that,” he recalls. “And we did. Took a while, but we did.”

FastSpring’s Growth Trajectory

After a humble start in 2005 with only four ambitious people and $30,000, FastSpring took a little while to get off the ground. Dan remembers that “Not raising capital, going slower, sticking with Java, sticking with one developer — all those things made us go slower.”

But FastSpring eventually began growing quickly when they became popular in the Mac software community, which became their initial niche. “Eventually, we took over for Digital River and others as kind of the leading provider for Mac developers,” Dan explains. “But until then, it was a very slow moving train and we didn’t know what was around the corner.”

Besides having next generation technology and blowing away customers with service, FastSpring also offered pricing that contemporary competitors couldn’t beat.

“So how do you get anyone to switch away from FastSpring? They didn’t. We had retained I think 98.7 % of our customers, year after year after year, in an SMB business with thousands of customers,” Dan recalls. “I’m a venture capitalist now; I invest in software companies. I’m yet to find a company in all these years that matches what FastSpring obtained in its metrics.”

“I’m yet to find a company in all these years that matches what FastSpring obtained in its metrics.”

Dan Engel, Co-Founder and first CEO of FastSpring

By 2010, FastSpring had grown significantly, with Deloitte & Touche’s 2011 Technology Fast 500 awards ranking FastSpring the #1 fastest-growing company in the Greater L.A. area and #13 in North America. 

Then in 2018, Accel-KKR purchased a majority stake in FastSpring. By then, FastSpring counted companies such as Microsoft and Adobe among its customers, with services provided by around 80 FastSpring employees. 

FastSpring’s Mission Today: Unleashing Innovation Around the World

Today, FastSpring is a global leader in the payments, subscriptions, and tax management space as a leading merchant of record. With offices in Santa Barbara, Amsterdam, Belfast, and Halifax, FastSpring has grown to have over 130 employees serving 3200+ companies throughout more than 200 regions, with support for 21+ languages and 23+ currencies — all while filing over 1,000 tax returns every year, so that the companies who use FastSpring don’t have to.

Providing an industry leading platform for SaaS, software, video game, and other digital products businesses to sell and monetize their products around the world is a privilege we’ve earned over the last 20 years, but we haven’t forgotten where we came from. 

Current CEO David Nachman echoes original CEO Dan Engel’s thoughts about FastSpring’s mission, but builds upon it. What gets David excited is enabling and democratizing the software industry so that people anywhere in the world can build software and compete with bigger, more capitalized players in highly developed markets.

“It’s gotten dramatically easier to build software anywhere and do it in a really, really competitive way,” David explains. “What hasn’t gotten easier is selling it globally.” In fact, in many ways, thanks to increasingly complex tax codes, proliferating payments options, and the increase of fraud, selling software cross-borders or monetizing a game outside of an app marketplace has only gotten harder. 

“So you’ve got this paradox of, you can develop software now at any scale anywhere in the world, but it’s not easy to bring it to market successfully without a solution like ours,” he says. “And that’s what we do.”

“By democratizing software development and commercialization of it, ultimately, we’re playing into a trend of unleashing more innovation around the world.”

David Nachman, CEO of FastSpring

“By democratizing software development and commercialization of it, ultimately, we’re playing into a trend of unleashing more innovation around the world,” David continues. “That’s kind of the big lofty mission that excites me. And I think it excites a lot of people here.”

Twenty years is quite a milestone, so we’ll be celebrating all month! That includes cake cuttings and toasts with our team members around the world on June 28, our official incorporation day and 20th birthday. Check back later this month for photos, and here’s to the next 20! 🥂

Podcast Transcript

David Vogelpohl (00:04)

Hello everyone, and welcome to Growth Stage by FastSpring, where we discuss how digital product companies grow revenue, build meaningful products, and increase the value of their businesses. I’m your host, David Vogelpohl. I support the digital product community through my role at FastSpring, and I love to bring the best of the community to you here on Growth Stage. In today’s episode, I’m super excited. What we’re going to be talking about is what it takes to build an enduring business.

David Vogelpohl (00:32)

We’re going to do that through the lens of celebrating 20 years of FastSpring, the company that puts on Growth Stage and joining us for that conversation to celebrate FastSpring and talk about building an enduring business. I’d like to welcome first FastSpring’s original CEO and one of the original cofounders, Mr. Dan Engel. Dan, welcome to Growth Stage.

Dan Engel (00:53)

Thank you very much. I’m excited to be here and I’m excited we made it to such a successful 20 year journey.

David Vogelpohl (01:00)

I can’t imagine what it must be like to look back on your legacy and have this be something so enduring be part of that. And I know you’ve done a lot since then. And I’m kind of curious to learn a little bit more about that here in a bit. Also joining us for this conversation to kind of take a look at the past and where we are now. I’d like to welcome FastSpring’s current CEO, Mr. David Nachman. David, welcome.

David Nachman (01:23)

Great. Well, thank you, David. I’m also super excited to be here and I definitely owe some gratitude to Dan. Wouldn’t be in my role today if it weren’t for what he did 20 years ago today.

Dan Engel (01:30)

Mm-hmm.

David Vogelpohl (01:33)

Now it’s so interesting to think about those long-term effects our short-term decisions sometimes have. And so we’re going to try to peel back as much as we can here on this episode, ⁓ to give folks a view into what it takes to build an enduring business, what mistakes to avoid along the way and how to build a business that stands the test of time.

So ⁓ we’ll kick it off. David Nachman, I’d like to start with you. ⁓ For those, maybe this is their first time seeing the Growth Stage podcast or they’re not familiar with FastSpring. Could you explain what FastSpring is and what you do here?

David Nachman (02:13)

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. What we do is pretty straightforward. We are an end to end e-commerce platform for companies that sell digital goods on a global basis. So it’s often software companies, it may be gaming companies, maybe other forms of digital goods, but the commonality for everybody that’s selling on our platform is they’re trying to reach a global audience, which isn’t really an easy thing to do.

in commerce and payments. There’s a tremendous amount of complexity there. And they’re all selling digital goods. So that’s what we do. I am the CEO of the company. I joined the company about six years ago, just over about a month ago from six years ago.

David Vogelpohl (02:55)

Oh, wow. Congratulations on the six year mark there. A little over 25 % of FastSpring’s history, it sounds like. And then Dan, tell us about your connection to FastSpring and what you’re doing now.

David Nachman (03:01)

⁓ yeah.

Dan Engel (03:07)

Well, let’s see. It was ⁓ 2005 that ⁓ I met our co-founder Jason Foodman. And I had an idea for something we wanted to do having to do with upselling into shopping carts. And Jason said, well, that is a really good idea, but we’re not going to be able to do it unless we own the shopping cart. ⁓

And I said, well, what if we create our own shopping cart? And Jason said, well, it just so happens I’m working with a guy on that concept to compete with Digital River, which was the 800 pound gorilla at the time that had come out in 1994, went public, became worth a billion dollars. And so we decided that we would build that e-commerce infrastructure and shopping cart capability. We never ended up doing my idea

having to do with upsells, but obviously the foundational part that we needed is what became the business over time.

David Vogelpohl (04:05)

And this is you, right? Is this from around the time of the founding? These are the original founders, correct?

Dan Engel (04:11)

Yeah, that could be. I’d have to see exactly what year that was, but that’s uh — Jason’s all the way to the right hand side on the other opposite end of me. then Ken and Ryan. And what’s interesting is I only knew Jason, but then he knew Ken and Ken knew Ryan. So through the, I don’t know, transitive property or whatever it is, we all kind of knew each other. And that’s how we started working together. And we were all in four different states from one another.

And ⁓ we did it despite not being in the same place. And we actually went for about four years, I believe, without ever even seeing each other. Everything was just email and ICQ, which is chat. And maybe every six months there’d be a phone call. But some of the guys weren’t the type of people that were dying to get on the phone or meet in person that didn’t have the same personality as maybe Jason and I did as kind of the more salesy front of the business.

David Nachman (04:50)

Thanks

David Vogelpohl (05:05)

Was that the balance between you four where you and Jason were more on the business side and the other two for Ken and what’s the other person’s name? Yeah, Ryan. ⁓ and they were more technically focused.

Dan Engel (05:15)

Ken and Ryan. Yeah, totally. Yeah,

Ryan just was an awesome coder. He was probably the best guy on the planet to build what we were building. I mean, that’s what Ken said at the time, because he had built a company called RegNow, sold it to Digital River. By the way, all three of the other guys built and sold companies like FastSpring to Digital River. So we knew this space really well, and they knew it even better than I did. But yeah, Jason and I were on the business side, and Ken…

is amazing dealing with people through email. But he won’t pick up the phone. But we had phenomenal customer service that he led. And Ryan just wanted to code and wanted to own it himself. Didn’t want other coders. Didn’t want to spend time managing other coders. He just wanted to build his dream, again, the next generation of what he had built before using Java technology and doing things in a way that would be much more beneficial over the long term.

David Nachman (05:46)

answer.

you

Dan Engel (06:08)

over the existing solutions like Digital River, which became kind of the technology dinosaur that was inflexible. So we wanted to build that next generation system.

David Vogelpohl (06:17)

It sounds like there was a lot of synergy there between you four and a good balance. And it seems like you and Jason were able to kind of team up, I guess, on the business side and then Ken and Ryan on the technical and customer success side. It’s also interesting to hear about your virtual posture as co-founders back in that day and using ICQ and thriving in that kind of environment.

Um, of course, way pre pandemic, this was 2005 when the company was founded. Um, and then to hear about how much Digital River played a role in your company, in your lives back then, and to think of FastSpring’s enduring nature, even going beyond, you know, Digital River, um, uh, offering in existence, I guess, uh, recently kind of winding down there. Um, and to think about how that’s an interesting representation of FastSpring’s enduring

Dan Engel (07:06)

Mm

David Vogelpohl (07:13)

⁓ but maybe that’s one of the ways I might think about an enduring business. ⁓ I’ll start with Nachman on this question. David, to you, what does it mean to build an enduring business? What is that? How do you define that?

David Nachman (07:29)

Yeah, I think, I mean, the first thing I would say for a business to be enduring is it’s got to be adaptable. This business, like just about any business, there’s ebbs and flows and there’s times when everything is going great and there’s times when it’s a lot more challenging. And, you know, in my experience, like there’s a lot of things that need to go into strategy and execution to succeed as an enduring business. But I think the foundation of all of it is the team and the culture.

If you look at the businesses that I think have endured over time, it’s often the team and the culture that really, really stand out because the challenges are going to change over time. And you need a team that knows how to adapt to that. And if you’ve got the right team and people are passionate about what they’re doing, know, in my experience, generally they’re going to figure it out.

None of us have a perfect crystal ball. Certainly, I’m sure Dan, when you started this company 20 years ago, you had no idea what some of the challenges might look like today. But I think you built a great cultural foundation that I think still persists today. I think a lot of the elements of the culture that were there when you started it are still like a real, real strength for us. So to me, that’s kind of the foundation of all of it to build an enduring business.

David Vogelpohl (08:47)

Yeah. I like that idea of flexibility. What’s the saying — “Steady seas don’t make skilled sailors,” and like,

Dan Engel (08:48)

you

David Vogelpohl (08:53)

⁓ being able to roll with the punches and adapt and survive and thrive. I could see that being critical to building an enduring business. ⁓ Dan, what about you? What does it mean to build an enduring business?

Dan Engel (09:06)

Well, it’s kind of the same things because what he’s talking about there about adaptability and flexibility, that’s exactly what I was saying earlier. We specifically built a system from the ground up ⁓ that had the adaptability component that was missing from the competition.

That’s why Digital River doesn’t exist anymore. That’s why we were able to ultimately leave them some degree in the dust because they weren’t able to change with the times. And we knew, because we all had been customers of Digital River. mean, everybody was back then. It’s a long time ago. And we knew that they couldn’t deliver when we needed new functionality and features. They were stuck. Right. So that was a really big part of it. But I think culturally, you know, the biggest advantage FastSpring ever had

was based on culture and how we treated our people, meaning like the employees, the partners we had, and then how that trickled down to how they treated the customers. And we had a theory, which is not too novel, but isn’t practiced as much as it should be, that customers should be treated like gold. And we had happened to be in an industry where the competition felt very much the opposite. ⁓ They just

A lot of these companies were led by kind of arrogant folks that didn’t think too much about the customers. And, you know, you’d write into PayPal, nobody had ever sent you anything back or Digital River couldn’t get your account manager to respond. So we came up with rules like you’re going to hear a response within, I think it was 24 hours, even on weekends, even on holidays, ⁓ guarantees like that. And we absolutely delivered on it. We strive to wow.

every single customer, both the end user and our merchants, you know, the software companies. And the kind of things that they were saying were, and I don’t know if it’s still on the website anymore, but the old testimonials that I used to throw up on the website were like, I feel like I just left the spa, or I’ve never had this kind of experience in a services business before. We were blowing people away. And how were we able to do that when we had like four support reps and our competition had like 250?

because we’re just normal people that cared. That’s all. And those were the kind of people that hired and people like themselves who gave a damn. And we had been in the shoes of the customers who were frustrated working with Digital River. So we tried to build a business that would be the opposite. And it totally worked. And also it’s an advantage that we had, which didn’t really cost money, that nobody could beat. No competitor could beat. They could try to match it.

you know, blowing away your customers and wowing them with the experience, but they couldn’t ever beat it. And so part of what made the company so enduring is we had low prices and couldn’t really beat us on pricing. We had next generation technology instead of kind of the inflexible dinosaur tech of our competitors. And we blew you away with customer service. So how do you, how do you get anyone to switch away from FastSpring? They didn’t. We had retained

think 98.7 % of our customers year after year after year in an SMB business with thousands of customers. I’m a venture capitalist now, I invest in software companies. I’m yet to find a company in all these years that matches what FastSpring obtained in its metrics.

David Vogelpohl (12:16)

I can attest that nature has lived on and we see similar levels of success in ⁓ our business today, including winning awards like a ⁓ gold Globee and silver Stevie for that customer success. I think that foundation you laid and the seeds you planted are still bearing fruit.

Dan Engel (12:37)

Good. That’s great to hear.

David Vogelpohl (12:39)

Excellent. Yeah. Super cool to see that, ⁓ endure the test of time. Cause I know service can be one of those areas that definitely erodes over time, especially over like a 20 year history. ⁓ it was also interesting to hear you talk about how, if you have a team, if you hire a team and develop a team who cares, that’s like so critical to building that differentiation in that enduring nature.

And I thought that connected well to what David had shared a little earlier around flexibility and developing teams in that same way to address challenges that you have no idea what’s coming around the corner. ⁓ and I thought that was an interesting connection there. ⁓ speaking of like how, speaking of missions by sake of example, what was FastSpring’s mission in the beginning, you talked about like being better than Digital River, but like, was it more than that? Like, how did you view the mission of the company at that time?

Dan Engel (13:33)

I think we wanted to build a business that treated its customers the way we thought we should have been treated as software vendors. Everything that was wrong with the experience of working with Digital River and its competitors and non-software specific platforms like PayPal, we wanted to correct that because we felt wronged ourselves.

⁓ So I think that was a big part of the mission. And we thought if we were just normal, nice people that cared, we could accomplish that. ⁓ And we did, took a while, but we did. And we did displace a lot of those alternatives. ⁓ mission-wise, I think that’s really what our driving force was, ⁓ is to put some good into an industry that had a lot of bad experiences.

David Vogelpohl (14:21)

David, 20 years later, how do you define FastSpring’s mission now?

David Nachman (14:26)

Yeah, so I think a lot of what Dan just shared is still very true and very important in what we’re doing. ⁓ What gets me excited is kind of the bigger trend we’re playing into in enabling. And for me, it’s about democratizing the software development industry. And what I mean by that is if you look over the last 20 years, since the company was founded, barrier after barrier has come down that allows people

to build software anywhere in the world at any scale and compete with much bigger, much better capitalized players in highly developed markets. going way back, open source, developer tools, cloud computing, online marketing, now we’ve got the AI boom. So it’s gotten dramatically easier to build software anywhere and do it in a really, really competitive way. What hasn’t gotten easier?

is selling it globally. It’s actually kind of gone in some respects in the opposite direction. Tax complexity around the world has gone up a ton. Enforcement has gone up a ton.  The regulatory environment around data has gone up. Payments has gotten a lot more complex. The proliferation of payment methods around the world uh is pretty incredible, and the adoption of a lot of these payment methods  is really high. Fraud

⁓ is going up. I don’t know if it’s exponentially, but it’s certainly going up at a high rate and the complexity of that fraud is going up. So you’ve got this paradox of, you can develop software now at any scale anywhere in the world, but it’s not easy to bring it to market successfully without a solution like ours. And that’s what we do. ⁓ and if you look around the world, there’s, know, no monopoly on development talent in places like Silicon Valley. And there’s talented developers everywhere in the world now.

but there were barriers to them competing. So By democratizing software development and commercialization of it, ultimately, we’re playing into a trend of unleashing more innovation around the world. That’s kind of the big lofty mission that excites me. And I think it does excite a lot of people here.

Dan Engel (16:18)

you

David Vogelpohl (16:39)

Excellent. Love hearing that. ⁓ Dan, so we’ve talked about like it’s a 20 year episode, right? So we’re doing like the worm and fuzzy stuff, but I want to go to like the stuff that made you lose sleep at night in the early days of FastSpring. Tell me about a big mistake you made that like almost tank the company or just like took you in a really bad direction. I mean, we are publishing this, so like take that into heart there, but

Dan Engel (16:53)

So.

David Vogelpohl (17:08)

Was it, was it deprecating this website? mean, this is a fire of a 2025 website, but like, me about the mistakes you

Dan Engel (17:11)

Ha ha!

looks a little pruney to me. ⁓ Well, obviously we made lots of mistakes. think, you know, one key decision was we kept coding really just within Ryan’s domain and didn’t hire a bunch of developers. And I think there were benefits to that and costs. And sometimes we were frustrated we weren’t going faster. ⁓ Because when we came out, a company also came out around the same time. unlike us who did everything

by the way, with $30,000, I put ten grand in, that’s all I ever put into FastSpring. We had a competitor, the head also sold their company to Digital River and they put like 35 or 50 million into their company and they started eating our lunch. So that made us kind of frustrated and concerned because they were getting a lot of clients we had hoped to get. So that was one decision. And also I think using

Java, think, had a lot of benefits, but also I think it slowed us down as well. Now, in the long term, it was beneficial and a great decision because it kept us flexible and extensible. But let’s see. So one of the scarier things that happen is, so when you’re processing payments, there’s risks that you might process in payments that are violations of, say, your relationship.

in your agreement with say a Visa or MasterCard. And we got really good at policing and avoiding any transactions going through the system that would violate any of those agreements. like with hackers, you figure out a solution to avoid the hacking and then the hackers find a way around it and then you find a solution to solve that and then they find a way. So it wasn’t perfect, you know, it’s life. And we had a particular incident where some

content got through that we did processing for is a tiny amount, but it still was very problematic. And that was very costly to us. We had to deal with MasterCard and you know, to have an angry MasterCard is a real problem because you can’t stop working with MasterCard if you’re accepting credit cards, right? That kind of got this duopoly or whatever you want to call it. So that was an example of a really scary experience when we had to deal with, you know, people like Visa MasterCard and

some of the risks around processing that could have really hurt our business and changed things. ⁓ And I would say, in terms of the team that we had, we got along incredibly well. It probably didn’t hurt that we weren’t in the same office and hardly ever saw each other. That can really have a lot of benefits. The biggest fight we ever had, and when we had it, I thought, my God, this is gonna be such a battle for years, was picking the name.

⁓ After we had that, that was like a real battle and I didn’t know what the future would bring. And we went years and years with really not having any fights, maybe until the end when we were selling the business and not everyone wanted to necessarily sell at the same price and money gets people to fight. But ⁓ other than that, ⁓ we really made a great call with the kind of team that we had as founders because we had a team of four former CEOs.

which meant we were all able to kind of do our own stuff without anybody needing to help us. Right. And so we, we, we, we, we split up the business into silos, Ken handled support, Ryan development, me on the sales side and also all the CEO role and Jason on the sales side and some other stuff too. And that worked really well. but, ⁓ anyway, so those are some thoughts on some of the things that were challenges over the years. and,

not, raising capital, going slower, sticking with Java, sticking with one developer. All those things made us go slower. And for me, made me anxious. ⁓ but some of the other partners, they were okay with waiting and having the business take a long time. And it sure did. My wife, ⁓ nicknamed it “SlowSpring,” ⁓ because, ⁓ you know, it was like year three and a half or something and we still weren’t getting anywhere. And I kept telling her, it’s right around the corner.

David Nachman (21:15)

it.

Dan Engel (21:22)

Finally, things picked up. They picked up because we became popular in the Mac software community. We found a niche, right? ⁓ I don’t know what would have happened to FastSpring if we hadn’t found that niche. ⁓ But eventually we took over for Digital River and others as kind of the leading provider for Mac developers. But until then, it was a very slow moving train and we didn’t know what was around the corner.

David Vogelpohl (21:44)

think that’s a bold lesson for people watching and listening who are just starting out and thinking about how to get traction about how you were able to kind of niche down in your core ICP and find that, you know, kind of handhold foothold to start moving further up the mountain. I also thought you had tension in some of the mistakes where you talked about the desire to go faster and invest more, but then you talked about growing pains around things like dealing with hackers and

maybe processing transactions you shouldn’t have and how that affected and put risk into your business. And so like with FastSpring, you know, we’re offering payments and subscriptions and tax compliance and a lot of startups are like compliance. What are you talking about? I’m blowing and growing. I’m, ready to go. Do you think that like maybe moving slow and being more purposeful did have value other than just being, you know, “SlowSpring” and making you a little frustrated with the growth?

Dan Engel (22:41)

Probably. Two of my partners would say definitely yes. They would be, yes, they are more patient people than I am.

David Vogelpohl (22:44)

Would those be Ken and Ryan?

Nice. I like that. ⁓ But yeah, I think about that a lot, you know, in this day, I don’t know how much you’ve kept up with the merchant of record space, but there’s a decent number of startups getting into it. And so I just imagine what it must be like to start from near zero and develop these rules, and this experience, and this understanding, and a platform that reacts to it all. ⁓ Certainly a grand adventure, but definitely no easy task.

Dan Engel (23:15)

Yeah.

It

was, and I think one error was that we didn’t really have expertise in the whole merchant account payment processing business. I mean, yes, software and what used to be called shareware, and the Digital River side of things. But the actual — like all the intricacies of working with like, Visa, Mastercard, Discover, AmEx, PayPal, and doing global payments and different currencies and different really didn’t know that stuff.

And so sometimes we learned some hard lessons because of our ignorance. ⁓ It would have, if I were to do it again, I would bring someone involved in the early days who really had spent, I don’t know, 20 years in that payment we didn’t have to figure out what we didn’t know. I think that was costly to us. And I think that was something missing, a missing ingredient that fortunately, we were successful despite it.

David Vogelpohl (24:07)

Did you underestimate the complexity of payments?

Dan Engel (24:10)

I think so. Yeah, I think so. ⁓ And the deep understanding that was needed to really know what we were working with and what we were doing and how it was viewed by others playing all different roles in the industry, the ISOs, IPSPs, the Visas and Mastercards, the acquiring banks, the gateways, we just didn’t really have a great understanding of how all of those different parties were seeing us in their world.

And so we didn’t necessarily navigate it the best way that we could have if we had known more.

David Vogelpohl (24:45)

Sage advice. ⁓ As you look back at your time with FastSpring, founding it, bringing it up, eventually selling it, and the roles and companies you’ve led since then, what lessons did you learn in your FastSpring days that you took forward into your future adventures?

Dan Engel (25:03)

Well, you know, we built FastSpring to not be able to fail because we had all been serial entrepreneurs and had built businesses. Some worked, some didn’t. And one thing that I figured out is if you don’t have a clock tied to money and burn, it’s really hard to go out of business. so…

We built the business from scratch with almost no money. Like I said, I put in 10 grand and the co-founders contributed their time for no cash, just for equity, right? Significant equity, founders equity. ⁓ And so the only way the business could fail is if we lost interest. Nothing external could really make us fail. It really was in our control. So it’s a question of, we lose interest before we get enough customers that this business is big enough that we care about it? And it’s making a difference for us. So with that,

⁓ It gave us quite a runway to be able to figure things out, which took really four years to really start taking off. And believe me, the first three years wasn’t just fun. And of course, while you’re building it, you don’t know if you’re ever going to make it, so you might be wasting your time. So it’s not always the most motivating every day. But I’ve built every business since like that, ⁓ where it’s either profitable for day one or it just doesn’t have that burn and that pressure.

Because what’s the number one reason businesses go out of business? They run out of cash. So if you can get rid of that risk, you’ve got a really good chance of making it. So I’ve had a lot of successes in my career. FastSpring is one of them. There’s a whole bunch of other things I’ve done and all that. And the thing that they all have in common is they all failed before they succeeded. I mean, people don’t see that. They just see the news headlines and great exit for FastSpring, or Picasa, or what I did at Google, or

GoTo Meeting in Santa Barbara. But all those things failed first. So the only reason I’ve been able to figure out how to build these businesses successfully now, including my venture capital firm, is because of all the things I did that failed in the past. And so I think that’s the biggest lesson that I bring forward to every business I do and hope to pass on to other entrepreneurs and to my children and whatnot, that it’s really the failures where you learn how to succeed.

David Vogelpohl (27:12)

I imagine what that must be like. So these are the years and the number of employees from back in those days. And you were saying like, it really took you better part of this time period to get it ramped up. And then you can start to see the business grow over time. It’s very efficient business still during that time.

Dan Engel (27:29)

Well, keep in mind, so in 2013, that was 23. They weren’t really employees, 12 full-time. The rest were part-time contractors. We made them employees later after we sold the business. But that was at a time we were doing over $100 million in revenue. We had 12 full-timers. So it was very efficient and we did not in any way measure ourselves by number of people. It was by revenue and profit.

David Vogelpohl (27:51)

That’s great to hear. ⁓ so Dan has founded the business with his co-founders and they’ve gone on this grand adventure, eventually selling the business. ⁓ Nachman, tell me the backstory between about when you joined the business and what you were kind of doing right before that.

David Nachman (28:11)

Yeah,

I’ve been in B2B tech just about my whole career. Immediately before joining FastSpring, I was running a business that had a very highly tailored content management platform for local government.

So it was cities and counties, they would host a website on it, but also we would power a lot of the constituent facing functionality. you we sort of powered the digital city hall strategy that, you know, a lot of local governments are moving towards. We had sold that business to someone who was really consolidating all of the gov tech industry.

Dan Engel (28:32)

.

David Nachman (28:53)

And I found my way indirectly to FastSpring, was drawn to it for a whole host of reasons. But that’s ultimately, you know, what brought me here or the backstory in terms of what I was doing before I got here.

David Vogelpohl (29:08)

And then as you entered the business, what were your perceptions at that time? ⁓ How did you think about FastSpring’s mission then versus now? ⁓ We had this great meeting the other day where we were like, where did you get wrong about FastSpring when you first joined the company? What about for you, David? What did you get wrong about FastSpring when you first joined?

Dan Engel (29:24)

Okay.

David Nachman (29:29)

Yes, I think some of

the same things that Dan mentioned. I’m not sure that I necessarily underestimated the complexity of payments, but I’m not a payments guy by trade and experience. We had a lot of generalists even at that point in the company. We had a lot of really passionate, a lot of really talented people. And I’ve kind of always been one of those people who believes, OK, if you get the

know, get smart people that are driven, they’re going to figure out problems. And yes, but they’re not going to figure them out as quickly. In many cases, it’s someone who’s got the pattern recognition of having seen that same problem 15 times before. ⁓ And I think I waited a little too long ⁓ to really bolster a lot of our domain expertise in the business. And as I started to do that, ⁓ just

Dan Engel (30:05)

you ⁓

David Nachman (30:23)

What it did in terms of accelerating the business was pretty profound. And it was one of those where I sort of stepped back and said, wow, I should have done that a long time ago. I’d say the other thing is when I came into the business, my perceptions were very positive of the business. Great solution, great customers, business growing at a very healthy clip. So it was a very healthy business. wasn’t a turnaround of any sort. It was how do we take it to the next level?

Dan Engel (30:30)

Okay.

David Nachman (30:52)

So what was missing in my mind was that it really wasn’t built to scale

to anywhere, you the size we are today or, where we think we’ll be over the coming few years. And like a lot of small businesses, a lot of single points of failure, you know, some of that was people, some of that was vendors, some of that was technology. The business sort of survived and thrived on individual heroics. So, you know.

not a lot of ⁓ systems in place, processes, et cetera. And we didn’t really have a leadership team that had scaled to where we wanted to go. So I felt like we did need to bring in people that were more experienced and kind of knew the journey that we were embarking on. And I think a little bit of what I got wrong there.

⁓ in some of these initial hires was I was very focused on getting people that, you know, kind of knew how to operate at scale. And culturally I missed on some of them in terms of abandoning a lot of what’s made the company so special and so effective, which is kind of the entrepreneurial scrappiness. And it’s a, you know, it’s a rare breed of person that has that hands on entrepreneurial scrappiness and can also scale. ⁓ you know,

Dan Engel (32:08)

you

David Nachman (32:14)

Often those are great founder type people that could do magic that a lot of more experienced company people can’t do, but they don’t scale as well. ⁓ So initially I did bring some of those people in and it just, they weren’t the right fit. ⁓ And over my first few years here, I started to really realize what’s the culture that really correlates with

success in our particular business. And part of it is this is the most dynamic, most complex business I’ve ever been at for its scale. I mean, we’ve got a very global footprint. We’re operating in highly regulated industries. We’re dealing with payments. We’re dealing with software. We’re dealing with complexity around tax. We’re dealing with a lot of regulation around data. It’s kind of infinitely complex. And this goes back to this notion of adaptability. ⁓

Dan Engel (32:47)

Okay.

David Nachman (33:11)

You have to have some level of scrappy entrepreneurialism to thrive in this business. But it also has to be paired with, you know how to scale a business and it’s not all about, hey, I’m just going to do the heroics to get us to the next challenge. It’s no, I’m going to build a foundation where if I’m not here, this business will still run quite well. So.

Dan Engel (33:25)

you

David Nachman (33:37)

So I think, you know, there are definitely things I got right, but there were some things I got wrong in trying to make that transition from more of a startup company to a really scalable company.

David Vogelpohl (33:48)

Yeah, that’s kind of like an awkward teenager-y zone a little bit. that’s a whole, sorry, go ahead.

Dan Engel (33:48)

Hm.

David Nachman (33:51)

That’s right. ⁓

We definitely went through our awkward teenage phase. I hope we’re out of that now.

David Vogelpohl (33:57)

Yeah.

Knock on wood on that one for sure. I still got to build the enduring business of the future, right? ⁓ We’re kind of getting towards the end here, so I want to make sure to hit on a couple of things here in the last little bit. Nachman, since I’m on you, I’ll stick with you for this one. But if somebody’s out there and they have a startup and they’re listening to all these points of view,

David Nachman (34:03)

That’s right.

David Vogelpohl (34:22)

maybe taking some notes along the way, but what’s the one thing that that person should ⁓ get from listening to you about building an enduring business? What’s your number one piece of advice?

David Nachman (34:33)

It’s embrace change and change before you have to. ⁓ You can’t build an enduring business doing the same thing for any period of time. period of time is shrinking with every given year. mean, given what’s going on with AI right now, ⁓ know, the timeframes over which things evolve is just collapsing. it’s, you know, constantly think about how your business is going to be.

reimagined and go do that. ⁓ Don’t let somebody else do that to you. You’ve got to get out in front of it.

David Vogelpohl (35:08)

Great one, embrace change and change before you have to. ⁓ Dan, what about you?

Dan Engel (35:14)

⁓ I would say treating your own people extremely well and having that then trickle down to how they treat your customers and the concept of treating your customers like gold and bending over backwards to ensure that they are just wowed by the experience of working with you compared to what they’re used to from alternatives. And then I think in terms of building a business, removing the obstacles as much as possible that

lead companies to fail, including dealing with things like burn upfront.

David Vogelpohl (35:46)

I it. I love the people first thing. I think this is like the Dan Golden Rule. Treat others as you want them to treat your customers. I love it. ⁓ All right. ⁓ Last question. Sorry about that little mic pop there. Dan, um we’re going to show this recording to the FastSpring team and they’re pretty much all going to listen to it and watch it. Do you have a special message for them to celebrate the 20 year FastSpring anniversary?

David Nachman (35:53)

Thank

Dan Engel (36:16)

A special message. Well, you know, I guess, you know, it’s I’m glad that everybody’s part of something with the humble roots and mission that we originally started on to try to offer a better alternative in an industry that was plagued with some negativity. But I think, ⁓ you know, I challenge everybody to really think about how to make the next 20 years of FastSpring successful, dealing with all the change. Change has been a big ⁓

theme here in our conversation. So we have all the different things happening around, say, AI, or how people purchase software, or what Apple’s Store looks like, and what they can and can’t do. All different facets are going to continuously change. And so I hope folks are thinking about how they can continuously adapt to ensure that FastSpring survives and thrives through all the shifts ahead. Some will be good and some will be bad for the company so that we can have this kind of a conversation again after another 20 years.

David Vogelpohl (37:12)

Nice, I like it. Dan, thank you so much for joining us for this conversation. It was super interesting to hear about your backstory and some of the things that went into building such an enduring business. But thank you so much for joining us today.

Dan Engel (37:27)

You betcha. Thanks for having me and congratulations on the 20 years and thanks everyone for doing such a great job at the business.

David Vogelpohl (37:33)

Thank you, of course. then David, thank you for joining and picking up the torch and then sharing your backstory here at the helm.

David Nachman (37:41)

Well, thank you for having me. I’ve enjoyed the discussion. I’ve learned some things about the business. I don’t think I knew Dan, so it’s fantastic to get the time to interact and learn a little bit about our roots and history.

Dan Engel (37:50)

Okay.

David Vogelpohl (37:52)

Excellent. And for those watching and listening, if you’d like to learn more about FastSpring, you can visit FastSpring.com. Thanks for joining us for the Growth Stage podcast. I’ve been your host, David Vogelpohl. I support the digital product community as part of my role here at FastSpring. And I love to bring the best of the community to you here on Growth Stage. Thanks everybody.

The post What It Takes to Build an Enduring Business: Celebrating 20 Years of FastSpring appeared first on FastSpring.

Note: A major U.S. court ruling was released on April 30, 2025, with a judge declaring that Apple’s anti-steering policies for purchases outside of apps are anticompetitive and were to be discontinued immediately. This presentation was given before the April 30 ruling. The situation continues to develop; for more, follow our Industry News posts or sign up for our newsletter using the form on the right side of this page. 

Jump to video.

Thanks to years of working for major mobile publishers, Chip knows firsthand what it’s like to refine D2C marketing and monetization strategies — and he knows the impact a web store can have on a game if it’s marketed properly. 

Check out the video below to learn:

• Why discussion around D2C marketing often starts with “the first rule about web shops is that you don’t talk about web shops.” 
• What is known about what mobile game and app publishers can and can’t do when marketing web stores.
• Some of the specific nuances of D2C marketing, including how publishers can reach their players, what publishers can say, and where they can land their players. 
• What specific use cases can teach us, such as driving web portal traffic with free daily claims.

Not sure how to get started with a web shop? FastSpring has recently partnered with Nexus to make web shops easier than ever. Learn more about Nexus’s game-optimized web shops with FastSpring payments and tax compliance here.

The Nuances of Marketing a D2C Web Store

Monetize Your Game With FastSpring

FastSpring is how gaming publishers sell in more places around the world. For two decades, FastSpring has been a trusted payment provider you can use to sell games or in-game items on your website, web shop, or embedded directly into your game with fully customizable and branded checkouts just for you. FastSpring allows you to offload the complexity of global payments, sales tax and VAT compliance, player payments support, and many other aspects of payments management. 

Spend less time managing your payments and compliance and more time making great games! To learn more about how FastSpring supports game developers, visit fastspring.gg/.

The post Video: Marketing Web Shops: Forbidden Fruit or Ripe Opportunity? appeared first on FastSpring.

As a bonus, event organizers caught Chip out and about on the floor of the show and asked him, “What should you do if building a new game today?”

(Spoiler: Start planning for a D2C web shop from day one!) 

Below, hear what Chip has to say about planning from the beginning to diversify how you monetize your new game, thanks to PGC’s post over on LinkedIn:

Not sure how to get started with a web shop? FastSpring has recently partnered with Nexus to make web shops easier than ever. Learn more about Nexus’s game-optimized web shops with FastSpring payments and tax compliance here.

Monetize Your Game With FastSpring

FastSpring is how gaming publishers sell in more places around the world, and for nearly two decades, we’ve been a payment provider you can use to sell games or in-game items on your website, web shop, or embedded directly into your game with fully customizable and branded checkouts just for you. To learn more about how FastSpring supports game developers, visit fastspring.gg.

The post Video: Why the Best Time to Plan a D2C Web Shop Is When You Start Building the Game appeared first on FastSpring.

In this episode of Growth Stage, we interview CEO of Nexus Justin Sacks about his thoughts on:

• The core challenges the partnership was established to address.
• How the integration works.
• Exactly how publishers can use FastSpring + Nexus to quickly launch a successful D2C channel.

If you’re sitting on your hands worried that launching D2C has to be a massively disruptive project, you may be surprised what is possible for you and your players. Listen or watch now!

FastSpring is how gaming publishers sell in more places around the world, and for nearly two decades, we’ve been a payment provider you can use to sell games or in-game items on your website, web shop, or embedded directly into your game with fully customizable and branded checkouts just for you. To learn more about how FastSpring supports game developers, visit fastspring.gg.

Jump to video.  |  Jump to transcript.

Podcast Full Interview: Audio

Listen online or find it on more podcast services.

Podcast Full Interview: Video

The post EP31: Introducing the FastSpring + Nexus Web Shop Integration appeared first on FastSpring.

How to Integrate FastSpring With Your Web Shop

Job to be done: You are a publisher who is selling products from your web shop directly to your players and you want to use FastSpring’s advanced Javascript Library to support your checkout process so you can offload all the hard parts of transacting and build great games.

Resources

• Web Shop Demo
• FastSpring Examples
• Store Builder Library
• Embedded Checkout

Or, if you have another use case you want to explore, speak directly with a solution engineer by signing up for a demo here.

The post fsBuilds: How to Add FastSpring to Your Web Shop (Video) appeared first on FastSpring.

Get more details and watch the video below. 

FastSpring is how gaming publishers sell in more places around the world, and for nearly two decades, we’ve been a payment provider you can use to sell games or in-game items on your website, web shop, or embedded directly into your game with fully customizable and branded checkouts just for you. To learn more about how FastSpring supports game developers, visit fastspring.gg.

Session: Proven Insights on D2C Monetization From the Frontlines of Major Mobile Publishers

Chip presented on some of the nuances of direct-to-consumer (D2C) monetization for mobile games, including:

• Some perception vs. reality dissonance that comes up commonly when Chip talks with mobile games publishers. 
• Normalizing D2C mobile game monetization in a changing industry.
• The table stakes for building a web shop to monetize your mobile game. 
• Five proven insights that Chip has learned along the way as he himself refined D2C marketing and monetization strategies at major mobile publishers.

Watch the Video

About FastSpring

FastSpring is how gaming publishers sell in more places around the world. For nearly two decades, FastSpring has been a trusted payment provider you can use to sell games or in-game items on your website, web shop, or embedded directly into your game with fully customizable and branded checkouts just for you. FastSpring allows you to offload the complexity of global payments, sales tax and VAT compliance, player payments support, and many other aspects of payments management. Spend less time managing your payments and compliance and more time making great games! To learn more about how FastSpring supports game developers, visit fastspring.gg.

The post Video: Proven Insights on D2C Monetization From the Frontlines of Major Mobile Publishers appeared first on FastSpring.

As part of our participation in the packed two-day event, CMO David Vogelpohl represented FastSpring in two informative and collaborative sessions:

• Keynote presentation with CEO of Nexus Justin Sacks: “How to Actually Succeed With D2C Web Shops for Mobile Games.”
• Panel discussion with four industry experts: “Is Using a Web Shop or Third-Party Payment Solution Worth It?”

Get more details and watch videos of the sessions below.

FastSpring is how gaming publishers sell in more places around the world, and for nearly two decades, we’ve been a payment provider you can use to sell games or in-game items on your website, web shop, or embedded directly into your game with fully customizable and branded checkouts just for you. To learn more about how FastSpring supports game developers, visit fastspring.gg.

Keynote Presentation: How to Actually Succeed With D2C Web Shops for Mobile Games

David and Justin Sacks co-presented the keynote Superstar Session on direct to consumer (D2C) web shops for mobile games, with a focus on three things that publishers need to be successful with D2C:

• Global payments and compliance.
• A player-experience optimized web shop.
• The ability to market outside your game.

Watch the Video

Panel Discussion: Is Using a Web Shop or Third-Party Payment Solution Worth It?

For the panel on third party payment solutions and web shops, David was joined by CTO and Head of Beacon at Rovio, David Mason, and other payments industry leading experts with discussion moderated by Director at Raptor PR, Thomas Huxter.

Panelists answer questions regarding:

• Which companies D2C and web shops are most helpful to.
• The benefits of directly owning your relationship with your players.
• Strategies for maximizing the value of directing players to a commerce page, and how to navigate the guidelines around doing so.
• And more.

About FastSpring

FastSpring is how gaming publishers sell in more places around the world. For nearly two decades, FastSpring has been a trusted payment provider you can use to sell games or in-game items on your website, web shop, or embedded directly into your game with fully customizable and branded checkouts just for you. FastSpring allows you to offload the complexity of global payments, sales tax and VAT compliance, player payments support, and many other aspects of payments management. Spend less time managing your payments and compliance and more time making great games! To learn more about how FastSpring supports game developers, visit fastspring.gg.

The post Videos: D2C Web Shops for Mobile Games at Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki appeared first on FastSpring.

How to Use FastSpring Within a React Single Page Application

Job to be done: You are a SaaS company using React Single Page Applications on your website and you want to use FastSpring’s Store Builder Library to support your checkout process so you can offload all the hard parts of transacting and run your business.

For this build, Marco Agüero, FastSpring Sales Engineer, shows us how to easily use Store Builder Library within a React Single Page Application, thereby unlocking FastSpring’s embedded experiences for your online store.

Resources

• Git Repo
• Demo Site
• Store Builder Library

If you have another use case you want to explore, speak directly with a solution engineer by signing up for a demo here.

The post fsBuilds: How to Use FastSpring Within a React Single Page Application (Video) appeared first on FastSpring.