From high school dropout to $3M venture, Derry native launches gamer coaching platform

When Josh Fabian dropped out of high school in Derry and moved out of his parents’ home all before the age of 18, he wasn’t expecting a career in web design to fall into his lap.

He certainly wasn’t expecting to be heading up a gamer coaching company that’s attracted more than $3 million in investment less than 15 years later.

“I was staying with some college kids I knew, and I started doing web design,” said Fabian, 31, who lives in Blairsville. “And I got really lucky. I got better at it, and more people started asking me to do web design for them.”

Eventually, Fabian and his family moved to Chicago around 2010, where he planned to learn how to perform back-end development — the things a website does, as opposed to how it looks.

“That didn’t succeed, but I did get a job as a designer at a start-up company,” Fabian said. “It was eventually bought by Groupon, and that led me to become the lead designer for Groupon’s Marketplace initiative.”

In three years, Fabian and his team scaled Marketplace from a new venture to one bringing in $100 million in revenue. After earning equity in Groupon, Fabian was ready to strike out on his own, and tried his hand at an esports career playing the video game Clash Royale. But after a year of making $20 to $30 a day playing the game professionally, he decided to go back to the tech world.

“When you have four kids, it’s hard to justify playing video games,” he said.

When two of those kids took an interest in Pokemon, however, Fabian’s efforts to improve their skills led to a new idea.

“Boy, were they bad at it,” he said with a laugh. “So I reached out to the prior year’s Pokemon world champion to ask if he’d work with my kids. He got back to me and said sure, it would be $20 an hour.”

To Fabian, it was a shockingly low figure.

“I was charging $100 an hour to coach Clash Royale, and I wasn’t even the best player,” he said. “This was one of the best players in the world, but he was offering his services for a paltry sum and he was making $30,000 a year working in a warehouse.”

That’s how Fabian got the idea for Metafy, a game-coaching platform that recently attracted more than $3 million in investment capital after being featured as one of three start-ups chosen for Jeff Morris Jr.’s Product Club business accelerator program.

The service’s tag line is “Get coached by the players kicking your ass.”

“I thought, how many more incredibly talented people are out there, who are passionate about games, who have something people want to learn from them, but who don’t know how to monetize that talent?” he said. “My experience with start-ups, combined with my experience as a gamer, puts me in a unique situation to solve that problem.”

For Trung Tran, 25, a Czech Republic native and former professional gamer-turned-coach, it was the perfect solution.

“I played Hearthstone and a lot of other strategic, card-based, high-variance games,” Tran said. “I found out a few years in that I didn’t really like the competition part that much, but I really enjoyed the coaching part of it.”

Tran and Fabian met in the summer of 2018, when Tran was already working as a full-time video-game coach.

“There aren’t that many successful coaching platforms,” he said. “I worked on every one of them, and the most frustrating thing is that so many of the people behind the other platforms did not put any weight behind the feedback they’d get from coaches. I really liked Josh’s ideas, his approach and what he had to say.”

Fabian, who runs Metafy out of the Ignite co-working office space in Youngwood, said he wants others to have the chance to earn a living doing what they love.

“They might be among the best in the world, but a lot are still working a regular job,” he said. “And if you ask, would you rather make $40,000 as a manager, or making $5,000 or $10,000 less doing what makes you feel most alive every day, it’s a no-brainer for a lot of them.”

Metafy is still in the beta-testing stages, having launched toward the end of last summer, but Fabian is preparing to add specific courses to the service.

“We’re primarily focusing on coaching and making it the best coaching experience you can get online, and that includes breaking into courses,” he said. “So if you’re like me, and you want desperately to win with Kirby against Mario in Super Smash Brothers, you can take a course with one of the best Kirby players in the world.”

For more, see Metafy.gg.