Ping Creates is a creative digital agency based at CodeBase Stirling that builds apps, games, web and animation. Founder and CEO Jason Wagner has worked in the industry for 30 years and has run Ping Creates as a limited company for the last 16. He built it to be driven by creativity, with people and ideas at its centre, and its brand is inspired by dreams.
From the start, Jason wanted to keep talent in Scotland. He has employed hundreds of people, locally and internationally, and won Entrepreneur of the Year at the Stirling Business Awards. He reinvests profit from the agency's service work into a games product arm.
Jason is a Techscaler member who has mentored founders through the programme for almost four years. He has taken part in Techscaler's Reforge programme and joined the Techscaler cohort to Gamescom in Cologne with finished games for publishers.
This is a case study in building a creative business around people, and in giving back to the ecosystem that supports it.
Ping Creates grew out of what Jason studied at art school, which was animation. He had been working as a freelancer and found himself getting busier, and he wanted to take that step further by building a company that kept talent in Scotland. A love of Transformers as a child drew him into cartoons, toys and animation, and led to web and animation work for clients including Royal Bank of Scotland while he was still young.
Entrepreneurship was already familiar to him, since he started out selling jewellery at 11 and has built several businesses since. Ping Creates became the realisation of that drive, with a brand inspired by dreams.
By the time Techscaler launched, Jason had already been through other accelerators, including a games programme run by Elevator in Dundee, and had seen Silicon Valley for himself. He wanted a programme built around a wider ecosystem in which different kinds of people work together.
Ping Creates was also looking further ahead. To build long-term value, Jason was reinvesting agency profit into a games product arm. The team's self-published mobile games, marketed with BFI funding, had shown that gaining traction and acquisition on mobile was beyond what it could do at that point.
Jason's response to Techscaler was recognition. Before joining CodeBase, he had been planning a creative hub in Stirling, because he knew that collaboration between different kinds of people leads to great things. He had seen the same effect of a diverse mix at art school. When Techscaler was announced, with Mark Logan's report alongside it, he saw the ecosystem he had been waiting for. Having been through other accelerators, he valued a programme built around the government's plan to grow that ecosystem. He joined for the community and the collaborative network, and as a mentor he gained access to Reforge.
Through Techscaler, Jason took part in Reforge's Growth Accelerator and Advanced Growth Strategy courses, learning live alongside hundreds of people from around the world. Speakers included the head of product at Netflix, who talked through what the company had done, and the head of product at Airtable, who covered how it built out its SaaS platforms. Jason says the learning helped him scale the platforms and games Ping Creates was working on, and as a mentor he could pass it back and recognise when founders were ready for a course like Reforge.
The peer community sat alongside it. Gamescom then offered the next step for the games arm: taking finished mobile games to the biggest games event in the world.
Jason joined the Techscaler cohort to Gamescom with finished mobile games and a plan to take them to PC and console. The cohort held 23 networking events and well over 100 one-to-one meetings with investors and publishers among other industry contacts. Of those meetings, 46 of 47 with publishers and 9 of 10 with investors ended with a follow-up agreed.
Jason's mentoring shows how far the ecosystem reaches across sectors. Through CodeBase and Techscaler he has mentored Elliot Riley-Walsh of Valart, a collectible management platform, and Kayla Burns of Podplistic, a media platform. He recalls an early mentee with a marketplace for tradesmen who took his advice to expand regionally and later exited. Giving back runs through his plans too, as he builds the games arm so Ping Creates can keep creating opportunity.
Jason's advice to founders starts with asking for help. He recommends hiring early, since a first hire doubles a workforce, and writing down your role. He also encourages founders to find their "nothing", an activity away from the desk that lets ideas flow, which for him is riding his motorbike.
Jason's story shows what a founder gains from community and what an ecosystem gains when that founder gives back.
Follow Jason on LinkedIn for updates on Ping Creates and its games.
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