“Realising that you make a difference in someone’s life” with Ellinor Bergman
The Community Lounge Season 1 Episode 6
Today I chat with Ellinor Bergman, CEO & Co-Founder of Speldosa Interactive.
Ellinor tells us her journey into community management – and how a crisis situation at her previous job led her – somewhat unexpectedly – into her current role as CEO.
Games mentioned in this episode: MonsterWash, Project Shoreline, Totally Accurate Battle Simulator (aka TABS), Content Warning, Passpartout 2, Deadlock, Caravan SandWitch, Dorfromantik
Find Ellinor on LinkedIn.
The Community Lounge is brought to you by Feature Upvote: Painlessly collect feedback from your players. More insights, less noise.
Transcript
Steve McLeod
I’m Steve McLeod And you are listening to the Community Lounge, the podcast where community managers from the video games industry tell their story, talk about the challenges they face and share tips to help other community managers do their job better. Today I chat with Ellinor Bergman, CEO and co founder of Speldosa Interactive. Ellinor tells us her journey into community management and how a crisis situation at her previous job led her, somewhat unexpectedly, into her current role as CEO.
Welcome to the show, Ellinor.
Ellinor Bergman
Hello. I’m very happy to be here.
Steve McLeod
I just want you to pronounce your name for the sake of our listeners.
Proper Swedish.
Ellinor Bergman
Okay. Proper Swedish, Ellinor Bergman.
Steve McLeod
Which gives away the fact that you are Swedish and living in Sweden.
It’s a really nice connection because you’re also in Skövde, where the guest from episode two, Jeremy Fielding, was in Skövde.
I mentioned there that it’s a small city with a massive games industry, a massive impact on the industry.
Ellinor Bergman
Yeah. We have so many companies here, which is kind of why I think that’s a little bit why I also moved here because I’m not from Skövde either, but I have a different story than Jeremy. Jeremy moved here to work, I moved here to study. And I think the school is definitely part of why this town has become such a hub for games. I think the school has been going on since like early 2000s or something like that with game development and it’s a very like broad university where you can study programming, art, everything like that.
Steve McLeod
Quite amazing. I met somebody who’d been around for a long time in the games industry and he told me a bit of that backstory about that university in Skövde.
He said that they actually found themselves in a bit of a crisis in the early 2000s because the whole there was this dotcom crash. You’re obviously not old enough to remember it, but I am. And it left the university in a bit of a dilemma because suddenly they didn’t have enough students to fill their courses and they realized they needed to find a different direction and they took a big, big gamble on going fully into the games industry. Is that all the university does, just games industry?
Ellinor Bergman
No, they have a bunch of different ones. I think the biomedicine is also very popular here. We have a lot of students from other countries coming here for that one as well. But I think the most popular ones are the master programs here for games. I think we have user experience and narrative something. Narrative storytelling or something like that, and serious games as well.
Steve McLeod
So I found this on your LinkedIn profile that you are a community manager turned producer turned CEO and co founder. Okay, unwrap that. What does that mean? How did this happen? How did you become a community manager and then a producer, et cetera?
Ellinor Bergman
Yeah. So like I said, I moved to Skövde to study game development. I studied graphics and I think already at like year two I was like, okay, this is kind of not really for me. This is a lot of like I think I was more into user experience and UI but didn’t really know that back then.
And the school was very focused on concept art and I was like, ah, this is not for me. So I wanted to look into something that was a bit more like fitting for me. And I have worked in grocery stores for about like seven years, so I already had all of that like customer service mindset. So I started looking into community management positions and I wasn’t really a person who hung out in game communities before, so that’s also a bit strange.
But I started applying for roles and then I ended up at a local mobile games company here in Skövde, like right out of school.
I think it was one month or something after I finished uni.
Yeah. And that’s kind of how I got into it. And then since then it’s just been a wild ride kind of at least these last two years.
Steve McLeod
That first job was community management.
Ellinor Bergman
Yeah. So it was full time community management and a little bit of the work was also doing game support.
Since it was mobile games, it was a lot of like, oh, a purchase didn’t go through or they didn’t get the thing, they lost their save file.
So I did some support work as well apart from like the regular community management and social media stuff.
Steve McLeod
How was that your first experience in community management? You said that you weren’t one who typically hung out in gaming communities. So how was it for you coming into this job without that background?
Ellinor Bergman
I definitely like, I think with most people starting community management it’s always a wild ride hopping in because companies hire one when they really need it. So for me it was like one month before they released their second game.
So I didn’t have a lot of time and I also think I only had like one week onboarding with the person who I was replacing.
So it was a lot of experimenting and trying to get the hang of it on myself. But also with the help from the community, I think they were super helpful, just teaching me their ways as well.
So in the beginning I played a lot of safe cards, continued with what had been done in the past. I think also my experience in grocery stores and just being very service minded helped a lot because a lot, a lot of the role was just answering to people’s complaints and feedback and comments, reviews and things like that. And I kind of already had that in the bag because I knew how to deal with customers.
That can be difficult in many ways.
But yeah, so it was very much getting launched into this big, big release that they were doing and I think that can be helpful as well, trying to deal with big things going on because you get to learn things very fast.
Steve McLeod
Yeah, I think it’s interesting you talked about that you had learned how to deal with difficult customers. I think many people in the games industry think it’s something specific to the games industry, that some people can be a bit difficult, but actually it’s anybody working with the customers and this experience does move over.
Ellinor Bergman
Yeah, definitely. Just because everyone can be a big baby, you know, even if you’re going to the grocery store, if you’re sitting in the Steam reviews section.
So it’s, it’s definitely good to have like just people knowledge in a way when you do community management. So I think that’s really what helped me get the role. I think when I talk to them about why, because I didn’t have any prior experience, I just had the games bachelor degree and then just the grocery store stuff.
And I think when they, when they talked to me they were like, well, your answers to the reviews, because we did a little work test before, were the best ones. So I think, I think, yeah, I think that experience really helped a lot.
Steve McLeod
So then the next part of your profile that you went from community manager into being a producer, how did that happen?
Ellinor Bergman
Yeah, so I worked for three years at this first company and we were very close. I think we were about 12, 14 people when I started. And then we kind of went up to 20 for a while and then we went back to like 14 or something like that.
And around, let’s see, it was 2023, we started kind of like me and the other employees start kind of noticing that something was going on.
So I actually created a Discord for me and all my colleagues to like talk to each other about what’s happening. And then about a few weeks later we got laid off. So we definitely could feel that it was kind of happening.
But then we had this like little community space just for us to help support each other through it because it can be really tough. Some of my colleagues at this place had been there like ever since they left high school, I think it is. Yeah, high school, like five years. And some people had been there for four years. So it was a tough time. And we could just help support each other now that we have that space. And after a while we were like, well, we have a full team. We all enjoy working together. We don’t really feel done with each other yet. And that’s kind of when we decided to start a studio.
And that’s also when, like, this is – I wasn’t doing game dev per se. And since I had been doing community management, where it’s a lot of planning, and since I was also the person who like draws together, it kind of started off that I did, like, producer stuff, helped with planning and production.
And then after a few months of that, we were like, okay, should we actually start this company for real? And then it was also kind of natural that just I became the CEO because the other people, they should do the development stuff and I’ll do the business.
Steve McLeod
Okay. That’s really nice. Partly it’s because you just rolled up your sleeves and made a decision to help out in this situation. It’s also really interesting that, like, this community helping each other. I think when you are laid off, you can often feel like it’s because of you as a person, that you’re not valuable or that there’s something wrong with you. But when there’s a whole lot of people at the same time and you’re able to talk about it, you realize it’s not one of us. We’re all fine. We’ve all got our talents, like, because we’re in this together, which is nice, and that you’re actually a team that can work well together. Just because things didn’t work out financially for the company doesn’t mean it was not a good team.
So what’s happening with this team now? You’re working on new products?
Ellinor Bergman
Yeah. So we started out, like I said, in 2023. We just started out, like, talking about it for a few months because we still had some time left at this old company. When we got laid off, I think we had about three months or something like that.
And then we were like, okay, let’s go for this. And none of us had kind of done anything like this before.
We have a few older people in the team, but they have just worked at other places in the past. I have one guy who’s been working at Volvo helping them with programming a few years back. So it’s a very big variety team. We are kind of young still in the industry.
We weren’t really that close either to begin with. I think we kind of grew close with getting laid off and being supportive to each other.
Like with any small to middle sized company, there are going to be groups that form, you know.
But now it kind of became a group of ourselves. And we started like, okay, what do we do? How do we do this? So we kind of look to Landfall, who’s made TABS, for example, and Content Warning. We looked at how they work with games.
And also how Flamebait, who’s made Passepartout.
So we started out by doing first, like gathering a bunch of ideas, doing some quick market research, picking a few that we were gonna make prototypes of. And the second one we did got super much traction.
Steve McLeod
Wow.
Ellinor Bergman
Or super much, but a lot like for us.
And that was the MonsterWash idea. It’s basically inspired by Spirited Away where the big spirits come in, you clean them and they get happy. And then the concept kind of grew a little bit and it got more traction when we were like, okay, so MonsterWash, it’s a combination of Shadow of the Colossus and PowerWash Simulator.
And then we started pitching that, we started doing some community work as well. Building something from the ground up was not something I had done before.
It’s tough, especially when you don’t – well, we kind of knew the audience because it’s a cosy game, just like the game we worked on in the past, although that was on mobile, so that’s very different. Now we move to PC.
So that was really fun, just exploring. Okay, how do you start a community from scratch?
We’re still not that huge, but we’ve definitely grown a lot since then.
Steve McLeod
Are you responsible for community as well as CEO. Okay, so CEO/Community Manager.
Ellinor Bergman
Yeah, there is a lot of hats going on.
Steve McLeod
Just to make sure I got the details right. So the team from your old company that you kept together, that’s now the team that is Speldosa Interactive, the current one.
Ellinor Bergman
Yeah, exactly. So it’s the employees from the past company.
Since we were all laid off, we were like, okay, let’s all continue. Everyone wanted to continue, so that was really fun as well.
Steve McLeod
So I looked at the Speldosa website yesterday evening and I did notice it was very cosy game-ish. And I love cosy games. Actually. I have a young daughter, so it solves two things for me. One, these are games I can play with my daughter. And two, I just don’t have time to get into the games that require big investment of onboarding. The games in which you spend hours just learning how to play it – I don’t have time for that.
Steve McLeod
Hey, listeners, a short interruption.
When I’m not hosting the Community Lounge, I run Feature Upvote, a platform for managing player feedback. When you use Feature Upvote, your players can submit and upvote suggestions to improve your game in a single place.
This gives you the data you need to develop a game that meets player expectations.
And you can say goodbye to the confusion of trying to keep up with feedback scattered across discussions on Discord and Steam and Reddit. Learn more at featureupvote.com
Steve McLeod
But I wanted to ask you about this game’s so it’s very interesting that you said they are kind of prototypes – did you make them available for free or for paid?
Ellinor Bergman
So in the beginning we were like, okay, we’re going to spend two weeks on each prototype. We got to the second prototype, which was the MonsterWash one, where we started getting traction on the idea. So then we kind of continued on that we made a technical prototype during the autumn just to prove that, okay, we can make the idea.
But the thing is, we were kind of told, because this was in 2023, so we were kind of told that it would not be that hard to get investment.
But then like, I think in May or June of 2023, Embracer went out and said that they were gonna split up and they lost out on this big investment and stuff like that. And I feel like that was kind of a turning point when people started holding their money very tightly.
So we started off by doing the technical prototype and we were like, okay, this is not enough. We need to do something else. And that’s when we started working on Project Shoreline.
We just took the core of MonsterWash, so just the cleaning and removed the big monsters. Because we knew that like, okay, doing a colossal monster where you clean on top of it, running around on it, is gonna take a lot of time to make good enough to release to the public. So we made Project Shoreline. It’s a cosy cleaning adventure. It’s a short game, sandbox, it’s free on itch.io. And we released that just to, you know, validate the idea, but also like the art style and the direction and the world building kind of, it doesn’t really have a lot. It’s really bare bones. I think we made it in six weeks and then we’ve had a few updates along the way.
Steve McLeod
I just need to interject to say that’s amazing. It’s amazing that as a first time CEO, you are able to get people on target and get stuff out in six weeks. Because it’s always this urge that people want to do more and want to do better and well. So that’s amazing.
Ellinor Bergman
I think it’s just because we are nine people. We are nine founders and seven of us are in the company board. So we take a lot of decisions together, but we also have me and my colleague Henrik Risberg, we do most of the business stuff. We talk to a lot of people, we talk to business coaches and things like that. So we just said like, I think it was back in January, we were like, okay, we need to get something out to players. So we stayed late one evening and just came up with the idea, okay, let’s do this in one month, only one month, because we gotta get something out. We want the artists to get into unity.
So we pitched that and people were like, okay, yeah, let’s do it.
And it’s been going well. We did a little. We put on two weeks on it, on the project. So it took six weeks. And that was mostly to just do like a big kind of marketing community approach to it as well. So we did a short campaign for like a month, I think. So two weeks before this and about two weeks after where we try to post everywhere and post a lot about it.
Steve McLeod
When you say post everywhere, where is everywhere?
Ellinor Bergman
Okay, so on all of our own social media, but then also try to reach people in places like Reddit, try to find subreddits where we could reach our audience because Reddit has a very good conversion rate. People join a subreddit because they’re interested in what’s in there.
And the same with Discord. We also tried to find discords that were relevant, like wholesome games or cosy games, and tried to take talk to moderators. Are we allowed to post here? Are we allowed to post here? Poke all of our friends play the game now, so we get a lot of downloads.
We also have connections with the game is a bit like leaning into furry community as well. If you have a look at like the main character, it’s a fish mouse.
Very furry-esque character.
So we. We also have a few on the team who are within the furry community and connections with furry streamers. So we got a few bigger streamers to play the game as well. So I think in the first month or so we had about 4,000 downloads, which is pretty good for itch.io because itch.io is just mostly horror games or browser games.
Steve McLeod
You say pretty good. I think that sounds incredible.
Ellinor Bergman
And then we kind of reached out to itch.io and we’re like, okay, so we are doing our final update on Project Shoreline because then we’re kind of sunsetting it. And we wrote to them in May and asked like, how could we get like a front page feature? Is there something we need to do? And then they were like, okay, we’re going to send it off to our team who chooses, picks the games. Because it’s just a team who picks them, it’s no algorithm. And then we got featured and now we’re up to 20,000 downloads. So it has been going pretty well for like a game that we made very fast and that we just released for free.
And now we’re just working on the next game and we’ve been trying to do community work alongside this, but it’s busy now. It kind of goes into like, we didn’t do. We don’t have any money, any funding for the company yet still. It’s still very hard to find funding, especially if you’re nine founders, because you’re a big team.
So I think it was in November, no wait, October already last year that I started working with Paradox Interactive as a freelancer. And right now we’re also doing some freelance work. Now I’m actually doing it via Speldosa. We’re doing some freelance work for Amplifier, where I have been working with Lightyear Frontier for the past month.
So unfortunately Speldosa’s social media is not super active right now, but I am hoping to bring it up. We’re looking to announce a new game soon.
Steve McLeod
Okay. Yhe battle many small studios have, which is getting the funding.
We’ve strayed a long way from the topic of community management. So let’s go back there for a while. I mean, I could keep talking about what you’ve been doing with Speldosa, but I should actually honour the theme of the podcast.
So tell me a memorable experience, something positive that’s happened to you as a community manager.
Ellinor Bergman
The most memorable moments are when you get like close connections with the community and maybe you help someone or they write to you that you’ve been a big part of a change in their life or a big positive force in their life in some way. I’ve definitely had those kind of conversations with moderators in the past or other very active members of a community, especially at my first gig because we were very close, like at the mobile game Studio. We were very close with the community back then and I was working like since it had like a community that was largely kids because the games were on mobile. So very accessible and also like very cute and wholesome and easy to play.
Steve McLeod
By kids, do you mean like teenagers or younger than that?
Ellinor Bergman
Both.
The community was mostly teenagers, but also a lot of young people. And even if they’re not allowed on like Discord or social platforms, they are gonna get in there either way.
So a lot of my work was also just providing a safe space.
Steve McLeod
How did you go about doing that?
Ellinor Bergman
Well, kind of having like strict rules, but also like the community was just very helpful with it, I would say. And just trusting the community as well. And also just making sure that they know why we have the strict rules. Because we did struggle a little bit with we had a very big audience in Russia and they struggled a lot with that because they were a bit more free spoken than a large part of the western community who were a bit more restrictive.
So it was a bit hard to connect those dots a little bit. But we were just trying to be strict and transparent about why we were being strict and they understood that. So just talking to them on their own level and not being above them.
Steve McLeod
What does it mean to be strict in such a community? Does it mean you have got the banhammer out?
Ellinor Bergman
More well defined rules and more like.
Since we knew that a big part were kids, we wanted to be understanding that you can make mistakes. So it wasn’t just you make a mistake, you’re banned. It was more like, okay, but this is not allowed. We sent out messages and they get warnings and things like that. So just a very structured system I would say for the rules and that really helped. But that also created like a space where they felt safe and they could also share stories with us or write to maybe me or a developer that the game has helped them a lot or the community has helped them a lot.
And I think that’s one of the biggest positive moments you can have as a community manager. Just realising that you make a difference in someone’s life but also like the personal achievements. Like I was thinking about when I started doing the first time, I stepped out of the box a little bit at my first gig, I started making memes because that was not something they had done in the past. So I was just taking like real life memes and making them with our game content and that was super fun. And then when we started doing TikTok for the first time.
When I started working with PC games at Paradox for the first time, I did like, a video strategy that people started using as a template because they appreciated it a lot. So things like that or like just onboarding someone and them telling you they have had like a really good experience.
The first time I recorded a Let’s Play, even if it never got to see the light of day, but it was still like a really fun experience. So I think it’s a mix of positive moments, like a mix of when you get close to someone in the community or someone you meet at the workplace or like a big achievement, I guess, a personal achievement. And it doesn’t have to be a big achievement in someone else’s eyes. It can just be a big achievement for you yourself.
You know, I don’t really have one. I just have a lot of smaller ones.
Steve McLeod
I like that. I try to celebrate all the minor achievements of my own professional career too, like getting the first episode of this podcast published. Like, for me, that was a major course to go and celebrate. And I think people should do that. I really like that.
Hey, what about moving on to how you learn to do your job better?
Ellinor Bergman
So I think it’s usually just trying to look at other people and seeing what they do and learning from just looking. I think that’s mostly what I do.
Try to look at other companies or maybe looking at a lecture from someone.
One lecture that helped me get a lot of inspiration was when Hanna from Landfall had a lecture here in Skövde back in, I think it was 2021 and she was talking about how they at Landfall started working with TikTok. And she said something about like, they were throwing things at the wall and trying to see what sticks. And that really, like, inspired me to also start doing TikTok because I had just done static content before that.
And starting working more with video was something I hadn’t really done before. I think I had worked a few weeks with After Effects in school, but other than that, no video editing or anything like that.
So it was just a very inspiring lecture that helped me get out of my shell a little bit.
So just listening to other people within the community space of community managers can be really helpful.
Steve McLeod
How do you find that? One of the reasons I’m doing this podcast is I find it really hard to find online resources for community managers. So how do you go about finding these people already doing it that you can learn from?
Ellinor Bergman
Yeah, I think I’m very lucky to be in like the Swedish games industry is very tight knit and everyone knows everyone here somehow and Skövde is a hub for game development. So like this, this one was just a lecture that was arranged by Science Park Skövde.
They work together with an organisation that is called Sweden Game Arena and they host like events and things like that, lectures. They just help bring the Swedish games industry. They just help make it better by attending events supporting smaller developers as well and things like that. So many lectures I just find because they’re sent to me, they just show up.
But I think just going to the GDC Vault is also helpful.
Steve McLeod
The GDC Vault, okay.
Ellinor Bergman
Yeah, definitely.
Steve McLeod
Is that a free resource?
Ellinor Bergman
I think so.
It was a long time ago I actually did that because now like I said, things just pop up because you build a net with people around you and you just get links sent to you.
Steve McLeod
So maybe that’s a tip. There is to make sure you’re following other community managers on social media because these things will come up.
Ellinor Bergman
Yeah, definitely. By connecting with people on LinkedIn or making sure that you join communities on Discord.
That helps a lot I think because people like community managers – especially here in Sweden where my experiences are – are really helpful and we just try to help each other get work or things like that.
Steve McLeod
Speaking of getting work, I would like to hear from you what tips you have for people wanting to become a community manager. For other people who would like to become a community manager, what would you suggest to them?
Ellinor Bergman
It depends a little bit because every company they view community managers differently and the role looks different depending on where you apply.
But I think it’s mostly about being a bit organised because you need to be able to plan things like plan campaigns and things like that. You need to also be fun, relaxed and experimental. You need to have some people skills as well and just overall being like a good person and being yourself when you apply. Because I think your personality is very important when you are a community manager.
It’s not really a craft you can learn. You need to have some attributes that fit the role in a way I think. And you need to have the endurance as well for it.
Something I can see that a lot of companies are looking for right now or something that I feel like they are looking for just based on my past experience this year is that they’re kind of looking for people who have influencer qualities like that they can stream or they can make videos because video content is so much better than static. Like it can’t compare it.
Steve McLeod
Better in that it gets people watching and coming to wishlist your game for example?
Ellinor Bergman
Yeah, yeah.
And it gets spread a lot more by algorithms as well.
Static content doesn’t really get spread that much, so you kind of need to do video content. So I think just trying to. Trying streaming on your own or making videos is definitely something that someone can do if they haven’t. If they have no clue about community management, try practicing becoming an influencer, because I think that will help in, like, the new landscape that’s kind of growing with videos and streaming.
Steve McLeod
Final question. I ask every guest this, and it’s my favorite question. What game have you been playing lately?
Ellinor Bergman
This is so sad, but none. I haven’t had time in, like, the last one or two months because I’ve been working so much. But the latest two games I played are Deadlock and also Caravan SandWitch, a cosy game.
Super nice. But I also had, like, the latest one that I actually got super stuck in was Dorfromantik. So very, very cosy game where you just place tiles.
Steve McLeod
Yeah, that’s so telling that this is the reality of being a CEO. I think you’re around games all day, but you don’t actually have much time to play them.
Ellinor Bergman
Exactly. I think that’s kind of the reality of many community managers as well. You’re super busy all the time, so you don’t really have time to play that many games.
Steve McLeod
Well, Ellinor, thank you very much. That’s all we have time for today. Thank you again for being on the show.
Ellinor Bergman
Yeah, thank you. It was super fun.
Steve McLeod
For me too. Where can listeners get in touch if they’d like to know more about you and what we’ve discussed today?
Ellinor Bergman
I think LinkedIn is a really good place. Just search for Ellinor Bergman and I should show up. It should say Speldosa somewhere around my title.
Steve McLeod
Okay. And I’ll make sure the show notes have a link to your LinkedIn profile. Okay, well, thank you very much again. Bye, Ellinor.
Ellinor Bergman
Yeah, bye. Bye.
Steve McLeod
Bye, everyone.
Thanks again for listening to this episode of the Community Lounge. If you enjoyed this episode, please spread the word and share it with friends and colleagues who you think would also enjoy it. You can find all the episodes on your favourite podcasting platform or at featureupvote.com/thecommunitylounge/ .