Product definition · 2026
Sigra
The business operating system for independent game studios.
Pre-launch · Research and validation stage · Building with friends I met at Stanford
My role: co-founder, led field research and product development
The one-sentence version
Game engines help studios build games. Sigra helps studios build companies.
Sigra doesn't build your game. You build the game. We build the business behind it.
The problem
More than 12,000 indie games ship on Steam every year, built by teams of one to five people. They are excellent at the craft, but nobody in the team owns budgeting, planning, marketing, contracts or admin - so most earn almost nothing.
The failure is not a lack of skill or passion. It is operational. Studios already have Jira, GitHub, Notion and Discord for building the game. They have nothing at all for running the company.
1 in 20
game projects reaches a playable game
1 in 8,000
newly registered companies becomes a significant business
Both figures are rough estimates from an industry expert interview, not measured data.
The name
Sigra comes from the Swedish segra, to win, rooted in the Old Norse sigr, victory. The built-in AI copilot is called Sigrid, from the Old Norse name meaning "beautiful victory." Sigrid guides founders when they need it; Sigra is the operating system underneath.
How we validated it
We ran 11 field conversations: Nordic indie developers, industry veterans who went independent, Björn Flintberg (who interviews new studios at Science Park Skövde), and an expert session with a business-intelligence specialist on packaged BI for small studios.
The counts below are mentions across informal interviews, not survey responses - they are directional, not statistical.
Marketing is the wound, and it's discovered too late (8 of 11)
"An entirely new field, hard to understand where to start. A different way of thinking." Confusion about when to open a Steam page, which platform to use, which strategy fits which genre.
Access and proof are the bottleneck, not the craft (6 of 11)
Finding publishers and investors, and converting activity into investor-legible numbers - views to wishlists to Discord members. Plus reliable genre and sales data.
Admin unknowns: "what do I not know that I should know?" (5 of 11)
Taxes, insurance, contracts, grants, bookkeeping, employer duties, jurisdiction. Founders outsource these but rarely know what documents exist, what is due, or what they are signing.
The business side has no operating system (3 of 11)
"With game dev it was easy, we had Jira and daily standups. On business we failed to keep the team on the same track - we stopped because we got too confused on our business status."
Business talk drifts visionary; the next small step never gets set (2 of 11)
"We ended up talking very long term. Concrete goals helped a lot with direction - but we had a hard time setting those smaller goals ourselves."
What the research changed
Failure is operational, not creative
Startups don't fail for lack of passion. Development work has tooling and ritual; the business layer has neither, so it silently stops.
"Never turn the maker into a CEO"
Founders want support, not outsourcing: "you are still legally responsible even if you outsource." The gap is visibility, not missing services.
Monetization is a core pain
It isn't. "Teams are usually quite good at monetizing - platforms make it relatively easy." Scope moved to discovery, admin and finance.
Willingness to pay before funding
The help is needed exactly when there is no cash. The emerging answer is that regional game hubs and incubators pay, because human coaching doesn't scale as the number of studios grows.
A source that only confirms your idea is a source you didn't interrogate. The rejected and reframed findings did more for the product than the confirmed ones.
The open decision
Unresolved
Felt pain
Marketing - the one founders name unprompted, 8 out of 11.
Existential pain
Admin and finance - the thing that actually ends studios, and what the incubator side says to build first.
Current proposal: build finance and admin as the core, because it's the unoccupied seat in the market and it's what an incubator channel can sell. Enter through the go-to-market timeline, because it's the most-named pain, the cheapest to ship, and the reason a founder signs up at all.
How help has to be presented
The product's constraint is psychological, not technical. Makers avoid business work because it threatens an identity built around craft, not because the information is hard to find.
The game is the client, not the founder
Every output serves the game, never "as a CEO you should." Commerce becomes instrumental to the craft rather than competing with it.
Verified and game-native, or silent
Every number carries visible provenance - which studios, what genre, what team size. Credibility in this audience is domain-specific, not credential-based.
Advisory, never blocking
Nothing gates the build. No mandatory onboarding, no overdue-red states, no guilt mechanics. Drafts arrive pre-filled so the founder edits rather than starting from a blank page.
What we're building
- 1.
Company foundation
Founder agreements, vesting, NDAs, contracts, legal responsibilities.
- 2.
Finance
Budgets, burn rate, runway, cash flow, payroll and grant tracking, milestone forecasting.
- 3.
People
Hiring workflow, employee handbook, insurance checklist, contractor agreements.
- 4.
Business intelligence
Investor, publisher, playtest and coach feedback turned into prioritised actions.
The legal and equity layer is jurisdiction-specific and is the hardest part of the product - company law, vesting and e-signature rules differ by country, and the founder remains legally responsible regardless. We are scoping it as structured templates plus explanation, not as automated legal advice.
Product and brand
Where the research landed visually: the marketing site, the legal and equity surface, the business journey we guide studios through, and the brand system that holds it together. Click any image to view it larger.
Marketing site
The pitch in one screen: studio health, cash runway, current stage and today's priorities. Written for a founder who wants to know where the business stands before opening the engine.
Legal and equity
Answering the admin unknowns we heard in 5 of 11 conversations: who owns what, what vests when, and which agreements are signed, all in one place.
The business journey
Six stages with an explicit outcome for each, so business work gets the same sequencing that development work already has.
Brand system
Logo, palette, type and icon set. Dark and game-native on purpose: the tool has to feel like it belongs next to a studio's other software, not like accounting software.
Model and market
Subscription for studios, in the range of €19-49 per month (pricing not yet validated).
Second channel: regional game hubs and incubators, which need to support more studios than human coaches can reach.
Adjacent players each cover one slice - payments, marketing, discovery data - and generic AI assistants have no game-specific benchmarks or persistence. The full business layer is unoccupied.
Market size: the indie segment is often estimated at around $5bn growing at roughly 14% annually. This is an unverified third-party estimate.
My contribution
My role - what I owned
- The field research programme
- The interview synthesis
- The psychological framing of how help is presented
- The validation slide used with advisors