Concrete Software

When Keith Pichelman looks back at those early days of starting Concrete Software, he laughs at how quickly things both moved… and yet didn’t at the same time. Wins could come fast, but things could also stall.

Fresh out of the University of Minnesota, he and co-founder Mike Lehne hopped from IBM to Digital River, where Keith was working on a project with Nokia, when mobile was still considered the new kid on the block.

“I can actually make this myself,” Keith realized one day, referring to the software on all the flip phones and PalmPilots starting to pop up in everyone’s hands.

Plus, the entrepreneurial bug had already taken a big bite out of the duo.

So in 2003, they quit their day jobs, and founded their fledgling company in Minneapolis. They started out by trying a little bit of everything.

There was a golf scorecard, and even a mileage tracker that even ended up winning a Nokia award, sending them to the Sugar Bowl of all places. “We’d sold like $20 worth of it,” Keith jokes, “but we went to the Sugar Bowl anyway!”

Their big break finally came along in 2004, with none other than their take on Aces Texas Hold’em. Poker was booming at the time (Keith was playing all these late night games at home with his buddies), and their poker app was literally flying off the virtual shelves.

That got the mobile carriers to notice. “It’s doing fantastic. It’s doing better than any preload we have,” he was told.

So the team ported the game to Nokia Series 30/40/60, Motorola RAZR, BlackBerry, Palm — all big names an average person would recognize in those early years.

Then a mini hiring boom followed. For a while, it felt like they might actually become a hundred-person shop in a span of just three years… until the realities of scale set in and platforms kept shifting.

That is, until Google Play and Apple’s App Store stepped in, and changed everything. They made worldwide distribution way easier than those carrier-by-carrier deals. “Those are the greatest platforms ever… they allowed us to scale quickly across the world,” Keith says.

All the while, they wanted folks to associate their company with what’s strong, something that’s sturdy, something dependable. That was what they’d be known for: nothing but rock solid apps.

And the “concrete” part seemed to stick too. Keith would cycle through a lot of ideas for names, but whenever he asked people to pick, they’d remember “the concrete company thing” the most.

The mission that guides Concrete Software to this day is just as durable: “to be the gaming company known for creating experiences that captivate players for decades while empowering our teams to innovate, and find joy in their craft.”

These days, Concrete’s players enjoy two flagship titles: PBA Bowling Challenge and PGA TOUR Golf Shootout, and some very tight-knit communities (also referred to as “clubhouses”) have sprung up around them.

In PGA TOUR, for instance, players can join a clubhouse, each one up to 50 members strong, that operates practically like a family: they help each other, compete against other clubhouses, and in cases like the Irrational Guys, even build out their own fan websites, with merch and video channels to boot.

“We’re really focused on bringing people together in our games,” Keith says. Clubhouses aren’t just a social feature; they’re a culture in and of themselves — and they provide some of the most valuable community feedback that can significantly influence game content and improvements.

And the community is constantly growing — just look at Concrete’s track record, having surpassed 100 million installs across its catalog. And the community-building doesn’t just end with their games.

The Concrete Software team is roughly 30 people now and counting, which might be Keith’s proudest achievement over the last twenty-plus years. “Watching the growth of the people in this company has been super heartwarming. It is so much fun when I go to meetings and I look around and see how much people have grown in their careers and their lives,” Keith reflects.

They still hire locally (and regularly) from none other than the University of Minnesota, of course, even gamifying the onboarding process (as any game studio worth their mettle should) so that it feels like a good “first-time user experience.”

“We survey people after they start and refine as we go,” Keith says. It’s the same exact loop they use in their games: listen, adjust, improve.

Ad revenue is what makes that sort of loop possible without installing a paywall. And it’s why Concrete favors an ads model for their free-to-play titles.

Looking forward, Concrete is doubling down on mobile free-to-play games that feel social, and aiming to launch one or two new titles every year. “We’re really good at free-to-play, that’s our niche,” Keith says. Partnerships (from leagues to licensors) and ongoing live-ops all benefit from an ads model.

“We want to build the kind of legendary games people come back to for years and years,” he says. Games that are rock solid, and unmistakably Concrete.